| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Thomas Reuther. Die Ambivalente Normalisierung: Deutschlanddiskurs und Deutschlandbilder in den USA, 1941–1955. (Transatlantische Historische Studien, number 11.) Stuttgart: Franz Steiner. 2000. Pp. 476. DM 88.00.

This study combines traditional German thoroughness with post-1945 familiarity with America to provide an impressive survey of the attitudes of columnists, officials, and the public. It is odd reading American opinions auf Deutsch, experiencing the ring of familiarity and yet strangeness, while automatically translating the ideas back into English. Very often Thomas Reuther short circuits the process, using original paragraphs and "untranslatable" words, like "exceptionalism—world opinion," knowing that his native readers understand English. 1

Cited attitudes begin with the disappointment that "the land of brave thinkers" could not achieve the needed revolution in 1848. Newspapers then supported Prussia against Napoleon III and greeted the Second Reich. Otto von Bismarck avoided annoying America, but an English appeasement policy was longer lasting. Traveler Mark Twain pictured Germans as kind, generous, polite models of cleanliness and order. The blustering Kaiser Wilhelm II damaged that image, but Germany remained beloved as a tourist land, admired for its science and art, until the helmeted march into Belgium. President Woodrow Wilson, having no transatlantic threat, had to use a compelling Feindbild to weaken isolationism, making the war one against barbarians and for democracy, opposing which equaled disloyalty. . . .

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