So there have been multiple Americas, depending on the vision of the perceiver. This was especially true when that perceiver belonged to an intellectual class of critics who never set foot in America and confused the metaphorical symbol of “Amerika”—almost always negative—with the reality of life as experienced and written about by Americans themselves. A closer examination of the two split images of America—America-the-land-of-the-future and Amerika-the-nightmare-of-tomorrow—reveals that the first was embraced very strongly by ordinary working-class people in Europe, while the latter was persistently touted by Europe’s intellectual and political elites.
This point can be illustrated by numbers: Between 1820 and 1920, five and a half million Germans immigrated to the United States, and perhaps as many more would have emigrated if they had had the opportunity. Although a certain number (perhaps ranging between 2 percent and 10 percent) returned, the vast number remained and prospered in America.13 We can reasonably conclude from this pattern of mass exodus that those who left were disenchanted with their homeland and looked to America as the land of golden opportunity. This was also probably true of all other immigrants who came to America voluntarily. Moreover, there never was a period in American history when Americans left their country in massive numbers. There never was a period when a large number of Americans escaped from America to live, for example, in Communist countries such as the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, or Vietnam. When this author came to America in 1959, he was one of 260,686 new immigrants.14 While this new wave arrived in the United States, this author can think of only one well-known American who went the other way that year—to the Soviet Union, where he renounced his American citizenship and asked for political asylum. His name was Lee Harvey Oswald.
Why, if vast numbers of ordinary Europeans, Hispanics, and Asians, tried to come to America, did their intellectual elites back home strike increasingly hostile anti-American attitudes? One is tempted, in the first place, to attribute the differences between elite perceptions and those of the general public to economic or social conditions. The elites had a greater stake in society because they were invested in it, while the general population felt that they had nothing to lose by leaving. But in addition to this obvious socioeconomic explanation, public attitudes during the late nineteenth century were strongly shaped by a rising tide of nationalism throughout Europe. In Germany, heightened feelings of nationality led to German unification under Prussian rule; these feelings then served the imperial government as an integrative force by which domestic social tensions could be diffused and rechanneled into overseas aggression. The rise of xenophobic nationalism also brought with it increased anti-Americanism. The German imperial elites, and their mouthpieces in the press, big business, and education, saw themselves as conduits of a new German culture that they hoped to impose on Europe.
By 1900, Germany was not only a new economic colossus but also a cultural force to be reckoned with. Educated circles in Central and Eastern Europe assimilated distinctly German intellectual habits, ranging from philosophical idealism to neoromanticism to historicism. John Lukacs points out that the Germans had the potential to “rejuvenate old Europe, to extend the European age, and the primacy of Europe in the world for centuries to come,” but he added that they destroyed that prospect through their obsession with their own primacy in Europe.15 American students, intellectuals, businessmen, and politicians who traveled or studied in Germany before World War I all noticed this compulsive German sense of primacy and denounced it as one of the least desirable aspects of the German character. Both Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt commented on this overwrought or inflated German nationalism. Even before World War I, American elites’ opinion of Germany began to shift from favorable to highly negative. Many American critics believed that the Germans had abandoned social democracy for a Prussianized autocracy and militarism. World War I strengthened the image, and the rise of Nazism confirmed it.
German propaganda during World War I greatly embellished the stereotype of “degenerate Amerika.” The imperial government sponsored and encouraged elite opinion makers on all sides of the political spectrum to condemn Anglo-American civilization, as Werner Sombart put it in his wartime book Händler gegen Helden (Merchants against Heroes), as crassly materialistic, rationalistic, and spiritually empty. By contrast, German civilization was supposedly martial, romantic, idealistic, and heroic. A large number of German intellectuals, including Max Weber, Ernst Troeltsch, Thomas Mann, Friedrich Meinecke, Max Scheler, Friedrich Naumann, Walther Rathenau, and Adolf von Harnack, to name just a few, subscribed to what was called by Johann Plenge, a professor of sociology at the University of Münster, the “Ideas of 1914,” a fabric of theories that contrasted two visions of civilization—the Germanic and the Anglo-American. The men of 1914 claimed to speak for a more cultivated, disciplined, and heroic way of life than was to be found in the purely consumer culture of the Anglo-Americans. In opposition to the rootless philosophy of laissez-faire individualism, they proposed a Volksgemeinschaft, an organically rooted community of the people without class divisions, a society in which individuals performed their duties for the good of the whole. Their anti-American views would constitute the essential point of departure for right-wing as well as left-wing critiques of America in the interwar period.
The strands of anti-Americanism are complex and varied, some based on cultural nationalism, antimodernism, anti-Semitism, and antidemocracy. In Germany all of them converged in the Nazi period. As the world’s major engine of modernization, America caused cultural degeneration wherever its influence made itself felt. Behind the drive toward modernization were its chief agents—the Jews. This is why anti-Americanism usually involves anti-Semitism. The Jews who had taken up residence in the metropolis of Amerika were seen as the real embodiment of the capitalistic Moloch.16
The very name of America in such circles suggests everything that is “grotesque, obscene, monstrous, stultifying, stunted, leveling, deadening, deracinating, deforming, rootless, uncultured, and—always in quotation marks—“free.” As previously shown, this “metaphysical” America existed almost from the beginning of the nation, and it became entwined with an equally metaphysical opposite: America, the land of freedom and of the future. These opposite images created ambiguous perceptions of America, and those who saw the New World from afar did so with ambivalence. Adolf Hitler, like so many Germans, absorbed both images of America and never resolved them in his own mind. America, the progressive, technological society, coexisted in his mind with Amerika, the land of degeneration.
Hitler’s Knowledge of America
The consensus concerning Hitler’s image of America still holds that he was abysmally ignorant and badly informed about conditions in America.17 There is little truth in this judgment. Hitler’s view of America was not as uninformed as many of his biographers and historians have written. He read widely, if often indiscriminately. His basic intelligence was definitely above average. He was an autodidact who had immersed himself in a wide variety of geopolitical, military, artistic, and technological sources. His knowledge of geography