|
|
|
Reviews
| Images of Germany in American Literature. By Waldemar Zacharasiewicz. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2007. viii + 253 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $39.95 (cloth).
|
|
In Images of Germany in American Literature, Waldemar Zacharasiewicz traces the evolution of treatments of that country—and, by extension, its residents—by American authors of the early nineteenth to the late twentieth century. According to Zacharasiewicz, the literary picture begins positively, with Germany seen as a land of "poets and thinkers," but takes a negative turn around the time of the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71). This souring of Germany's image in American literature is really Zacharasiewicz's focus. With fine detail, he explores how authors here have perpetuated, and sometimes challenged, stereotypes that include military aggressiveness, obedience to authority, gluttony, and efficiency. The penultimate chapter deals with the grips that World War II and the Holocaust retain on American authors, many of whom seem unable to move beyond "those negative stereotypes frequently associated in American fiction of the 1970s and 1980s with the Germans and resulting from the heavy burden left on them by the Nazi regime" (p. 171). |
1
|
|
A reader might complain, though, that the book's title would have benefited from substituting the phrase "Impressions" in place of "Images" to signal that Zacharasiewicz is at least as interested in the autobiographical dimensions of authors as he is in the images evoked by their texts. To be sure, he opens with an excellent survey of scholarship on imagology and, specifically, earlier analyses of images of Germans and Germany. However, his broad range of sources—from travelogues to novels—is written almost exclusively by authors who, he confirms, personally visited Germany. At times, he sidesteps into psychological speculation, such as when he suggests that Henry James might have had "a more favorable image of German princely patronage, and a less power-centered notion of the German character," had he followed his brother William's recommendation to include Dresden in his trip (p. 43). The admiration that H. L. Mencken held for Nietzsche's Herrenmoral, we read, may well have been "a compensation for his own feelings of failure resulting from his lack of talent in baseball" (p. 70), and Zacharasiewicz adds that "it must have been [Edith Wharton's] passionate feeling for and sense of affinity with France which determined her ... crudely antagonistic image of Germany" (p. 79). More passages that exemplify these and other authors' portraits of Germany and Germans would have better clarified what the literary images are rather than why certain authors created them. |
2
|
|
Fortunately, this approach becomes less prominent as the chapters proceed. For instance, in a chapter dealing with the rise of the Third Reich, Zacharasiewicz quotes a passage from Thomas Wolfe's You Can't Go Home Again (1937) that nicely illustrates his claim that Wolfe "could only account for the dramatic changes he had eventually perceived by resorting to the imagery of sickness, and thus he reported that an insidious poison was in the process of destroying the essential spirit and culture of Germany as a whole." (p. 121). That this quotation comes just after a discussion of W. E. B. Du Bois's reports on Germany from the same period hints at the diversity of authors covered in the book. In this respect, Zacharasiewicz has done a great service for scholars in seeking a far-reaching overview of what American authors have had to say about Germany. In fact, there is some discussion of cinema, television, and political cartoons. |
3
|
Nonetheless, readers of the Journal of American Ethnic History should be aware that the book only barely touches on issues of German immigrants and German Americans. Also, a basic understanding of nineteenth- and twentieth-century German history is assumed.
Tim Prchal
Oklahoma State University
|
4
|
|
|
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|