and which does not love any of the loftiest expressions of the human spirit such as music.”5 Just a few months later, at the same time that he grudgingly praised America’s industrial superiority, he also condemned the United States as a “degenerate and corrupt state,” adding, “I have the deepest revulsion and hate against Americanism. Every European state is closer to us. In its entire spiritual attitude it is a half judaized and negrified society. How could one expect such a state to endure if 80 percent of its taxed income is squandered, a land built entirely on the dollar?”6
From what sources did Hitler derive these split images of America? From the very moment America was settled by Europeans, two quite different perceptions of America developed: that of the real land experienced by its settlers, and that of the symbol it represented in the minds of foreigners who never set foot in America. The symbol of America, as it filtered down to the level of ordinary Europeans, was the construction of intellectuals—scientists, novelists, journalists, and philosophers. Much of what they said about a country they had never seen was a mixture of fantasy, wishful thinking, psychological projection, and ethnocentric prejudices. We all know the positive images that spoke of a “New World” as rich as it was enchanting, a world of unlimited opportunities for land-starved and oppressed peasants of Europe. To millions of Europeans, America was the dream the Old World—one steeped in sin and trouble—hoped for. The New World was going to be better; its resources and its open spaces beckoned the failures and adventurers of the Old World to another chance, offering them a refuge from their own past.
Hitler’s image of America was not substantially different from what most Germans thought of America. On the one hand, America appeared as a vast and immensely wealthy country offering unlimited opportunities to land-starved and poor Europeans who were still suffering oppression under the rule of their royal masters. America was the land of freedom and a haven for hardworking common people. This benign image of America, however, coexisted with the degeneracy theory of the eighteenth century. Following the Civil War, European intellectuals provided increasingly negative accounts of America. Two broad developments contributed to this change: rapid industrialization, which gave rise to a national obsession with the acquisition of material wealth, especially among the nouveaux riches; and America’s ongoing ethnic and racial conflicts. Many Europeans accused America of becoming a nation of soulless materialists, chasing the dollar and concealing its spiritual emptiness by worshipping size: enormous skyscrapers, mansions, tunnels, suspension bridges, luxury liners, and so on. Paradoxically, images of a land of conspicuous consumers and millionaires, lacking any spiritual depth, often represented precisely the qualities many Europeans themselves desired even as they roundly condemned them in the allegedly harried, dollar-chasing Yankee. Despite having fought a civil war over race and the way of life based on it, Americans continued to be deeply divided on racial issues. The rise of biological-racial ideologies, which rested on pseudoscientific and Social Darwinian doctrines, encouraged conflicting views about America’s racial dilemma. America’s ruling elite, and that included the Roosevelts, saw themselves on the one hand as advancing the progress of civilization through democracy and liberal reform; but on the other hand they also believed that superior civilization derived from English, Dutch, and northern European racial stocks.7 Theodore Roosevelt, for example, believed that both England and America owed their success to the Germanic stock, and in The Winning of the West, a colorful account of how the West was won according to Roosevelt, he celebrated the spread of the Anglo-Saxon races over “the world’s waste space” as the most striking feature of human history.8 The same sentiments can be found in Owen Wister’s novels, especially the widely acclaimed Virginian (1902). Wister’s cowboys are latter-day medieval heroes who give the Anglo-Saxon race a last chance to regain its virility on the western frontier. Wister was a Philadelphia patrician and a Harvard graduate. Theodore Roosevelt was a New York patrician and also a Harvard graduate. Both men, and others from similar social backgrounds, thought in terms of racial stocks, superior and inferior blood, and American exceptionalism. Such racially conscious elites were alarmed by the influx of “inferior breeds” from Eastern Europe and from Latin countries. They supported strong anti-immigration laws that discriminated against such groups particularly if they came from non-European civilizations. Pervasive fears periodically surfaced in such circles that the huge influx of East Europeans, especially Jews, was creating a mongrel nation in which the creative and dominant Teutonic racial stock would be diluted by inferior blood.
Hitler’s perception of America encompassed all of these prejudicial strains that had entered into the thinking of Americans themselves. The Roosevelts had absorbed the typical prejudices of their class; they saw themselves as the crème de la crème by virtue of their older bloodline. In bolstering their class biases they found support in a variety of intellectual sources: neo-Darwinism, muckraking social criticism, and romanticized versions of American history. Their sense of class exceptionalism, however, was not as strong as it appeared to be, for the Roosevelts, whether they came from the Oyster Bay (Theodore Roosevelt) or the Hyde Park (FDR) branch of the family, saw themselves displaced by the new and more aggressive class of entrepreneurs, the financial nouveaux riches, such as the Morgans, Goulds, Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, Fricks, and Carnegies. Possessing an older pedigree and a more modest form of wealth, they could understate and therefore accentuate their social superiority over more recent parvenus. They could also act as tribunes of the people, playing populists to the masses, which sometimes infuriated their own class, who despised them as class traitors.
Europeans did not distinguish between different types of rich Americans; they lumped them all into the same class. They envied rich and powerful Americans while publicly condemning them as vulgar and uncultured—a stereotypical reaction of the powerless. A whole mesh of contradictory attitudes of envy, resentment, and admiration produced the stereotypical image of America as a nation that had become too big for its britches, too wealthy and certainly too powerful for its own good. German critics of America, influenced by neoromantic and völkisch ideologies, saw America as an artificial creation rather than an organic growth. America, they said, had been mechanically produced through revolution and a written document conceived by abstract minds. As such, it lacked inner life and spiritual depth. As long as America was ruled by its superior Anglo-Saxon elite, it might avoid degenerating into a mongrel nation without any higher spiritual ideals. Voices were raised claiming that America’s hour had already passed and that the country was mired in materialism. One of Hitler’s countrymen, the Austrian novelist Ferdinand Kürnberger (1821–79) who had written a maudlin novel called Der Amerika-Müde (The Man Weary of America, 1855), referred to America as lacking any real moral, artistic, or religious life. Even the vaunted political values of freedom and equality were hollow, for Americans had shown themselves to be unworthy of such blessings.
Another aspect of Amerika Müde (America weariness) was inspired by neoromantic and conservative traditionalists who associated America with the unfettered pursuit of modernity. This view consisted of a set of ideas and attitudes held by reactionaries who yearned for the restoration of the preindustrial way of life. They believed that venerable ancient traditions were being lost under the impact of rapid industrialization and its consequences: urbanism, the activation of the masses, the demythologizing of ancient customs and beliefs, the creation of new cultural forms of expression for a mass audience, and so forth. Fritz Stern, in examining the intellectual precursors of the Nazi mentality, referred to this antimodernism as the “politics of cultural despair,” while Jeffrey Herf termed it as “reactionary modernism.”9 Still others, especially during the Weimar period, called it “Amerikanismus,” for it was in America that the “new” seemed to have an automatic claim to authenticity. National Socialism has been seen by some historians as a reactionary movement because it wanted to suspend the ideas of 1789, which were associated with the democratic revolution and the decadent values allegedly stemming from mass democracy: cheap popular culture, decadent lifestyles, fast food, mass media sensationalism, and so forth. This is the sort of American cultural imperialism that was so roundly condemned by Adolf Halfeld in his influential book Amerika und der Amerikanismus (1928).10 Halfeld expressed a deep fear that Amerika would export its popular culture and sap the spiritual nature of the western world, leaving nothing in its wake except the promise of “eternal prosperity” and material
