Politics and Contemporary History

Diametrically opposed to the soldierly authoritarian Prussian mindset, the easygoing, laid-back American way of life offered a positive model for identification in postwar Germany. "Democracy is sexy!" was the message of the US culture industry, which was transported to Germany via the media and the America House cultural policy.

Belated Democracy?

A number of historians believe one of the main reasons why Fascism was able to exert so much sway in Germany – as in Italy – was the belated development of the nation-state there. In his celebrated 1959 book Die verspätete Nation ("The Belated Nation"), Helmuth Plessner argued that England's political liberalism and France's democratic rationalism remained alien to German culture. That was why authoritarian structures held sway for so long in Germany. The kind of democratic culture that had long since become the norm in Western countries failed to materialize in Germany and therefore could not prevent the spread of Nazism.

Collective guilt?

In certain circumstances public opinion tends to assign collective guilt. Time and again, the postwar world blamed the German people as a whole for the atrocities of the Third Reich: an understandable reaction to the outright denials by all too many even avowed Nazis, the leadership clique, behind-the-scenes masterminds, members of the SS and Einsatzgruppen (killing squads) and so many others.

The concept of collective guilt involves putting the blame for crimes, even if committed by individual perpetrators, on a whole community, whether it be defined by religion, ethnicity, nation or class. It stems from an archaic tradition. Lest that tradition return with a vengeance, guilt needs to be proven concretely in each actual individual case. Anything else is incompatible with our modern-day conception of justice.

Atrocity films

Though Nazi criminals were convicted under modern law at the 1945–49 Nuremberg trials and there was no implication of collective guilt there, one couldn't help feeling there was a general assumption of the German people's collective guilt in the first years after the war. Commanders of the US forces frequently forced the populace to see images and video recordings of the exhumation of mass graves and the liberation of concentration camps. In fact, to obtain food stamps some had to attend screenings at the US Information Centers of what were aptly called "atrocity films", such as Billy Wilder's documentary The Death Mills.

This measure was quite understandable seeing as the German population generally claimed to have known nothing about the mass murder of the Jews, which began in broad daylight with systematic disenfranchisement, pogroms and deportation, and in 1952 Konrad Adenauer was already clamouring for a stop to the "sniffing-out of Nazis" – even before the war crimes had been processed in full.

From re-education to re-orientation

Suchlike coercive measures, however, which also made use of propaganda tools to instil democratic values in the German population, proved so ineffectual that the Americans eventually changed their cultural strategy. For the coercion met with general rejection and apathy; perceived as humiliating, it even engendered a hostile mistrust. But democracy is based on acceptance. At any rate, quasi shock-therapy methods could not achieve the noble purpose of eradicating slavish submission to authority and putting democratic ideals in their place, especially as German culture for several decades had been permeated by bitter anti-Western resentment, whose source Helmuth Plessner traces all the way back to Martin Luther.

From 1946 on, the US authorities forsook their "re-education" programmes for a more refined form of persuasion termed "re-orientation". This was a non-coercive form of cultural policy whose democratizing impact fed on voluntary acceptance, hence far more effective.

Democracy light: easygoing and laid-back!

Movie director Billy Wilder developed the idea of "propaganda through entertainment". He was convinced that good entertainment packed with indirect democratic messages to the audience would be a far more effective method of democratization.

In his study on Americanization and Westernization Wie westlich sind die Deutschen? ("How Western are the Germans?") historian Anselm Doering-Manteuffel writes that the American way of life offered a significant positive model for Germans to identify with: they saw its light, laid-back, easy-going style as a stark contrast to the soldierly authoritarian Prussian mindset. Ice cream, chewing gum and chocolate, jazz and rock 'n' roll, James Dean and Marilyn Monroe epitomize a free consumption-oriented society. "Democracy is sexy!" was the message of the American "culture industry", which was transported to Germany via cinemas and television, as well as through the very presence of the GIs and most certainly through the cultural policy of the America Houses.

Opening of America House in Frankfurt 1957

In May 1957, when its director William Keener opened in Frankfurt am Main what was at the time the most modern of the 157 existing United States Information Centers in 67 different countries around the world, America House had long since come to symbolize freedom of thought and democracy. One of the prominent figures invited to speak at the inauguration was Max Horkheimer, representing the University of Frankfurt. He was confident, he said, that even in the outward imitation of American culture, above all by the nation's youth, a thoroughgoing process of historical and societal restructuring was under way. Though it had previously proved so difficult and virtually impossible for historical reasons at any rate – and despite the critique of the Kulturindustrie that he and Theodor W. Adorno had formulated in their Dialectic of the Enlightenment – he called for unqualified endorsement of the new orientation toward the United States because it was an orientation toward freedom. A few days later Adorno, too, spoke at America House – chiefly on the differences between German and American culture.