Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 “Through a Glass, Darkly”: Changing German Ideas of American Freedom, 1776-1806
- 2 “Germans Make Cows and Women Work”: American Perceptions of Germans as Reported in American Travel Books, 1800-1840
- 3 Weary of Germany - Weary of America: Perceptions of the United States in Nineteenth-Century Germany
- 4 “Auch unser Deutschland muss einmal frei werden”: The Immigrant Civil War Experience as a Mirror on Political Conditions in Germany
- 5 Different, But Not Out of This World: German Images of the United States Between Two Wars, 1871-1914
- 6 From Cultureto Kultur : Changing American Perceptions of Imperial Germany, 1870-1914
- 7 The Reciprocal Vision of German and American Intellectuals: Beneath the Shifting Perceptions
- 8 Germany and the United States, 1914-1933: The Mutual Perception of Their Political Systems
- 9 Between Hope and Skepticism: American Views of Germany, 1918-1933
- 10 “Without Concessions to Marxist or Communist Thought”: Fordism in Germany, 1923-1939
- 11 The Continuity of Ambivalence: German Views of America, 1933-1945
- 12 Cultural Migration: Artists and Visual Representation Between Americans and Germans During the 1930s and 1940s
- 13 Representations of Germans and What Germans Represent: American Film Images and Public Perceptions in the Postwar Era
- 14 Chancellor of the Allies? The Significance of the United States in Adenauer's Foreign Policy
- 15 American Policy Toward German Unification: Images and Interests
- 16 Unification Policies and the German Image: Comments on the American Reaction
- Index
3 - Weary of Germany - Weary of America: Perceptions of the United States in Nineteenth-Century Germany
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2013
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 “Through a Glass, Darkly”: Changing German Ideas of American Freedom, 1776-1806
- 2 “Germans Make Cows and Women Work”: American Perceptions of Germans as Reported in American Travel Books, 1800-1840
- 3 Weary of Germany - Weary of America: Perceptions of the United States in Nineteenth-Century Germany
- 4 “Auch unser Deutschland muss einmal frei werden”: The Immigrant Civil War Experience as a Mirror on Political Conditions in Germany
- 5 Different, But Not Out of This World: German Images of the United States Between Two Wars, 1871-1914
- 6 From Cultureto Kultur : Changing American Perceptions of Imperial Germany, 1870-1914
- 7 The Reciprocal Vision of German and American Intellectuals: Beneath the Shifting Perceptions
- 8 Germany and the United States, 1914-1933: The Mutual Perception of Their Political Systems
- 9 Between Hope and Skepticism: American Views of Germany, 1918-1933
- 10 “Without Concessions to Marxist or Communist Thought”: Fordism in Germany, 1923-1939
- 11 The Continuity of Ambivalence: German Views of America, 1933-1945
- 12 Cultural Migration: Artists and Visual Representation Between Americans and Germans During the 1930s and 1940s
- 13 Representations of Germans and What Germans Represent: American Film Images and Public Perceptions in the Postwar Era
- 14 Chancellor of the Allies? The Significance of the United States in Adenauer's Foreign Policy
- 15 American Policy Toward German Unification: Images and Interests
- 16 Unification Policies and the German Image: Comments on the American Reaction
- Index
Summary
Near the end of the eighteenth century the field of Amerikakunde - a distant relation of present-day American Studies - made its appearance in German academic circles. Amerikakunde typically combined history, political science, economics, and geography, but it also included the study of such things as botany and mineralogy. The new field was represented by scholars like Dietrich Hermann Hegewisch, a professor of philosophy at the University of Kiel who, with Christoph Daniel Ebeling, co-edited the Amerikanisches Magazin, Germany's first scholarly journal devoted to the United States. As Hegewisch put it, he preferred to state facts without argumentation. His texts remained mostly descriptive, and their faulty judgments derived from biases in his sources.
The preeminent representative of Amerikakunde, though, was Hegewisch's Hamburg collaborator, Christoph Daniel Ebeling (1741-1817). Indeed, for contemporaries and posterity alike, Ebeling was the most distinguished German scholar of the United States. His Erdbeschreibung und Geschichte von Amerika (Geographic description and history of America) appeared over a time span of twenty-three years but remained incomplete. Still, before 1834, when the first volume of George Bancroft's monumental History of the United States was published, no other work of comparable scope and learning existed in the field. Ebeling admired the American polity, in particular the prevailing measure of individual liberty that, as he saw it, contrasted so favorably with French libertinage.
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- Information
- Transatlantic Images and PerceptionsGermany and America since 1776, pp. 65 - 86Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1997
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