Anti-Americanism in Twentieth Century Europe

Throughout the twentieth century, journalists, politicians and academics have used the term ‘Americanization’ to assess the global impact of the USA’s rise to the status of a world power, and to make sense of the dramatic and bedazzling social changes brought about by industrialization and urbanization. European intellectuals have rarely resisted the temptation to use ‘America’ as shorthand for ‘modernity’: across the Atlantic, European observers believed, it was possible to learn and see what their own societies would look like in the future. Complaints about the Americanization of Europe – or the world – could easily be turned into outright anti-Americanism, i.e. a radical and reductionist ideology which made the USA responsible for all the ills of society, be they economic, political, or cultural. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the following rift in transatlantic relations gave the history of European perceptions of America a new impetus. Among the large number of studies devoted to the history of ‘Americanization’ and anti-Americanism that have been published in recent years, several monographs, based on original research, promise new insights and deserve close attention

The Mind of the Nation: The Debate about Völkerpsychologie, 1851-1900

Völkerpsychologie or ‘folk psychology’ has a bad reputation amongst historians. It is either viewed as a pseudo-science not worth studying in detail, or considered a ‘failure’ since, in contrast to sociology, psychology, and anthropology, it never established itself as an independent discipline at university level. This article argues that Völkerpsychologie as developed by Moritz Lazarus and Heymann Steinthal was an important current in nineteenth-century German thought. While it was riddled with conceptual and methodological problems and received harsh criticism from academic reviewers, it contributed to the establishing of the social sciences since key concepts of folk psychology were appropriated by scholars such as Georg Simmel and Franz Boas. The article summarizes the main features of Lazarus and Steinthal’s Völkerpsychologie, discusses its reception in Germany and abroad, and shows how arguments originally developed for folk psychology were used by Lazarus to reject antisemitism in the 1870s and 1880s. It concludes that Lazarus and Steinthal’s Völkerpsychologie epitomized the mentality of nineteenth-century liberals with its belief in science, progress, and the nation, which was reinforced by their experience of Jewish emancipation

Auf den Spuren des Sonderwegs. Zur Westorientierung der Deutschen Geschichtswissenschaft in der Bundesrepublik

Book description: Die Geschichtswissenschaft hat sich in den vergangen Jahrzehnten stark internationalisiert. Kommunikation und Kooperation über Ländergrenzen, nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg noch die Ausnahme, sind längst zur Routine geworden. Das gilt insbesondere für das deutsch-amerikanische Verhältnis, wo der beispiellose Einfluß, den die Vereinigten Staaten auf die Bundesrepublik ausübten, zur Bildung enger wissenschaftlicher Netzwerke geführt hat. Daher ist es kein Zufall, dass deutsch-amerikanische Themen in der Internationalen Geschichte eine herausragende Rolle spielen. Dieser Band bietet einen Querschnitt durch das breite Spektrum der methodischen Ansätze, Fragestellungen und Themen, mit denen sich die Forschung auf beiden Seiten des Atlantiks in jüngster Zeit beschäftigt hat. Zugleich stellen einige der 29 Beiträge weiterführende Überlegungen zu Theorie und Methode sowie zur historiographischen Entwicklung der Internationalen Geschichte an