This collaborative project on competing and conflicting versions of modernity is a remarkable achievement and will serve as a valuable resource for anyone interested in transatlantic history. The volume brings together twenty-six scholars from both sides of the Atlantic who analyze in fourteen chapters a wide range of social, cultural, and political themes in American and German history from the late nineteenth century to the present. For each chapter two experts teamed up to examine the respective national developments in an integrated account. The topics range from empire, authority, and law to gender, media, and immigration. The individual essays successfully balance informative overviews with occasionally deft analysis.
In both countries a strong sense of exceptionalism has consistently been confounded by the realities of imposed as well as invited “foreign” influences in the wake of migration, war, occupation, and globalization. A precarious sense of familiarity around 1900 between Germany and the U.S. was supplanted by ideological contrast and war in the first half of the twentieth century and was then replaced again with alliance and partnership for the Federal Republic while the GDR continued to play the role of the ideological other. Yet underneath both the international confrontation and cooperation, countervailing phenomena of selective elite and popular attraction and criticism further complicate the picture. The United States took in Germans as immigrants and refugees and proved remarkably open to different aspects of the “German model” up to the 1930s. After the defeat of Nazi Germany, practices and ideas migrated mainly eastward. This process of exchange deepened transatlantic connections and contributed to both markedly similar (economic, business, popular culture) and divergent (religion, environment, foreign relations, gender) practices in both countries.
Several authors in this volume combine comparative with transnational analysis and thus bring out more clearly the entangled nature of German and American history. Repeatedly one is reminded of Robert Kagan's 2002 argument that Europe and the United States changed places in mid-century: pursuing military power politics versus realizing a peaceful transnational utopia. Kagan's essay relied on stark transatlantic dichotomies and argumentative shortcuts. The authors of this book by contrast offer nuanced historical explanations for the sustained exchanges and transfers (pp. 81, 107, 121, 141, 154) that connect the two countries but also for the significant national differences (pp. 54, 76, 162, 177) before and after World War II.
The focus on these two nations, broken down into many thematic angles and followed over the course of a century, allows the authors to bring out national incongruities and reversals not only for Germany moving from empire, republic, and genocidal dictatorship through its three postwar incarnations but also for the United States (pp. 100, 220f.). One of the recurring insights in this volume pertains to the inherent ambiguity of modernity (pp. 5, 113, 224). The Third Reich and its earlier German antecedents best exemplify this dark side but underlying components such as racism and growth of state power which are explored in the chapters on mass mobilization, authority, education, and welfare are part of a wider historical reality.
The essay on empire lays the groundwork for several compelling arguments made throughout this book. The authors show how the two countries pursued radically different strategies in dealing with the challenges of an interconnected world. The German empire relied on “unilateral domination and war” to be free “from global entanglement and in control of its own destiny” while the American empire equipped with natural resources, a diverse and growing population, and a universalist ideology “turned benevolent and ‘inviting.’” Eschewing a “simple dichotomy between a democratic and an autocratic empire,” the authors instead emphasize “the process of territorialization and racialization” in the German case and the “countervailing tendencies of de-territorialization and de-racialization . . . for which the United States came to stand after a great deal of internal struggle” (pp. 18–20). Briefly, at the beginning of a new millennium, the American “presumption of a unilateral freedom of action” and the “transformation of American universalism into a hypernationalism” showed an “uncanny parallel” to the German empire of a century ago (p. 30). This essay's most “salient point” that congruent as well as divergent practices were “crucially worked out in the confrontation” between the two nations is equally relevant and applicable for other themes in this book (education, military, gender, mass mobilization).
A happy synergetic effect between several of the contributions sheds light on additional questions. For example, the development of American and German political cultures are addressed in the context of religion, mass mobilization, welfare, law, empire, gender, and authority. In the especially insightful chapter on religion, the authors explain how in the United States “religious associations fulfilled functions similar to those of the labor movement in Germany,” including “the exercise of democratic practices” (p. 45) and social integration. The rise of a politically active, mainly conservative, evangelicalism is balanced in the United States by greater religious tolerance and ethno-racial-cultural diversity when compared to the more secular but also homogeneous German society.
Some of the interpretations struck this reviewer as fresh and original, others as either conventional or somewhat idiosyncratic. References would have helped to trace arguments back to literature and sources. In the absence of any footnotes, the reader has to be satisfied with short bibliographies for each of the fourteen chapters. Sadly, this volume omits some important works, especially for the American side, that are included in the German version, Wettlauf um die Moderne. A minor mistake is the confusion of Sinclair Lewis with Upton Sinclair as the author of It Can't Happen Here (p. 24). The purpose of the book is to “critically reexamine the accepted clichés about Germany and America” (p. 12) in those two countries’ entangled, conflicting, and converging paths through the twentieth century. The authors most decidedly succeeded in this ambitious endeavor.
