The crucial test to which the American government in Germany ought to subject all claimants and lobbyists is, of course, “Just how many followers do you have? How many hale and hearty democrats can you deliver?” An honest question, to which in honesty the non-Nazified functionaries of the old Weimar Republic can only answer: “None. Unfortunately, the people have become estranged from us. The young generation has forgotten us and doesn’t care about democracy. After thirteen years of Hitler, what can you expect?”
This is perfectly true, except that for once it is not Hitler who must take all the blame if American ideas don’t work out in occupied Germany. That blame must be shared by German gullibility and American gullibility alike. The truth is that the fathers of the present generation ate sour grapes from America, and now the children’s teeth are set on edge.
I will spare you the well-worn argument about Wilson’s Fourteen Points, and how the Germans felt let down when they got the Treaty of Versailles instead. No: what you have forgotten, or never became conscious of, is that for ten years after the First World War Germany’s most popular slogan was “Wir amerikaniseieren uns!” (“We must Americanize ourselves.”) Rarely, perhaps never in history, was there a defeated nation so completely enamored of the victor’s efficiency as the Germans after 1919. “American matériel has won the war? So then everything American must be superior. Let’s imitate them, let’s Americanize ourselves.” Such was German logic.
Every American who visited Berlin during those reconstruction years will remember to what ridiculous lengths that German logic went: American bars and American-style nightclubs, American jazz bands, if possible with one “real imported” Negro at the saxophone. American cafeteries and American movie houses were ubiquitous. The neatly dressed German wore “shimmy” shoes and a suit of American cut. American cars rolled on the streets with a new and surprising noiselessness, and in if an American asked his way in German he got an English answer. The dollar was the Elite-Valuta — the elite-professionals of the Kurfuerstendamm demanded it from even their German customers. And the first skyscrapers begain to raise their steel skeletons over the trees of the Tiergarten.
We imitated everything. The National Assembly imitated your Constitution, and the Reichswehr your Sam Browne belt. Industrialists copied your production systems, workers adapted themselves to your speed-up systems, and poets sang in praise of the assembly line. We introduced your weekend and your bookkeeping. We blossomed out in Rotary Clubs and poured sugar into our perfectly good wine to ape the sweet tooth of America.
We really meant it all. Sure, the people were disappointed that their Wilsonian dream hadn’t come true after all, but then they still clung to their dream of America. What kind of dream?
“If you will only be good democrats and work like hell and be modern and progressive as we are, then you can live like Americans.” That was the siren song which in a thousand variations sounded from across the ocean, and the people listened as starry-eyed as ever Hitler listened to a Wagner opera. They dreamed of the electric refrigerator that would one day be theirs, and of the vacuum cleaner, and, above all, of that cheap little car.
[...]
For a time the carrot worked; the ugly 19th-century brick-and-plaster houses of Germany’s Main Streets put on pants: facades of concrete reaching to the second floor and framing modern stores with neon lights. Cities built new municipal buildings and parks and hospitals for themselves. Yes, it was done with American loans — to a large degree, at least. Industry modernized itself and installed new machinery. Yes, American money helped do that, too. It looked almost like prosperity on the face of it, and a typical German crowd looked almost like a normal American crowd.
[...]
It must not be forgotten that private enterprise in Germany had suffered a major blow a few years before the Nazis came to power. In 1930, the great depression hit the economic body of Germany, which owing to malnutrition had a low resistance anyway. And the most significant thing about it was that “Wir amerikanisieren uns,” the slogan of the ‘twenties, backfired on us with a vengeance.
When the United States retracted her private loans, the first establishments to topple were the ones that had taken the loans. These included the municipalities that had gone farthest along the American way of modernity, and the industries that had gone the limit with American production methods, thereby accumulating an unduly high overhead. The workers on the American-style assembly lines were the first to be thrown on the dole. The most progressive farmers, who had invested heavily in modern American implements, were the first to surrender to the sheriff’s sale.
[...]
The cheapest kind of amusement, which even those on the dole could afford once a week, which indeed was thrown in as part of the dole, was a ticket to the movies. People thronged the movie houses, partly for the warmth, partly to snatch an hour of sleep in half-comfort, partly to forget their misery, and partly for the show. And the show always included a newsreel and some slapstick comedy from the U.S.A.
Never shall we forget — we, the unemployed of the depression years in Germany — those nauseating scenes that Hollywood projected for us on the silver screen as ostensibly representing the American way of life. Never shall I forget the incredulous stare at first, and then the tightening of lips, and then the gleam of hatred in the people’s eyes…
“So that’s the way those fellows live over there in America… did you see those brats throwing pie at each other’s faces, and all besmeared, and the whipped cream dripping all over?… And the girls in the sexy bathing suits, swimming in a pond full of apples and banging them around… Don’t forget the ones who got their buttocks measured by a bunch of fellows — a beauty contest, they called it… And that other hussy in the beauty parlor; got her hair all plastered with yolk of egg. I’ve seen it. Real eggs, at least a dozen….
[...]
In that other thing, College Fun or whatever it was, did you see how they wrecked the place, smashed up the furniture and all? Did you think that was funny? No, I call that beastly, and I could have taken a stick and smashed their skulls, and never be sorry I did it.”
Pre-war Germany and the modern Middle East suddenly seem eerily similar.
Paul Howe teaches an