Book Review

The relationship between intellectual concepts, public opinion, publicity, and policy has long troubled scholars of international relations. Too often complex ideas seem to be absorbed along with morning coffee and the New York Times.	1
The German scholar Thomas Reuther uses the discourse theories of Jürgen Habermas to bridge the gap between American images and policies toward Germany. The policies, he argues, followed logically from images derived from a combination of American political and social values with perceptions of those same values in Germans. The result was never a unified view of Germany, before, during, or after the Nazi regime.	2
Reuther goes far beyond the traditional stereotypes of "good German" versus "bad Nazi" to show how those images evolved from broader intellectual traditions in America. These perceptions influenced not only internal foreign policy decisions but also portrayals in film and literature. The public depictions of these images, then, did not directly influence the policy makers but rather came from the same intellectual streams that formed the views of those politicians and opinion makers.	. . .