Abstract
The creation and subsequent battle for control of the Amerika Institut in Munich provides a valuable insight into the influence that negotiation and the dynamic nature of relationships can have on public diplomacy. As demonstrated by the Salzburg Seminar and the Free University Berlin, the US government lacked a clear conception of democracy and an image of America that could be projected through American Studies. This situation was repeated in Munich and despite the tendency toward an assertive strategy, the absence of clear conceptions of freedom or democracy created cultural space for alternative conceptions within the initiative. From a public diplomacy perspective, the failure to negotiate a genuinely collaborative approach lead US officials to seek control over the initiative through coercion.
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Notes
H. F. Peters, “American Culture and the State Department,” The American Scholar 21 (1952): 273.
This concern was based on observations of the political situation but also drew on predictions of a retreat to a position that rejected alternative influences or “Tribalism” about which he had written in 1942. See H. M. Jones, “Tribalism,” The Atlantic 170, no. 4 (1942): 87–94.
For discussion on the projection of America through German cinema, see J. Fay, “Constructing America for German Reconstruction: American Films and the Re-Education of Occupied Germany, 1945–1947,” Southern Quarterly 39, no. 4 (2001): 87–100.
J. Fay, ‘“That’s Jazz Made in Germany!’: Hallo, Fraulein! and the Limits of Democratic Pedagogy,” Cinema Journal 44, no. 1 (2004): 3–24.
For a longer term discussion of the influence of Hollywood, see T. Saunders, Hollywood in Berlin: American Cinema and Weimar Germany. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
Gramsci, A., Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. (London : Lawrence and Wishart, 1971), 12.
H. F. Peters, “American Culture and the State Department,” The American Scholar 21 (1952): 273.
Curriculum Vitae, Dr. H. F. Peters, Enclosure II to Despatch No. 360 to Department of State, November 15, 1949, Decimal File 862.4212/11-1549; R. Robin, The Barbed Wire College (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).
A. Davis, “Memorial to Merle E. Curti,” American Studies Association Newsletter, June 1996. See particularly his presidential addresses to the Mississippi Valley Historical Association (1952) and the American Historical Association (1954); M. Curti, “The Democratic Theme in American Historical Literature,” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 39, no. 1 (1952): 3–28.
M. Curti, “Intellectuals and Other People,” The American Historical Review 60, no. 2 (1955): 259–82.
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© 2013 Ali Fisher
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Fisher, A. (2013). Amerika Institut—Munich. In: Collaborative Public Diplomacy. Palgrave Macmillan Series in Global Public Diplomacy. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137042477_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137042477_4
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