The most important early contacts between Germany and the United States involved immigration. Members of various Protestant groups from Central Europe settled in colonial America for the first time in 1683 in Germantown, out-side Philadelphia. In the nineteenth century political un-rest, economic problems, population pressure, and famine joined religious persecution in prompting two phases of large-scale migration, first from the 1830s to the early 1850s and then from the late 1860s to the mid-1880s. Approximately 5 million Germans arrived in the United States through 1900. Nativist sentiment in the 1840s and 1850s encouraged community leaders to preserve their cultural identity through a German-language press and associations (Vereine), creating a strong ethnic subculture that lasted until World War I. On the whole, though, German immigrants had a good reputation due to their education and industry. In 1869 the New York Times described them as "undoubtedly the healthiest element of our foreign immigration."
Until the late nineteenth century the United States enjoyed amiable official relations with the various German states. Geographic distance helped assure that the governments had few competing interests. In addition the United States had a tradition of noninterference in European affairs, and neither of the central European great powers, Prussia nor Austria, had substantial overseas concerns. Americans intensely followed the process of German unification and greeted the foundation of the German Reich in 1871. Chancellor Otto von Bismarck tried to minimize the few political disputes between the two countries and respected American predominance in the Western Hemisphere. Meanwhile, German classical music, painting, and literature, especially works by Friedrich Schiller, all found admirers in the United States by the 1860s. The German university system also attracted increasing numbers of American students in all disciplines—an estimated ten thousand through 1914—and was a model for the modern research university in the United States.
The "great Transformation" and World War I
However, starting in the 1870s German-American relations gradually underwent a "great transformation," in the words of Manfred Jonas, from amity to hostility that culminated in World War I. Expanding industrial economies and newfound imperial ambitions drove this process. In 1879 a new German protective tariff, instituted in response to the 1873 depression, initiated a lengthy controversy about American agricultural products having access to the German market. Relations began to deteriorate seriously, however, only after William II ascended the throne in 1888. Germany's decision to build a large battleship fleet starting in 1897 gave rise to fears that it someday would try to challenge the Monroe Doctrine. Between 1898 and 1903 German activities in the Philippines and Venezuela nurtured such suspicions and alienated the American public. So too did the kaiser's occasional bellicose outbursts and inept attempts at personal diplomacy, which did little to further the German government's aspirations for American cooperation against its great naval and imperial rival Great Britain.
These developments help explain why most political and business elites in the United States favored Britain when World War I broke out in August 1914. The flow of civilian goods and loans to Europe in support of the Allied war effort through 1917 demonstrated the partisan nature of American neutrality. Woodrow Wilson's protests against the Reich's campaign of unrestricted submarine warfare led to its temporary suspension by March 1916, but with few exceptions Germany's wartime leaders did not take the United States seriously as a potential opponent. Not only did the German Foreign Office try to secure an anti-American alliance with Mexico by promising it Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico, a risky policy that backfired with the publication of the "Zimmermann telegram," but the German government resumed its submarine campaign in January 1917, knowing it would almost certainly lead to American entry in the war, which occurred on 6 April.
Alongside the effort to crush Prussian militarism in Europe, a crusade against German culture began in the United States that in some regions lasted through the early 1920s. In its wake hundreds of German-language newspapers closed, many German-American churches started conducting their services in English, German cultural associations suffered declining memberships, and countless individuals, companies, and organizations anglicized their German-sounding names. German ethnic life in the United States never recovered. In late 1918 the Reich's military and political leadership hoped for a lenient peace based on Wilson's Fourteen Points and in October even instituted a parliamentary form of government to encourage one. The kaiser's abdication on 9 November 1918, two days before the armistice, helped pave the way for the establishment of a full-fledged republic. Germany's expectations concerning Wilson were unrealistic, and Germans were bitterly disappointed with the terms of the Versailles Peace Treaty announced on 7 May 1919, especially its "war guilt clause," Article 231, which was inserted to establish Germany's obligation to pay reparations.
The Weimar Republic and the Third Reich
Nonetheless during the Weimar Republic (1918–1933) German–American relations improved markedly. The republic became the focus of Washington's stabilization policy for Europe. In 1924 the Dawes Plan ended the Ruhr crisis by providing a new schedule for reparations payments and initiated a five-year period in which American loans and investments contributed to a brief return to prosperity in Europe, especially in Germany. Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann, who held that position from 1923 to 1929, believed a revitalized German economy would be the most powerful tool for revising the Versailles Treaty peacefully, and he therefore placed priority on good political relations with the United States to secure capital for German reconstruction. In the 1920s American mass culture (for example, Hollywood movies) also flooded into Germany for the first time, and intense debates ensued there over "Americanization" and "Fordism." By 1929 condemnation of the Young Plan, another American-brokered reparations repayment scheme, and of the American "modern," also associated with liberalism and mass democracy, had become a standard part of the German right's political program, including that of Adolf Hitler's National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP).
The Great Depression cut off American investment in Europe and thereby indirectly contributed to the NSDAP's rise to power on 30 January 1933. National Socialist attempts to establish autarky through bilateral trade treaties and aggressive export drives in Latin America and eastern Europe presented a direct threat to the open international economy deemed indispensable by the Roosevelt administration for the survival of the American way of life. Despite increasing evidence that Germany, along with Japan and Italy, was rearming for war, the American government remained inactive diplomatically before November 1938, when Franklin D. Roosevelt, already sobered by the Munich Conference, issued a sharp condemnation of Nazi anti-Semitic policies and recalled his ambassador following Kristallnacht. Strong isolationist sentiment at home, as expressed in the Neutrality Laws, left few weapons available other than trade policies and attempts to mobilize the Western Hemisphere against the threat of Nazi infiltration at the 1938 Lima Conference. Only the shock of France's defeat in 1940 allowed the American government to take more vigorous measures to contain German expansion, including the bases-fordestroyers deal with the United Kingdom in September 1940; the lend-lease program in March 1941; and an undeclared naval war against Uboats in the North Atlantic in the summer of 1941. Germany formally declared war on the United States on 11 December in the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, initiating what also became an ideological conflict. National Socialism saw "Americanism" as its enemy, while the United Sates, in Roosevelt's words, found itself locked in a struggle with a "monstrous nation."
Relations After 1945
Although the Roosevelt administration adopted a "Germany first" strategy for military campaigning during World War II, it pursued a policy of postponement in terms of postwar planning in order to hold together the wartime alliance with the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union. By 1945 the Allies had agreed to keep Germany unified, minus territorial revisions in the east, but temporarily divided into occupation zones. Practical problems of governance and increasing differences with the Soviet Union quickly led to modifications in the initially draconian American policy for its zone, consisting of the states of Bavaria, Bremen, Hesse, and Württemberg-Baden.
Starting around 1947 the Cold War led to another "great transformation" in the German-American relationship. Marshall Plan aid in 1947, relief for Berlin during the Soviet blockade of 1948–1949, CARE packages, and the daily experience with American soldiers left a generally positive view of the United States in the western zones, which in 1949 were united politically as the Federal Republic of Germany. The outbreak of the Korean War led by 1955 to West German rearmament, North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) membership, and the end of occupation controls except those affecting Germany as a whole. Konrad Adenauer, chancellor from 1949 to 1963, established integration into the West as one of the cornerstones of the Federal Republic's foreign policy.
By the 1960s some strains in the West German–American relationship had arisen over issues like the Vietnam War and the onset of détente, which relegated the German question to a subordinate status internationally. In the early 1980s thousands of West Germans demonstrated against NATO's decision to station medium-range nuclear missiles there. In addition the relative decline of the American economy after 1945 compared with West German economic growth contributed to disputes over payments for the stationing of GIs in the Federal Republic through the 1970s and over trade issues with the European Community (later the European Union), which the Federal Republic had belonged to since 1958. However, these periodic differences do not detract from the fact that after 1949 the United States and West Germany had compatible political, economic, and security goals, while their citizens shared a good deal of mutual sympathy and aspects of a common culture in areas like popular music, fashion, and the love affair with the automobile. The German Democratic Republic, on the other hand, remained relatively unimportant for the United States, even after diplomatic recognition in 1974.
The George H. W. Bush administration actively promoted the cause of German unification in 1989 and 1990. After the Cold War ended the main issue facing German-American relations became whether the European Union could develop an independent identity in political and security issues that would eventually supercede the Atlantic framework based around NATO.
Bibliography
Gatzke, Hans W. Germany and the United States: A "Special Relationship?" Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1980. Dated but worth reading.
Jonas, Manfred. The United States and Germany: A Diplomatic History. Ithaca, N. Y. : Cornell University Press, 1984. Excellent on official relations before 1945.
Junker, Detlef, ed., with the assistance of Philipp Gassert, Wilfried Mausbach, and David B. Morris. The USA and Germany in the Era of the Cold War, 1945–1990: A Handbook. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming. Will become the standard reference work on the post– 1945 era.
Luebke, Frederick C. Germans in the New World: Essays in the History of Immigration. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990. By the leading historian of the German community in the United States.
Schröder, Hans-Jürgen, ed. Confrontation and Cooperation: Germany and the United States in the Era of World War I, 1900–1924. Germany and the United States of America—The Krefeld Historical Symposia series, vol. 2. Providence, R. I. : Berg, 1993.
Trommler, Frank, and Joseph McVeigh, eds. America and the Germans: An Assessment of a Three-Hundred-Year History. 2 vols. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985. A good collection of essays by leading scholars.
Trommler, Frank, and Elliott Shore, eds. The German-American Encounter: Conflict and Cooperation between Two Cultures, 1800–2000. New York: Berghahn Books, 2001.
—Thomas Maulucci
