From the beginning, Europeans encountered the influx of American culture with both admiration and resistance. The European debate on modernization, already prevalent in the 1920s and 1930s, became an integral part of the Cold War in the 1950s and beyond, coupled with an increasingly intense debate over the downside of American culture.
Even if there had been no Cold War, the debate over modernization would have taken place. But the presence of American popular culture imported by American GIs and manufacturers aggravated and personalized these changes. The cultural implication of American movies, cartoons, and paintings in Europe was not merely their ostentatious display of consumer goods or dark heroes, but recipients’ social use of these artifacts in the creation of
Their own new identity. The Cold War thus politicized European historical hopes and fears.
Historians have described the controversial appeal of American popular culture among Europeans in the 1950s. In France, for example, the "American Way of Life" fascinated a generation of young men and women attracted to consumerism, better living standards, and economic growth.654 At the same time, older speakers continuously denounced the Americanization of French culture, language, and the arts. For many French people, the United States represented a scapegoat in the discourse over the future and the modernization of French society: whatever seemed to go wrong in France, it was the United States’ fault.
The European film industry served as a powerful catalyst in the debate over the continent’s cultural future. Soviet propagandists denounced American movies as imperialist and capitalist trash while West European critics deplored the demise of an independent European film scene. But in some countries American movies quickly gained a significant share of the market, often more than 50 percent within a few years.
Much of this success originated in the controversial appeal of American movies to younger Europeans. The influx of American films shaped a new West European youth culture, but it also antagonized their parents and teachers. In France and Italy, workers and young people adored Hollywood movies. At the same time, Communist Parties in those countries, as well as films such as Jacques Tati’s Jour de Fete, made it clear that their work ethos and labor tradition differed significantly fTom the consumerist orientation of workers in the United States. In blue-collar areas in Italy, the advent of Hollywood productions accelerated the break between traditional local culture and the new world. It estranged rural families from their urbanized children and it divided the proletariat from the mass rallies of organized labor. Watching Hollywood movies allowed workers and young people to understand these transformations.655
The protests against American culture in the 1950s remained partial and local. They were typically limited to a particular cause (anti-jazz,
Anti-Western), profession (workers against the Marshall Plan), or generation (youth against parents). But beginning in the 1960s, a nascent leftist movement identified American expansive capitalism both as the driving force behind the conflict between East and West and as representative of consumerism, modernity, organization, and the conflict between society and the individual.
In Europe, this change of climate may be attributed in no small part to generational reasons. Many of the networks founded during the late 1940s and 1950s were created by emigres, prisoners of war, and, later, exchange students who had spent several years in the United States, as well as by tens of thousands of US civil engineers who had worked in Europe. The generation coming of age in the 1960s had not had such experiences. They did not remember the Berlin airlift, the Marshall Plan, or the democratic reconstruction of Italy and West Germany. Instead, they witnessed the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King and watched the urban riots of 1968.
Disillusionment arising fTom those events as well as the presence of US troops and student revolts alienated a culturally significant portion of the West European population who came to despise NATO and the benefits of a free-market economy. In West Germany, the war in Southeast Asia destroyed the credibility of the US government and its image as a Camelot of the Western world. Instead, young Germans began to perceive the United States as imperialist and materialist. "My entire liberal education began in the [information center] Amerika-Haus [sic] where I studied the American Declaration of Independence," one young man stated; "what happens now is an open assault on these ideals."656
This move toward open rejection manifested the emancipation of young Europeans: in liberating themselves from their identification with the United States, West Germans began to come to terms with their own identity. Consequently, much of the cultural development taking place in the areas of music, film, theater, literature, and the performing arts after 1968 derived its emancipatory character and legitimacy precisely from the postwar right to protest and reject. Although American popular culture permeated European life, European intellectuals, artists, and consumers advocated cultural tropes celebrating the rejection of US culture.
33. American jazz musician Louis Armstrong at a bookstore on rue de I'Odeon in Paris's Latin Quarter, 1948. US officials wanted to export high culture, but American pop culture resonated throughout Europe.
Curiously, the European rejection and acceptance of American culture were always joined at the hip. American artists such as Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen continued to regard a tour of Europe as a mandatory part of their global trekking because they often found their European audiences even more enthusiastic than their American fans. Modern German pop, in turn, borrowed from the American model. In the 1970s and 1980s, singers such as Udo Lindenberg, Nina Hagen, or Herbert Gronemeyer, as well as groups such as BAP, Die Toten Hosen, or Einsturzende Neubauten, reflected the musical heritage of pop, rock, and new wave while their texts criticized US hegemony and reflected the tradition of German Liedermacher.657 Musicians - like the public - borrowed a language framed in the United States to make statements critical of that country.
Audiences in the East likewise accepted American popular culture, but they used it to criticize their own governments. During the first decade of the Cold War, consumer culture became a way to delineate the boundaries between
East and West, both as a way oflife and as a means of expressing cultural and political protest. Throughout the 1950s, East and West Germans shared a common interest in and consumption of American popular culture, including music and dance, movies, fashions as exhibited in music halls, broadcasting programs, stores, and television. Jeans, jazz, and stars such as Elvis Presley reached adolescents in both the Federal Republic and the GDR, who enthusiastically embraced the new styles.
After the building of the Berlin Wall, legal and physical restrictions seriously hampered the influx of popular music, movies, and artifacts behind the Iron Curtain. Both East and West German authorities began to contain Americanized youth culture in their respective regions. Their efforts reflected a continuation both of the cultural cold war and of the old debate over modernity. From then on, critics in the East could no longer openly use the language of popular culture when criticizing their governments.658 Instead, popular culture - notably rock and roll - became a way to silently protest against the government as well as against state-run cultural productions and artifacts.
Still, a society in which the state organized culture did not effectively ban all popular culture. Take, for example, science fiction. For both American and Soviet societies, outer space served as a screen on which to project their fears and expectations. Heroes of technological advancements, such as the astronauts Neil Armstrong and Yuri Gagarin, became symbols of human progress. Both democratic and Communist countries rallied around the celebration of the "scientific-technological revolution." Stalinist science fiction evoked visions of stunning inventions and new sources of raw materials in order to depict a perfect society. Some authors, such as Stanislav Lem, opted for a "third way" and developed a vision of a future in which Communism and capitalism had merged into a hybrid.659 Science fiction thus became a form of social protest (the "forbidden fruit" of popular culture) and a vision of an alternative future.
Nowhere was the European debate around the challenge of modernity and the organization of culture more evident than in the field of new technologies and the visual arts. Hollywood significantly shaped the West European
Perception of American popular culture. Hollywood film studios lobbied successfully with the State Department in order to export much of their production on the West German market. But local filmmakers strove to remain independent and successful at the box office until the 1960s, focusing on crime thrillers, Heimatfilme (nostalgia), musical revues, and the like.660 German film directors such as Volker Schlondorff (The Tin Drum) attempted to found a new German cinema, which would neither oppose mainstream commercial productions nor revive the spirit of German productions prior to 1945. Still, their ideas about German postwar identity typically revolved around the relationship between Germans and Americans, and their funds often originated in the United States.661
World History
