Weimar Germany's relationship with the United States is a story full of contradictions. The fragile republic depended on the newly anointed great power for its economic and political rehabilitation in the aftermath of the First World War. It strove to emulate the United States’ economic success, particularly in the area of mass production, admiring its economic and political modernity. Yet at the same time, German cultural conservatives derided what they saw as the United States’ preoccupation with materialism and supposed lack of cultural sophistication, and scoffed at its popular entertainment industry, particularly the new genre of jazz music and the burgeoning movie industry. In short, Weimar Germany suffered from a paradoxical mix of inferiority and superiority complexes, seeking to both emulate and reject the American model.
In her detailed study of the Weimar Republic's forays into public diplomacy toward the United States, Elisabeth Piller stays clear of such contradictions. She places primary emphasis on how Weimar's political officials and private citizens tried to woo Americans after the catastrophic loss of prestige during the First World War. She sees in those efforts the beginning of a fundamental rethinking about the scope and conduct of foreign policy. The new measures included the creation of specific cultural and educational outreach programs, support for German-American ethnic organizations, and the incorporation of business, trade, and tourist networks into the foreign-policy apparatus. This study reminds us that, whatever doubts Germans might have harbored about the feasibility of the American civilizational model, they recognized the United States' political and economic power and sought its approval in the international realm.
The volume spans the years from 1919 to 1937, divided into three chronological parts. The first, covering the period 1918-1924, offers a general overview of German diplomatic aspirations reaching back to the pre-First World War period to show early efforts at public diplomacy, such as the 1902 visit by the German emperor's brother Prince Heinrich to the United States. But there is surprisingly little evidence of a new, postwar public diplomacy emerging in this section. Rather, Piller largely confines her analysis to documenting the emerging consensus among policy officials that the country needed to overcome its international isolation. “There were few concrete programs or accomplishments in this period,” the author concedes, “but it set the course for much of what was to come” (158). In short, the problem is named, yet no solution in sight.
Public diplomacy came into its own in the period 1924-1929, which forms the second part of the volume. It is here that the book's central argument shines through most clearly. Piller discusses the government's efforts to connect to the German-American community in the United States; to foster transatlantic academic connections through student and faculty exchanges; and to promote American tourism in Germany. The cast of actors includes official government representatives, foundations, academics, students, as well as commercial entities, such as the German shipping magnates Hapag and Norddeutscher Lloyd (NDL).
The last section documents the decline of Weimar Germany's public diplomacy with the onset of the Great Depression, which, of course, also spelled the end of the Weimar Republic itself. It is followed by a concluding chapter on the first four years of the Nazi regime, which does not integrate easily into the book's central arguments. It almost seems like an afterthought, especially since the title of the book limits the chronological scope of the study to the period 1918-1933. If the objective of this chapter was to show some of the continuities of the public diplomacy apparatus, or maybe to explain why and how these interwar institutions and programs could have survived into the post-Second World War period and even thrived during the Cold War, it would have better served as an epilogue of sorts. It minimizes the contrasts; it underestimates the radical nature of the break with the past; and it downplays the degradation of public diplomacy into blatant propaganda.
The relationship between public diplomacy and propaganda runs as an undercurrent throughout the book. In some parts, Piller establishes clear boundaries between the two, such as when she writes about Germany's propaganda efforts during the First World War and the “black horror” campaign in the early 1920s, or describes the Nazi regime's absorption of public diplomacy into its Propaganda Ministry in the 1930s. But at other times, public diplomacy is presented as a more subtle, and therefore more successful, form of propaganda, for instance when a section on the German “propaganda” problem in the early 1920s (“America wants no propaganda of that kind, at least no German propaganda”), concludes with the simple statement that Germany began “to consider cultural diplomacy as a distinct policy option” (123). This lack of a clear distinction between the two concepts points to a broader issue that scholars in the field of communication studies and cultural diplomacy have not yet tackled in any systematic way.
This study makes an important contribution to the history of U.S.-German relations in the interwar period, particularly its reminder of the deep roots of cultural and academic exchange programs and institutions such as the Humboldt Foundation or the DAAD, which to this day send scholars across the Atlantic. The history of Weimar Germany's foreign relations has not received much scholarly attention recently, and thus Piller's book will hopefully spark some renewed interest among scholars and students. It is best read alongside other studies that give us a glimpse of the internal contradictions in that relationship or highlight the transnational dynamics of that relationship which was mutually constitutive.
