https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4948-0514
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ABSTRACT
The success of the Alliance Française in the United States inspired Germany to enhance its relations with the USA from a cultural perspective. Germany’s own cultural policy traditions and its foreign cultural policy practices provided the theoretical basis for the development of a cultural policy towards the USA. Germany, which firmly believed in its position as a pioneer of world culture, hoped to distinguish itself from the cultural competition with France by generously transferring knowledge to the Americans and to gain a political and economic ally. In German-American academic diplomacy at the beginning of the twentieth century, German intellectual elites had already attempted to move away from the power-state and militaristic foreign-policy thinking that had prevailed in the Empire, and they harboured internationalist dreams of culture as a means of overcoming national antagonisms. Nevertheless, unfortunately, these intellectual elites were still unable to shake off nationalist values, even as Karl Lamprecht, who had joined the Society for International Understanding, embraced Pan-Germanism again after the beginning of World War I.
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Notes
1 Elisabeth Piller, Selling Weimar: German Public Diplomacy and the United States, 1918–1933 (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2021), 69.
2 Charlotte A. Lerg, “Uses and Abuses of the First German-American Professorial Exchange, 1905–1914”, in New Perspectives on German-American Educational History: Topics, Trends, Fields of Research, ed. Jürgen Overhoff and Anne Overbeck (Bad Heilbrunn: Verlag Julius Klinkhardt), 109.
3 Charles E. McClelland, “Republics Within the Empire: The Universities”, in Another Germany: A Reconsideration of The Imperial Era, ed. Jack R. Dukes and Joachim Remak (London: Routledge, 2018), 169–80.
4 Franziska Ungern-Sternberg, Kulturpolitik zwischen den Kontinenten: Deutschland und Amerika: das Germanische Museum in Cambridge/Mass (Cologne: Böhlau, 1994), 134–5.
5 Kurt Düwell, Deutschlands auswärtige Kulturpolitik 1918–1932: Grundlinien und Dokumente (Cologne: Böhlau,1976), 58–63.
6 France’s systematic promotion of cultural nationalism after its defeat in 1871 became a model for the achievements of European countries in the field of foreign cultural policy. By 1900, the Alliance Française had some 150 local committees in the United States. See: Piller, Selling Weimar, 65; Germany, for its part, fell into a friend-versus-foe state of mind, ignoring the ideological and socio-political motivations of French foreign cultural policy and seeing it merely as an expression of national self-aggrandisement. See: Frank Trommler, Kulturmacht ohne Kompass: Deutsche Auswärtige Kulturbeziehungen im 20. Jahrhundert (Cologne: Böhlau, 2014), 58.
7 Hugo Münsterberg, “Die deutsche Kultur und das Ausland”, Internationale Wochenschrift für Wissenschaft, Kunst und Technik 4 (1910): 1471–8.
8 The main reference is a correspondence sent back to Germany by Johann Heinrich von Bernstorff, the German Ambassador in Washington (see Abschrift A 1380 Imperial German Embassy Washington to Reichskanzler von Bethmann-Hollweg, 8 January 1914, PA Botschaft Washington, 1523, Bernstorff.)
9 Bernhard vom Brocke, Wissenschaftsgeschichte und Wissenschaftspolitik im Industriezeitalter: Das „System Althoff” in historischer Perspektive (Hildesheim: Verlag Lax, 1991), 195.
10 Ungern-Sternberg, Kulturpolitik zwischen den Kontinenten, 5–7.
11 Hugo Münsterberg, “Der Internationale Gelehrtenkongreß”, in Amtlicher Bericht über die Weltausstellung in St. Louis 1904 (Reichskommissar, Berlin 1906), 563–71.
12 Hugo Münsterberg, Aus Deutsch-Amerika (Berlin: Ernst Siegfried Mittler und Sohn Königliche Hofbuchhandlung, 1909), 21.
13 Kuno Francke, “Das Kartell zwischen deutschen und amerikanischen Universitäten”, New Yorker Staatszeitung, 16 April 1905.
14 Alfred Vagts, Deutschland und die Vereinigten Staaten in der Weltpolitik, vol. 2 (New York: MacMillan, 1935), 2003–4.
15 Guido Goldman, A History of the Germanic Museum at Harvard (Cambridge, MA: Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies in Harvard, 1989), 7.
16 John W. Burgess, Reminiscences of an American Scholar: The Beginnings of Columbia University (New York: Columbia University Press, 1934), 322.
17 Butler to Schmidt-Ott, 16 June 1911, CUL, University Archives, Rare Books & Manuscript Library, Central Files: Box 338/Friedrich Schmidt.
18 vom Brocke, Wissenschaftsgeschichte und Wissenschaftspolitik im Industriezeitalter, 238–9.
19 Ibid., 212.
20 See Elisabeth Piller, “A Tumultuous Relationship: Nicholas Murray Butler and Germany in the Era of the Two World Wars”, Bulletin of the GHI Washington 67 (2020): 71–100.
21 Kuno Francke, “Germany in Defeat: A Reply to the Hon. James M. Beck”, Harper’s Magazine, November 1917, 881.
22 Kuno Francke, “Mein Lebenslauf”, Deutsch-Amerika 43 (October 1925): 24.
23 Kuno Francke, “Deutsche Kultur in den Vereinigten Staaten und das Germanische Museum der Harvard-Universität”, Deutsche Rundschau 28, no. 7 (April 1905): 127–45.
24 Charlotte A. Lerg, Universitätsdiplomatie: Wissenschaft und Prestige in den transatlantischen Beziehungen 1890–1920 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2019), 426.
25 Jörg Nagler, “From Culture to Kultur: Changing American Perceptions of Imperial Germany, 1870–1914”, in Transatlantic Images and Perceptions: Germany and America since 1776, ed. D. Barclay and E. Glaser-Schmidt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 131–54.
26 Friedrich Paulsen, professor of philosophy at the University of Berlin, wrote in his memoirs that when the prospect of professorial exchange was talked about in 1905, his colleagues were dismissive of the American institution. See: Friedrich Paulsen, Friedrich Paulsen: An Autobiography (New York: Columbia University Press, 1938), 438.
27 McClelland, “Republics Within the Empire”, 169–80.
28 Hugo Münsterberg, American Traits: From the Point of View of a German (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1902), 187–93.
29 Ragnhild Fiebig-von Hase, “Die politische Funktionalisierung der Kultur: Der sogenannte ‘deutsch-amerikanische’ Professorenaustausch von 1904–1914”, in Zwei Wege in die Moderne: Aspekte der deutsch-amerikanischen Beziehungen 1900–1918, ed. Ragnhild Fiebig-von Hase and Jürgen Heideking (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 1998), 73.
30 Albecht Penck, U.S.-Amerika: Gedanken und Erinnerungen eines Austauschprofessors (Stuttgart: Engelhorn, 1917), 86.
31 Fiebig-von Hase, “Die politische Funktionalisierung der Kultur”, 79.
32 Karl Lamprecht, Americana: Reiseeindrücke, Betrachtungen, Geschichtliche Gesamtansicht (Freiburg im Breisgau: Hermann Heyfelder, 1906), 44–5.
33 “Prof. Lamprecht Declares [New American Culture] Will Surpass European Attainment”, New York Times, 9 October 1904.
34 Lamprecht, Americana, 37.
35 Luise Wiese-Schorn, “Karl Lamprechts Pläne zur Reform der auswärtigen Kulturpolitik”, Zeitschrift für Kulturaustausch 31 (Regensburg: ConBrio Verlag, 1981), 34.
37 Roger Chickering, Karl Lamprecht: Das Leben eines deutschen Historikers (1856–1915) (Wiesbaden: Steiner Franz Verlag, 2020), 581–2.
38 Roger Chickering, Karl Lamprecht: Das Leben eines deutschen Historikers (1856–1915), 607–8.
39 Within hours of Britain declaring war, a British cruiser cut the cables of the German transatlantic telegraph, turning Britain’s already considerable advantage in transatlantic communications into a virtual monopoly. In early September Wellington House, a government-funded propaganda centre made up of journalists, Oxbridge academics, and prominent writers, embarked on creating a brutal negative image of the German enemy, especially highly propagandised See: M. L. Sanders, “Wellington House and British Propaganda during the First World War”, The Historical Journal 18, no. 1 (1975): 119–46.
40 See Tomás Irish, “From International to Interallied: Transatlantic University Relations in the Era of the First World War, 1905–1920”, Journal of Transatlantic Studies 13, no. 4 (November 2015): 311–25.
41 John Trowbridge, “An Estimate of German scientific Culture”, Atlantic Monthly 103 (1914): 816–19. In this article the author analyses the various fields of physics, chemistry and mathematics and other areas of natural science, arguing that Britain and France were ahead of Germany and that Germany’s scientific capabilities were overestimated. Furthermore, since the Franco-Prussian War, under the Reich, Germany had fallen to third place in terms of achievements in physics. “Is this regression due to militarism and commercialism, a question I leave to the psychologist?” The author’s reference to the psychologist here is a clear satire on Münsterberg, who, as a professor of psychology at Harvard University, regularly played the role of defender of the German image in American magazines and newspapers from 1898 onwards.
42 Nicolas Murray Butler, “The United States of Europe”, New York Times, 18 October 1914.
43 See Piller, “A Tumultuous Relationship”, 71–100.
44 Shortly before World War I, Ambassador Bernstoff still believed that “American culture does not exist today, and a brief acquaintance with any American can tell whether his culture came from England, Germany, or France”. See: German Embassy Washington to Reichskanzler von Bethmann-Hollweg, Jan.8, 1914, Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amts [PA] Botschaft Washington, 1523, Bernstorff.
45 See Vagts, Deutschland und die Vereinigten Staaten in der Weltpolitik, 602.
46 Abschrift Kühnemann (1914), NL Schmidt-Ott 411, GSPK.
47 Piller, Selling Weimar, 88.
48 Eugen Kühnemann, Deutschland und Amerika. Briefe an einen deutsch-amerikanischen Freund (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1917), S.13.
49 See Piller, “A Tumultuous Relationship”, 71–100.
50 See Klaus Schwabe, Wissenschaft und Kriegsmoral: Die deutschen Hochschullehrer und die politischen Grundfragen des Ersten Weltkrieges (Göttingen: Musterschmidt-Verlag, 1969), 121–2.
51 “Ernst Haeckel and Rudolf Eucken: A German Declaration”, New York Times, 10 September 1914.
52 Frank Jewett Mather Jr., “Eucken and Haeckel. Sad to See Them Sink to the Level of Chauvinists”, New York Times, 20 September 1914.
53 See William E. Dodd, “Karl Lamprecht and Kulturgeschichte”, Popular Science Monthly 63 (1903): 419–26.
54 H. P. Falcke, Vor dem Eintritt Amerikas in den Weltkrieg (Dresden: Reissner, 1928), 251–2.
55 Butler to Schmidt-Ott, 30 November 1914, Central Files; Box 338/Friedrich Schmidt; University Archives, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library.
56 Frank Trommler, “The Lusitania Effect: America’s Mobilization against Germany in World War I”, German Studies Review 32, no. 2 (2009): 241–66.
57 Charles Eliot, “Imperialistic and Democratic Ideals of National Greatness – A Contrast”, New York Times, 22 September 1914.
58 vom Brocke, Wissenschaftsgeschichte und Wissenschaftspolitik im Industriezeitalter, 238–9.
59 Lerg, “Uses and Abuses of the First German-American Professorial Exchange, 1905–1914”, 113–15.
60 Edward Shils, Friedrich Althoff, and Max Weber, “The Power of the State and the Dignity of the Academic Calling in Imperial Germany: The Writings of Max Weber on University Problems”, Minerva 11, no. 4 (1973): 571–632.
61 vom Brocke, Wissenschaftsgeschichte und Wissenschaftspolitik im Industriezeitalter, 242.
62 See Elisabeth Piller, “A Tumultuous Relationship: Nicholas Murray Butler and Germany in the Era of the Two World Wars”, Bulletin of the GHI Washington 67 (2020): 71–100.
63 Katharina Rietzler, “Philanthropy, Peace Research and Revisionist Politics: Rockefeller and Carnegie Support for the Study of International Relations in Weimar Germany”, Beyond the Nation: United States History in Transnational Perspective (2008): 61–79.
64 See J.G. Fichte, The Closed Commercial State, trans. Anthony Curtis Adler (New York: SUNY Press, 2012), 198.
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Sijie Wang
Sijie Wang is Assistant Professor at the Institute for German Studies, Tongji University in Shanghai. She holds a Ph.D. in History and frequently researches historical issues in the context of the digital humanities and currently focuses on early 20th century German history, German-American cultural relations, and German-Americans.