Customer Reviews

America in the Eyes of the Germans: An Essay on Anti-Americanism

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Dan Diner's history of German anti-Americanism is an eye-opener to the first-time reader. The history of such an irrational phenomenon - it didn't begin in World War I - makes for a "sidebar" history of some interesting psychological underpinnings of a normally rational set. Like the ugliest of garden weeds, this has some deep roots hard to get out.

The one or two awkward translation questions mentioned in above reviews were simple cases of choice of words. I find Diner's work highly readable and informative.

Germans hate dollars. Not enough to refuse them. Probably they feel dirty after accepting one, like a preacher after a visit to the whorehouse, but they force themselves to do it, anyway.

So instead of hating themselves for accepting the dollars, they hate the Americans for giving them to them.

That's my explanation, anyway, and it fits easily enough into Israeli-German political scientist Dan Diner's more nuanced and evolutionary explanation.

Diner was inspired to write his polemic by the hatred of America unleashed by Gulf War I. He traced it back to an entirely different matter in the early 19th century. For him, America -- not any very real America, but a symbol -- was the convenient whipping boy for Romantics who were upset by the modernization of Germany and the decay of familiar hierarchical social relations.

He notes, of course, that this was a feeling hardly shared by German peasants and workers, who escaped to America when they could. Anti-Americanism was a phenomenon of religious, academic and social elites. In Germany, that included a lot of "vons."

I think Americans underestimate how much monarchism and aristocratism still resonate in Europe even in the 21st century. It was even more so in the recent past. Most of Hitler's generals were not radical street fighters jumped up by the revolution of 1933. They were Prussian barons.

As Diner traces German anti-Americanism, it of course gets conflated with anti-Semitism. Anything a German despises -- whether it is worthy of being despised or not -- will sooner or later (usually sooner) be blamed on the Jews.

From the beginning, but even more so after being beaten twice on the battlefield -- no greater insult can be imagined by a German -- Germans looked for flaws with which to beat the Americans. Slavery was always there, and also the decimation of the American Indian.

Those are two valid points, though odd coming from Germans, who decimated the Lithuanians and were enthusiastic slave-catchers as recently as 1945. That critics who hold themselves out as superior moralists and intellectuals should continue to make the same complaints in the 21st century just shows how crazy they all are.

Diner's essay was published in German in 1993 and translated into English in 1996 (and very poorly, too). Since then something important has happened.

While the German right has never pulled any punches about its Jew-hatred, the left and liberals had to tread warily after 1945. The first intifada was an Allah-send to them, as it allowed them to stop pretending they were not anti-Semitic.

Since, as Diner shows convincingly, in German eyes, anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism are two sides of the same coin, the coming of Gulf War II was the trigger for paroxysms of gleeful hate fests.

That's one thing you have to give the Germans credit for. They can't win wars against anybody but the French, but nobody hates better.