Der Spiegel recently posted an article (“Evil Americans, Poor Mullahs“) citing the results of a recent poll commissioned by Stern magazine. By a margin of 48 percent to 31 percent, Germans believe that the U.S. is more dangerous than is Iran. Among 18-to-29-year-olds, 57 percent consider the U.S. to be the greater danger.
As has been amply documented by Davids Medienkritik, Der Spiegel (along with most of the German mass media) has long been sharply critical of the Bush Administration for a wide variety of sins, ranging from its dismissal of the Kyoto Treaty to its opposition to the International Criminal Court to its prosecution of the War on Terror to its invasion of Iraq.
This makes the tone and content of the recent article all the more interesting. Rather than blaming the German media (itself included), Der Spiegel asserts that the German “political establishment” is “largely responsible for this wave of anti-Americanism.” For years, German foreign ministers “fed the Germans the fairy tale of what they called a ‘critical dialogue’ between Europe and Iran.”
The article was penned by Spiegel Online’s Berlin bureau chief, a position I presume to be of some importance and authority. He casts some heavy stones:
For us Germans, the Americans are either too fat or too obsessed with exercise, too prudish or too pornographic, too religious or too nihilistic. In terms of history and foreign policy, the Americans have either been too isolationist or too imperialistic. They simply go ahead and invade foreign countries (something we Germans, of course, would never do) and then abandon them, the way they did in Vietnam and will soon do in Iraq.Worst of all, the Americans won the war in 1945. (Well, with German help, of course—from Einstein and his ilk.) There are some Germans who will never forgive the Americans for VE Day, when they defeated Hitler. After all, Nazism was just an accident, whereas Americans are inherently evil. Just look at President Bush, the man who, as some of SPIEGEL ONLINE’s readers steadfastly believe, “is worse than Hitler.” Now that gives us a chance to kill two birds with one stone. If Bush is the new Hitler, then we Germans have finally unloaded the Führer on to someone else . . .
Anti-Americanism is the wonder drug of German politics. If no one believes what you’re saying, take a swing at the Yanks and you’ll be shooting your way back up to the top of the opinion polls in no time. And on the practical side, you can be the head of the Social Democratic Party and endear yourself to the party’s hardcore with a load of anti-American nonsense, and still get invited back to Washington—just look at Gerhard Schröder. In fact, you could, like leading German politicians in the debate over the planned American missile shield in Europe, be accused of having “an almost unbelievable lack of knowledge” by a former NATO general, and even that wouldn’t matter. It’s all about what you believe, not what you know.
Anti-Americanism is hypocrisy at its finest. You can spend your evening catching the latest episode of “24” and then complain about Guantanamo the next morning. You can claim that the Americans have themselves to blame for terrorism, while at the same time calling for tougher restrictions on Muslim immigration to Germany. You can call the American president a mass murderer and book a flight to New York the next day. You can lament the average American’s supposed lack of culture and savvy and meanwhile send off for the documents for the Green Card lottery.
Not a day passes in Germany when someone isn’t making the wildest claims, hurling the vilest insults or spreading the most outlandish conspiracy theories about the United States. But there’s no risk involved and it all serves mainly to boost the German feeling of self-righteousness.
Marc,
Don’t get too excited. This piece did not make it into the print version, where it would be much more likely to upset paying readers.
You sure that Claus Christian Malzahn is not one of Mark Steyn’s German pen names?
West Berlin was one place that people remembered Americans as the “good guys.”
[...] A good article defining anti-americanism in Germany: "For us Germans, the Americans are either too fat or too obsessed with exercise, too prudish or too pornographic, too religious or too nihilistic. In terms of history and foreign policy, the Americans have either been too isolationist or too imperialistic. They simply go ahead and invade foreign countries (something we Germans, of course, would never do) and then abandon them, the way they did in Vietnam and will soon do in Iraq. Worst of all, the Americans won the war in 1945. (Well, with German help, of course—from Einstein and his ilk.) There are some Germans who will never forgive the Americans for VE Day, when they defeated Hitler. After all, Nazism was just an accident, whereas Americans are inherently evil. Just look at President Bush, the man who, as some of SPIEGEL ONLINE’s readers steadfastly believe, “is worse than Hitler.” Now that gives us a chance to kill two birds with one stone. If Bush is the new Hitler, then we Germans have finally unloaded the Führer on to someone else . . . Anti-Americanism is the wonder drug of German politics. If no one believes what you’re saying, take a swing at the Yanks and you’ll be shooting your way back up to the top of the opinion polls in no time. And on the practical side, you can be the head of the Social Democratic Party and endear yourself to the party’s hardcore with a load of anti-American nonsense, and still get invited back to Washington—just look at Gerhard Schröder. In fact, you could, like leading German politicians in the debate over the planned American missile shield in Europe, be accused of having “an almost unbelievable lack of knowledge” by a former NATO general, and even that wouldn’t matter. It’s all about what you believe, not what you know. Anti-Americanism is hypocrisy at its finest. You can spend your evening catching the latest episode of “24” and then complain about Guantanamo the next morning. You can claim that the Americans have themselves to blame for terrorism, while at the same time calling for tougher restrictions on Muslim immigration to Germany. You can call the American president a mass murderer and book a flight to New York the next day. You can lament the average American’s supposed lack of culture and savvy and meanwhile send off for the documents for the Green Card lottery. Not a day passes in Germany when someone isn’t making the wildest claims, hurling the vilest insults or spreading the most outlandish conspiracy theories about the United States. But there’s no risk involved and it all serves mainly to boost the German feeling of self-righteousness" Any of the above apply to you, Stroll? I do know when I was in Germany several years ago, I didn’t see overt anti-american attitudes but once you got into conversations with those Germans who had not ever been to the states, the points outlined in the above article began to surface. Link [...]
[...] weeks ago, I posted on an article by Spiegel Online’s Berlin bureau chief in which he wrote that [...]