Quotes from Andrei S. Markovits

Karl May stylizes the Apaches—in crucial alliance with German immigrants like Old Shatterhand, Old Surehand, and (of course) Old Firehand ("head forest ranger by profession, forced to leave Germany for political reasons that caught many an honest man in their whirl"27 )—as a kind of bulwark of nobility against modern capitalism and Yankee individualism, which are subverting and undermining traditional German/Indian values.

True faith and good education distinguish Germans from white Americans, who come across in May's novels as blasphemous and utterly uneducated. Indeed, it is Old Shatterhand's "Europeanness"—meaning his Germanness in a cultural sense, and not his whiteness in any kind of purely racial category—that constitutes his intellectual and spiritual-religious superiority, distinguishing him not only from the Indians, but also Anglo-Americans:

The magical triangle of these three competing ethnic communities (Americans—Indians—Germans) is, of course, no accidental construction; rather, it expresses a negative, almost obsessive passion of the German people: America

In the field of politics, therefore, the European Left fears American power much more than does the Right. It is the other way round in the realm of culture; there, the Right is much more worried than is the Left.

In the two mentioned here, Moore addresses two standard elements of traditional European anti-Americanism: first, the amicableness of Americans that always strikes Europeans as phony, superficial, and inauthentic; and second, Americans' purported stupidity and simple-mindedness.11

The rancor against Europe in American mass public opinion is of a completely different magnitude from anti-Americanism in Europe. In American politics and society, Europe is—if anything—a sporadic and insignificant element of the public discourse.

Anti-Americanism is an emotion masquerading as an analysis, a morality, an ideal, even an idea about what to do. When hatred of foreign policies ignites into hatred of an entire people and their civilization, then thinking is dead and demonology lives. When complexity of thought devolves into caricature, intellect is close to reconciling itself to mass murder.

The lack of understanding by the Germans, but not only the Germans, for Anglo-Saxon traditions and American reality is an old story. —Hannah Arendt

There never was a "golden age" in which European elites genuinely liked America. To be still more precise, an era never existed in which European intellectuals and literati—European elites—viewed the United States without a solid base of resentment, or better, ressentiment.

Indeed, if one extends the "social" dimension to include the successful integration of immigrants, surely America's democracy would emerge much less defective than the alleged models of Western Europe.

And what about the fascinating issue of Article 102 of the Federal Republic of Germany's "Basic Law," which abolished the death penalty in 1949, not so much for humanitarian reasons but to protect the lives of convicted Nazi war criminals by preventing their execution at the hands of British and American authorities?

But does the large presence of guns in America and their relative paucity in Europe render the former more democratic than the latter? Does the fact that some American states, such as New York and Massachusetts, have much tougher gun laws than France make them more complete democratic polities?

America's "otherness" is not accepted as such by Europeans or even considered under the rubric of that motto "Other countries—other customs." On the contrary: The American "other" serves the purpose of turning America on the whole into a laughingstock, of mocking, ridiculing, and sanctimoniously instructing America, but never viewing it as an equal on the same plane with Europe.

By no means did such views come entirely from conservative or right-wing circles, which have long regarded the American military as soft and incompetent. People from the Green and Social Democratic milieus—where German pacifism is chiefly at home today—also displayed this contempt for the courage and ability of American GIs, thereby indirectly demonstrating how deeply Germans feel the resentment of things American.

Above all, Marx emphasized and admired the progressiveness of bourgeois America against feudal Europe.

Domestic Manners of the Americans was an enormous success in Great Britain because the book used every stereotype of cultural inferiority and crude materialism imputed to the New World as a way of making the Old World feel better about its own identity in relation to the United States.

a sense, the history of anti-Americanism in France is perhaps the most interesting in Europe. In contrast to all the other major European countries—Great Britain, Germany, Spain, Italy, even the Austro-Hungarian monarchy75 —France and the United States have never fought a war against each other.

a sense, the history of anti-Americanism in France is perhaps the most interesting in Europe. In contrast to all the other major European countries—Great Britain, Germany, Spain, Italy, even the Austro-Hungarian monarchy75 —France and the United States have never fought a war against each other.76 What is more, the United States was allied with France, officially or otherwise, more often than with any other European country.

One element of French anti-Americanism thus results from an undifferentiated aversion to everything Anglo-Saxon and English in general. With the French it is not so much the kind of skepticism about modernity (money, capitalism, trade, markets) that dominates German resentment of America.

There are also specific cultural fetishes and phobias unique to France. No European country pursues so rigid a linguistic policy as France, a nation that has always viewed its language as both an antiAmerican and an anti-English bulwark.

Of course in Germany, too, there have been occasional efforts to keep the German language clear of foreign (meaning, as a rule, English and French) influences. 77 And, of course, there are still organizations in Germany, like the Verein Deutsche Sprache e.V. (German Language Association), that have made a mission out of protecting the German language from contamination by American English.