Old-World Resentment

For the generation to which I belong, criticism of the USA is closely associated with the revolt of the left and the protests against the Vietnam War. At that time the then Swedish Conservative Party had a craze about the American ideal of liberty, and its leader Yngve Holmberg was launched as a Swedish equivalent of Kennedy. The democratic alliance grouping went furthest in praising the USA as the abode of liberty and in defending the Yanks’ putative missionary work in Indo-China and Latin-America. FNL (Front National de Liberté, or National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam) youngsters who had no history could even believe that it had always been like that.

But, if one looks back, one finds that anti-Americanism was espoused primarily by the political right, which between the wars was still the party of national self-esteem and traditional conservatism. No alliance had as yet been entered into with the market, which by its very nature possessed no fatherland, and even if the conservatives have always defended private ownership, they did not allow financial views alone to govern policy. Culture was not something that was taxed according to stock exchange quotations. It was a question of defending European tradition against both democratic shallowness and capitalist exploitation.

Throughout the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century a stream of books and polemical pamphlets was published which on the basis of conservative views depict the United States as a symbol of the evil of modern times. There are, of course, standard works here such as the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville’s oft-quoted work Democracy in America (1835), which was really less about the United States than about the importance of the democratic way of life for the people, and how it might be developed in old-world Europe. Long before the breakthrough of capitalism de Tocqueville scrutinised the puritan majority conformism, which would later also become a European problem: “I know of no country where there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as there is in America.”

THE GERMAN PHILOSOPHER Friedrich Nietzsche has in Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (The Gay Science, 1881) some sharp comments on “Americans’ breathless haste in working—the true vice of the New World”; and Hoffmann von Fallersleben—best known as the creator of the German national anthem “Deutschland über alles”—wrote in a poem called “The New World” about “the robber spirit” and “selfishness” that prevails in freedom’s promised land. This is how some characteristic lines run in my free translation:

Which is why no wine comes from your vines
And the scent of the flowers is faint.
No birds are heard behind your freedom’s bounds
And poetry is dead and mute.

These observation were made as early as 1843, when anti-Americanism was neither unambiguous nor fully articulated.

In order to understand the later distrust of the modern USA one has to be clear about the fact that the United States was a country of European settlement, a colony where those who had not managed to find a tolerable life in their European homelands for the first time had a fair chance of realising their personal dreams and visions of the future. During the first half of the 19th century this American vitality was expressed in what is usually called the pioneer spirit. When all is said and done, it was a question of a gigantic colonisation of a boundless area, and without human energy, daring and courage it would scarcely have been possible to open up the forests and prairie to cultivation and to move the boundary markers westwards towards the Pacific Ocean.

The German writer of “Red Indian” stories, Karl May, wrote of the expanses of the Prairie and the settlers’ longing for freedom in a series of novels that in their time were much read (not least by Adolf Hitler) and are very typical of their time in their critique of civilisation. In these idealised tales the ‘Red Indian’ is often a noble, rooted child of nature who comes into conflict with the white man’s ruthless entrepreneurial spirit. But all settlers are not evil.

EVEN KARL MAY differentiated between the hard-working farmer and the profit-hungry “yankee” who was always looking at prices and is the very symbol of reprehensible capitalism. His hero, Old Shatterhand, is in many respects an early example of anti-Americanism, waging a tough battle against “the vices of Western civilisation.” Among these are greed and covetousness, but also the extravagance of the parvenu, his bad habit of showing off his all-too-quickly acquired money in order to prove to those around him that he has succeeded. When the conservative right and radical conservative writers such as Oswald Spengler or Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, but also the young Thomas Mann, later in the 1920s turned against Americanisation in Europe, it was precisely the results of economic liberalism on the human soul that they were thinking of. None of them doubted that the individual desire for acquisition and the entrepreneurial spirit had been a prerequisite for colonisation of the American continent.

But if the United States during the 19th century was typified by the pioneer, in the 20th-century it came to be dominated by ruthless stockjobbers, corruption and an economic liberalism which finally completely undermined political freedom. For Thomas Mann it was a question of protecting a political, inner life against the superficiality and standardisation of democracy; it was only later that he became a convinced republican. The word “culture” became for him and many of the conservatives of the interwar period a designation of what was Central European, German, and part of this was primarily the notion of a real people in a real state, a high point in life and a delicacy of form which had been fostered for many generations. The conventional image of the perils of Americanisation that emerged in the hundreds of publications circulating in the 1920s was of how the “birthplace of human rights and liberty in the world” had been transformed from a liberal democracy into a “plutocracy” and a “dollar democracy” in which politics and the newspapers were subjected to the domination of money.

BEHIND THE BEAUTIFUL facade of an exemplary democratic state hid 60 rich families who through their “formation of trusts” and “legal deviousness” had succeeded in getting both legislation and administration to work in their own interests. A type of American, and primarily of American woman—standardised in body, clothes and soul—was viewed as a blend of mob and snob who had confused European nationalism with the pursuit of dollars and world records, who wanted to tear down everything that the old Europe had built up. Religion, which originally was marked by the strict puritanism of the settlers, had been transformed from a religious duty into a thoughtless Sunday entertainment. Even the war—which in Germany was characterised by the strict philosophy of Prussian officers—had among New York’s and Chicago’s parvenus been transformed into a sport. The cowboy with his revolver in his pocket was the emblematic American invention.

One of the standard ideas was also the link between anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism. Uncle Sam was frequently portrayed as a Jew, and a constant theme was that the 60 families which were thought to control the American market, were also attempting to infiltrate the European upper classes and royal houses through marriage.

Even if these notions can be rejected as shallow prejudice, there was a grain of truth in them. Not every American is a chewing gum-chomping businessman, but it cannot be denied that commercialism and consumerism, as well as a considerable conformism, comprise an important element in the American social picture. Nor can the fact that a great deal, not merely skyscrapers and the Statue of Liberty, is visually conceived and constructed in order to reach out to the greatest possible public and success.

When in 1927 the Norwegian writer and Nobel Prize winner Knut Hamsun laid down the law about the USA in the Swedish daily paper Dagens Nyheter, he was keen to stress American hospitality and openness. But no one can mistake the fact that at heart he was deeply sceptical of the concepts of progress and commercialisation. “You Americans seem not to be satisfied with little. You always want more. But what is progress? That we can drive faster on the roads? No, progress is the necessary rest for the body and the necessary peace for the soul.” Exactly like Thomas Mann, he distinguishes between (American) civilisation and (European) culture, and as so often in Hamsun, this text contains a series of ideas which in different ways would be worth following up.

WHAT HAMSUN PRIMARILY objected to was that American life, being aimed at money, lacked depth, or “patina,” and, because of its short history, also lacked the European tragedy, the great fate that for many centuries had provided depth and characterised the “soul” of the western peoples. Here journalism and film are raised to the most important expressions of the age, but American culture lacked the moral weight, the mark of inner necessity and responsibility which even in the 1920s provided European literature with its stature. Where it was not diluted and shallow it smacked of opportunism and speculation. “The market” had become the generally accepted expression for what in Europe was still an educational tradition. Advertising also governed culture, demanding attention at any price. People, in the kind of view represented by Hamsunm, seemed entirely to have lost the insight that it is a question of something spiritual.

Now the European continent was constantly being fed with global successes and cinema masterpieces, real miracles of technical skill and atmosphere—and somewhere in this superabundance European culture was sinking into its grave.

At about the same time the German philosopher Oswald Spengler threw out his theory about the decline of the West, and his argument was so suggestive that we can easily forget that unintentionally it also quickened the steps of the brown battalions. In his book Jahre der Entscheidung (The Hour of Decision), which was published immediately after the National Socialist take-over, he also discussed what “a hundred per cent Americanism” was. According to Spengler it was no accident that Americans did not speak of state or fatherland, but about “this country.” When all is said and done, it was a question of a “roaming population of trappers on the hunt for dollars,” free and unfettered by class barriers and traditions but also poisoned by the myth of egalitarian progress.

Success is the measure of all things, and woe to him who fails. Poverty is regarded almost as a sin, and for this reason American society does not give a thought to helping and protecting the financially weak. Competition is regarded as part of human rights, but there are no social obligations towards the defenceless crushed under the wheels of this horse race in the homeland of human rights.

THE AVERAGE AMERICAN, according to Spengler, knew no state in Hegel’s sense. The USA prided itself instead on being the country where the self-made man has apparently limitless scope at his disposal. But, wrote Spengler, “the similarity with Bolshevik Russia is much greater than one believes: the same endless expanses, preventing any successful attack by an opponent and thereby the experience of a threat to the nation, but as a result of which neither allows the origin of true political thinking.”

Admittedly there was no major communist movement in the USA. But this was, according to Spengler, the result only of American levelling (“a mass existence regulated according to the lowest common denominator”), depriving the American worker of his class pride and character. For this reason he regards his work as a pure function, “a job.” This does not, according to Spengler, exclude there being in the USA an almost Russian form of “state capitalism,” represented by the large number of trusts corresponding to Russian state administration. It is, summarises Spengler, “the Faustian will to power, but transposed from the organically developed to the soullessly mechanical. Dollar imperialism, which dominates all of the Americas right down to Santiago and Buenos Aires is, with its arrangement of political power within economic trends, exactly Bolshevist imperialism.”

What united all conservative critics of the USA between the wars was their horror of the modern mass society. It is the belief in the strong state or the primacy of politics over money which is repeating itself in today’s critics of globalisation, even if they themselves would not accept such a description. What they see is social injustice and sameness in the spiritual domain: lying in the middle of a spider’s web of rails, the new cities tower up, the people become termites, exposed to the consumer whims and ingenuity of capitalism which are confusingly similar. The same product hoardings and film advertising can be seen in London and New York, Calcutta and Oslo, the same scandals excite our senses, the same brand of clothing and cars surround them.

Or, as the young Weimar Republic’s German-Jewish Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau put it in his book Neue wirtschaft (New Society) 1918: “Never during the Middle Ages were two neighbouring states in one country—Nuremberg and Cologne, Genoa and Venice—so alike each other in vital respects as today’s London and Paris, New York and Berlin.”

THE 1920s WAS the period when one for the first time can seriously talk about Americanisation on a large-scale, and it became very evident in Germany. The defeated German people had to experience how the Wiener Walz was now displaced by more modern melodies; theatre and fashion nervously followed Broadway, and even film and literature instead of place tried to emphasise superficial brilliance.

Even those who had earlier dreamt of “the land of boundless opportunity” now regarded American individualism as the root of the evil of the modern age. The left-winger Karl Krauss spoke ironically about “Ford-schritt” (from German Fortschritt, meaning “progress”) in order to describe the combination of economism and Puritanism which was considered to denote the American attitude to life.

Describing the transition from conservative anti-Americanism to the slogans of National Socialism about “Jewish world domination” is not possible in this brief space, and far from all radical conservatives rejected the United States. Arthur Moeller van den Bruck—the man who wrote the book Das Dritte Reich (“The Third Reich”, trans. Germany’s Third Empire)—counted the USA, Germany and Russia among young viable peoples, while the old cultural nations of England and France had their history behind them. His book Das Recht der jungen Völker (“The Right of the Young Peoples”, 1919) was actually an appeal to American President Wilson for this reason to refrain from demanding overly harsh reparations from the Germans. The assured faith that inspired Walt Whitman’s poetry was supported by a notion of America’s world historic mission which—at least in its claims to conquest—is reminiscent of the imperialist rapture which filled 1930s Germany. After the Second World War there was, for natural reasons, no room for any anti-Americanism from the right. The writer Ernst von Salomon in his book Der Fragenbogen (The Answers of Ernst Von Salomon to the 131 Questions in the Allied Military Government ‘Fragebogen’, 1951) produced a blistering reckoning with the American “liberators,” but on the whole Germans of East and West obediently followed in their new masters’ footsteps. Marshall aid and political re-education after the Second World War contributed to clearing away old German notions of a Sonderweg (“Special way”) with its point directed westwards.