Abstract
If the interwar period saw anti-Americanism regain the ideological certainty it had lost toward the end of the nineteenth century, it happened largely by way of compensation, as a way of dealing with Europe’s crisis after World War I. As Eric Hobsbawm has pointed out, the nineteenth century was the most European century in world history; no continent before or since was able to exercise global supremacy on a comparable scale.1 While this supremacy manifested itself most strikingly in the form of great colonial empires, its mental correlative was a continental self-confidence that posited the universality of European culture as an unquestionable fact. The World War dealt a massive blow to this self-confidence. The war had not only revealed a shocking willingness on the part of the civilized Europeans to send millions of young men to their deaths, often for uncertain causes or trivial gains, but had also shown how easily the technological and scientific advances that had been the pride of the nineteenth century could be turned against humanity itself. With Europe’s normative power in shatters, the end of the war triggered a process of intense cultural self-scrutiny. The old idea of the natural life span of civilizations gained new currency as the historico-philosophical foundation for a new wave of cultural pessimism, and the dominant prognosis was that Europe, having passed it zenith, was now locked in unstoppable decline. In the words of Paul Valéry reflecting on the contemporary “crisis of the spirit,” the war had taught Europeans that their civilization was as mortal as the great civilizations of the past.2
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Notes
Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987), pp. 18–19.
Paul Valéry, “La Crise de l’esprit” (1919), in Valéry, Varieté I (Paris: Gallimard, 1924), pp. 11–31. The cyclical view of history was expounded most forcefully by Oswald Spengler in Untergang des Abendlandes (1918–22) (Munich: Beck, 1920–22).
Wyndham Lewis, America and Cosmic Man (1948) (Garden City, NY: Country Life Press, 1949), p. 12. Cf. Richard Pells, Not Like Us, p. 201–3.
Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics (1935) (trans. Gregory Fried & Richard Polt) (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2000), p. 40.
Ibid. For a more detailed account of Heidegger’s perception of the United States, cf. James W. Ceaser, “The Philosophical Origins of Anti-Americanism in Europe,” in Paul Hollander (ed.), Understanding Anti-Americanism (Chicago, IL: Ivan R. Dee, 2004), pp. 45–64.
Cf. Martin Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track (1950) (trans. Julian Young & Kenneth Haynes) (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), p. 218; Hölderlins Hymne Andenken’ (1941/1942) (Frankfurt/Main: Klostermann, 1982), p. 134.
Martin Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymne ‘Der Ister’ (1942) (trans. Willian McNeill & Julia Davis) (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1996), pp. 54–55.
Georges Duhamel, America the Menace (1930) (trans. Charles Miner Thompson) (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1931), pp. 209–10. Quotations from this edition have occasionally been altered with reference to the French original, Scènes de la Vie future (Paris: Mercure de France, 1930).
D. H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent (1926) (Ware: Wordsworth Classics, 1995), p. 35.
Jacob Paludan, De vestlige Veje (Copenhagen: Aschehough, 1922), p. 82.
Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790) (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2001), § 25, § 28.
Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (1906) (Boston & New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2005), pp. 134–35.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night (1932) (trans. Ralph Manheim) (London: John Calder, 1988), p. 171.
Cf. David Bradshaw’s introduction to the Vintage edition of the novel, Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932) (London: Vintage, 2004), p. viidff.
José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (1929) (trans. Anthony Kerrigan) (Notre Dame: Notre Dame UP, 1985), p. 6.
Cf. Richard Müller-Freienfels, Mysteries of the Soul (1927) (trans. Bernard Miall) (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1929), pp. 258–59.
For an account of Hollywood’s international dominance in the 1920s and 1930s as well as the European efforts to combat it, cf. John Trumpbour, Selling Hollywood to the World (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002).
Aldous Huxley, Jesting Pilate (London: Chatto & Windus, 1926), p. 268.
Cf. Seymour Lipset, American Exceptionalism (New York & London: W. W. Norton, 1996), pp. 77–78.
For a general appreciation of Marx’s perception of the United States, cf. Manfred Henningsen, “Das Amerika von Hegel, Marx und Engels: Zur Genealogie des europäischen Anti-Amerikanismus,” Zeitschrift für Politik, vol. 20 (1973), pp. 224–51, here pp. 237–49.
Cf. Ernest Poole, “Maxim Gorki in New York,” Slavonic and East European Review, vol. 3:1 (1944), pp. 77–83;
Cecilia von Studnitz, Mit Tränen löschst du das Feuer nicht: Maxim Gorki und sein Leben (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1993), pp. 136–39.
For a fuller discussion of Gorky’s image of America and the biographical and ideological context of these sketches, cf. Charles Rougle, Three Russian Consider America (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1976), pp. 15–58.
Maxim Gorky, In America (1906) (Honolulu: UP of the Pacific, 2001), p. 8.
Several years later, in 1925, Mayakovsky spent three months traveling in the United States as self-appointed “plenipotentiary of Soviet poetry.” This journey resulted in a cycle of 22 poems about America as well as an idiosyncratic travelogue, which, while retaining a number of anti-American motifs, mostly testifies to the author’s fascination with American modernity. Cf. Mayakovsky, My Discovery of America (1926) (trans. Neil Cornwell) (London: Hesperus, 2005).
For a detailed account of the development in Brecht’s perception of the United States, cf. Helfried W. Seliger, Das Amerikabild Bertolt Brechts (Bonn: Bouvier, 1974).
Bertolt Brecht, Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (1930) (Frankfurt/ Main: Suhrkamp, 1967), p. 549.
On Brecht’s years in California, cf. Klaus Völker, Brecht (London & Boston, MA: Marion Boyars, 1979), pp. 282–314.
Bertolt Brecht, “Wo ich wohne” (1944–47), in Ausgewählte Werke, vol. 6 (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), p. 511.
On anti-American propaganda in the Soviet Union, cf. Barry & Judith Colp Rubin, Hating America (New York: Oxford UP, 2004), pp. 80–91.
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© 2011 Jesper Gulddal
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Gulddal, J. (2011). Anti-American Futurology. In: Anti-Americanism in European Literature. Studies in European Culture and History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137016027_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137016027_4
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