Preface

Dear Colleagues and Friends,

It gives me great pleasure and even a considerable amount of pride to report on several new developments at 1607 New Hampshire Avenue, from top to bottom. These changes will further enhance the attractiveness of the German Historical Institute in Washington.

Very profound changes are about to occur on the Institute's fourth floor. As many of you know, these rooms remained empty after the Goethe Institute moved to a new location some time ago. In keeping with its policy of both strengthening and expanding transatlantic relations, the German government has decided to establish and operate a German-American Center for Visiting Scholars, and it will be housed in this space. The Center will open on January 1, 1998, and will receive initial funding for three years. Its main objective is to provide eight, mostly younger academics in the humanities and the social sciences with a place to work and carry out research for a period of up to six months. The Center will provide office space and computers for the scholars, and may also pay them a housing subsidy (see the announcement on page 59).

As the center of political power in the United States, and as one of the historical and cultural nuclei of this country, the metropolitan Washington area is a highly attractive location for both American and German scholars. The archives, libraries, museums, and universities, as well as the government institutions and think tanks, are of great importance to historians, social scientists, political scientists, and economists.

However, younger scholars who wish to utilize the potential of the Washington metropolitan area often lack offices featuring the most up-to-date technical equipment. The gradual retirement of the generation that has laid the groundwork for cooperation between Germany and the United States after World War II is a further reason for the creation of an institution that will promote German-American partnership and mutual understanding. The establishment of this new center will also offer its members an institutional affiliation and a congenial environment for academic work and the broadening of personal contacts.

Three institutions have united to form the society that will found the German-American Center for Visiting Scholars. These are the German-American Academic Council (Stiftung Deutsch-Amerikanisches Akademisches Konzil, DAAK), the German Historical Institute in Washington (GHI), and the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies (AICGS). The director of the DAAK will function as the managing director of the society operating the Center, and the visiting scholars will be chosen by a committee composed of representatives from the three involved institutions. The GHI is very pleased to be so closely associated with this new transatlantic initiative. We are sure that the visiting scholars will contribute greatly to the intellectual life, the broad range of scholarship, and the public acclaim of the German Historical Institute.

Finally, as our librarian Iris Golumbeck relates in this bulletin, we have installed new, compact shelving units in the basement. The Institute has thus gained additional space to store its collection of books, which grows by about 1,500 volumes a year, until the year 2008. For the period following that year, a new solution will have to be found to accommodate the intimidating problem of shelf space; that is, if historians will still be using books in the next millenium.

We indeed hope that these exciting developments, as well as our ongoing program of activities and events, continue to reinforce and advance the German-American academic community.

Yours sincerely,

Conference and Workshop Reports

"New Approaches to Migration Research: German-Americans in Comparative Perspective."

Conference at the Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas, April 22-24, 1997. Conveners: Wolfgang Helbich and Walter Kamphoefner.

The efforts of historians on both sides of the Atlantic to explore the intricate history of German settlement and heritage in the United States were continued with this conference. Bringing together senior scholars with younger researchers, Wolfgang Helbich of the Ruhr University in Bochum and Walter Kamphoefner of Texas A&M University planned a program that aimed to place German-Americans in comparative perspectives. The seventeen participants had been asked both to present a paper and to give a comment, a format that contributed to the intense working atmosphere of the meeting. Local support for the conference was provided by the George Bush School of Government and Public Policy and the Texas A&M Departments of History, International Studies, Political Science, Sociology, and Modern Languages.

In the first panel, Georg Fertig (University of Münster) and Simone A. Wegge (Lake Forest College) reviewed the main theses and hypotheses of recent discussions on the motives leading to emigration: the rejection of a simple dichotomy of "push" and "pull" factors; the relativity of explanations based on overpopulation, low income, and kinship networks; and the emphasis on chain migration and information systems across the Atlantic and within the areas of new settlement. Outling his micro-historical study on Göbrichen in Baden, an emigration village that offered quantifiable sources, Fertig focused on the local incentives to emigrate based on a network of information. Wegge also relied on an immense set of data from the villages of Hessen-Kassel in her attempt to combine the arguments of economists on the "utility maximum problem" and those of historians. Her results validated both the relative income and the information hypothesis and led to a debate about the ability to differentiate between economic and other factors that effect emigration.

The following panel explored the political world of emigrants in the United States. Willi Paul Adams of the Free University Berlin took up the concept of "ethnic politicians" and applied it to two German-Americans who served in Congress around 1880: Lorenz Brentano, a Republican from Chicago, and Peter Victor Deuster, a Democrat from Milwaukee. Adams rejected the notion that these German-Americans were motivated by monolithic ethnic interests. Based on a collective biography approach, Walter Kamphoefner compared German and Irish mayors in fourteen of the largest cities in the United States between 1820 and 1980. Kamphoefner warned against making generalizations about the differences between the two groups and elaborated more subtle distinctions, such as the Germans' success with educational issues and alcohol regulation and Irish accomplishments with regard to low-level patronage jobs. Michael Wala (University of Erlangen) focused on the Weimar Republic to investigate efforts to revitalize German ethnic identity in the United States after World War I. He described some of the conflicting attempts made by the Culture Department of the German Foreign Office and the Reichswehr on the one side, and the German diplomats in the United States and institutions for the promotion of German-American exchange on the other side.

The second day of the conference concentrated on problems of the nineteenth century. Wolfgang Helbich investigated the motivational structures and the inter- and intra-ethnic conflicts of German-born Union soldiers during the Civil War. The paper allowed some insights into his current project with Walter Kamphoefner to publish an annotated edition of German Civil War letters. While there were striking contradictions in the collective images of German soldiers, the German units as a whole were affected by ethnic tensions and marked by self-separation without showing any significant sign of patriotic effusions. Consequently, Helbich was skeptical about the use of the term "Americanization" for the German soldiers; he also preferred the term "pluralistic ethnic competition" to "nativism" for characterizing the often hostile social context. Russell A. Kazal (University of Pennsylvania) presented his research on German-Americans in two Philadelphia neighborhoods, Kensington and Germantown. Reappraising the concept of assimilation, Kazal carefully elaborated the argument that around 1900, German-Americans found a new identity as "old-stock Americans." They felt as a part of the "old immigrant" group of northwestern Europeans who now socially mixed among the English, Irish, and American-born population and distanced themselves from the "new immigrants" arriving mainly from southern and eastern Europe. Kazal emphasized the accompanying racial discourses that led to a rallying of the "old immigrants" under the common rubric "white." Ethnicity as a constructed category was also the topic of Tobias Brinkmann (Free University Berlin), as he illuminated the situation of German Jews in Chicago from 1840 to 1918. Brinkmann considered "Germanness," "Jewishness," and "Americanness" as overlapping but divergent fields of identity. He provided examples from the use of language, the social and associational life, the spiritual movement, and the attitude of Jews from Germany during the Civil War.

The following panel, devoted to the role of religion in the process of German emigration and immigrant life in the United States, did justice to Reinhard R. Doerries' (University of Erlangen) strong plea to integrate faith and church as non-quantifiable factors into any analysis of emigration. Doerries highlighted the persistence of confessional disputes among German immigrants and the effects of religious affiliations on educational efforts, the Vereinswesen, and the chance to gain financial support from denominational groups. The immense potential of new insights that can be achieved by combining emigration research with recent scholarship on the history of church and religion was shown by Kathleen Neils Conzen (University of Chicago) in a fascinating paper on "Immigrant Religion and the Public Sphere: The German Catholic Milieu in America." Conzen discussed the ability of religion, in particular Catholicism, to structure migratory, adaptive, and political processes. It became clear that Catholicism, both on the individual level and in organizational form, heavily influenced the decision to emigrate and produced Catholic migration chains. Moreover, German Catholics reproduced the socioreligious milieu they had experienced on the old continent in the United States. Of particular interest were also observations on the Catholic use of the Democratic Party against state centralization.

The vast number of regional and micro-historical studies currently being pursued was reflected in the program of the final conference day. Anne Aengenvoort (University of Bonn) presented results of her new research on German settlement in Ohio. The dominating influence of local and denominational ties on the decision to emigrate became as obvious as the "self selectivity" of settlement that followed patterns based on religion and local origins rather than a common ethnic German identity. As part of a larger interdisciplinary project, Myron Gutmann and Sara Pullum from the University of Texas at Austin discussed how immigrant and native farmers in the Great Plains differed with regard to settlement trends and farming practices.

Dirk Hoerder (University of Bremen) opened the discussion for another comprehensive view of the interconnectedness of emigration, immigration, and internal migration in universal, cross-continental comparison. Emphasizing the work-in-progress character and the intention to stimulate further research, Hoerder proposed the use of the term "diaspora" for a new conceptualization of the multidirectional migration from German territories and social ties over space and time that would abandon a German-centered perspective. This stimulating approach provoked a lively discussion on the implications of the term "diaspora."

"Prescriptions and Perceptions of Labor and Family among Ethnic Groups in the Nineteenth-Century American Middle West" was the topic of John Gjerde from the University of California at Berkeley. Utilizing a highly original approach, Gjerde pointed out that women and children were strongly involved in German farming practices, as opposed to those of other European and American-born farmers. He also made clear how depictions of the time are interwoven with value judgements about proper household relations, discipline, and gender structures within the home. These contemporary accounts represent distinct narratives by which both the immigrants and the American-born population reinforced ethnic boundaries and conflicting political assumptions. Donald A. DeBatts (Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia) presented three case studies conducted with the use of poll books, records of elections by voice, from the second half of the nineteenth century. Representing a rural, a mercantile, and an industrial context, respectively, these case studies demonstrated a peculiar inconsistency of electoral participation and partisanship among the German population, a generally low voting turnout, and a certain reluctance to engage in politics. DeBatts renewed the demand not to overrate social motives but to recognize political attitudes as leading forces in the behavior of immigrants.

The final panel returned to questions of racial discrimination and language as key areas where ethnicity continues to be negotiated in society. Gabriela F. Arredondo (University of Chicago) delineated the ambiguous place of Mexican-Americans in Chicago from 1916 to 1935. As she convincingly explained, sexual politics and competition between Mexican and Polish men over Polish women, who were seen as an incarnation of "white" female beauty, reflected the quest for racial acceptance. However, there were also strong tendencies among Mexicans to unify their own communities and neglect the formal advantages of becoming American citizens. Paul Fessler (Texas A&M University) stressed the importance of comparisons by remapping the bilingual educational structures of German-American communities one hundred years ago and taking up the current debate about this issue as it relates to the Hispanic population in the United States. Fessler saw an acceptable solution not in "transitional bilingual education" but in the "two-way partial immersion model"-that has, in fact, a precedent in the German-English programs before 1900. The stimulating debate about this proposal demonstrated that historians need to follow current debates to sharpen their analytical consciousness and that everyday politics cannot renounce historical reflection on ethnic diversity.

"Constitutive Moments of Transatlantic Relations, 1947-52 and 1997-2002. The Marshall Plan at 50: Retrospective, Prospective."

Workshop at the German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C., May 22, 1997. Cosponsored by the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies. Conveners: Carl Lankowski and Wilfried Mausbach.

Commemorations of the Marshall Plan were abundant this spring. The inspiration for this workshop came from the fact that, fifty years later, interest in the European Recovery Program (ERP) is still more than antiquarian. The ERP provided the essential elements for the organization of Europe and the basis for unprecedented prosperity and peace in the western part of a continent riven by depression and war. Today, the challenge is to unite Europe's eastern part with its luckier western neighbors without losing sight of either the dynamics of European integration or of American interests in Europe. What lessons can we glean from the earlier period?

The symposium was composed of two roundtables: one on the Marshall Plan itself, the other on a comparison of the mid-century situation with current circumstances as the twentieth century comes to a close. Each roundtable featured opening comments by a panel of distinguished scholars. Volker Berghahn (Brown University) spoke about the origins of the Marshall Plan. He stressed the importance of a perception among key players in the late 1940s that something had gone wrong with U.S. participation in Europe in the 1920s. Back then, a destructive German reparations settlement had crippled confidence in European recovery, thereby discouraging private American investment. In contrast, after World War II, the Marshall Plan, according to Berghahn, unleashed initiative in the private sector and encouraged U.S. businessmen to get involved. Although the impact of the Marshall Plan then was primarily psychological, Berghahn disagreed with critics of the plan's importance and was inclined to regard it (with other scholars) as the "crucial margin" in Europe's postwar recovery efforts.

Lincoln Gordon (The Brookings Institution), whose former governmental service includes an appointment as director of the Marshall Plan aid mission in the American embassy in London from 1952 to 1955, considered another question: To what extent was a federalist form of European unification a goal of the Marshall Plan? Gordon stated that neither the integrationist thrust of European politics after World War II nor an operative military alliance such as NATO would have been possible without the Marshall Plan. However, he strongly criticized scholars who imply that the ERP envisioned integration from the start. Instead, as Gordon remembered, the term "economic integration" was introduced "with a big bang" by Paul Hoffman only at a meeting of the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC) in October 1949. Moreover, Hoffman was referring to a rather simple concept of integration, namely, the overcoming of trade and commerce barriers. The postwar European institutions implying supranationalism were not so much an offspring of American planners trying to cast a United States of Europe in the mold of their own country's experience, but rather "a protective device growing out of French nationalism and fear of Germany." As to the future of these institutions, Gordon voiced his skepticism that they will ever be able to transform the continent into a genuine union. However, he credited them with the major accomplishment of making war between France and Germany unthinkable.

Our second roundtable began with a presentation by Charles S. Maier (Harvard University), who outlined structural similarities and dissimilarities in three eras of European reconstruction: post-1919, post-1945, and post-1990. Maier paid particular attention to two similar developments that nonetheless provoked different policy approaches. After both world wars, as after the end of the Cold War, European economies held on to an excessive share of agriculture. But while distressed farmers became main supporters of extremism during the interwar period, the second half of the century was, and still is, characterized by government handouts to these groups to appease their dissatisfaction. Similarly, all three eras Maier investigated had to grapple with changing industrial bases. Already in the 1920s, the American model loomed large, but Europeans remained skeptical and undecided. In contrast, after World War II, the American model was strongly favored throughout Europe. While policy in this respect still seems to be in flux in eastern Europe today, Maier pointed out one particular realm where policies seem to ignore the experience of the 1940s and hark back to the 1920s: the failure to treat labor as a fully qualified partner-which the Marshall Plan certainly did. Moreover, the confidence in institu-

tions to shape economic outcomes so prevalent in Marshall Plan days has given way to an almost general belief among policy makers in the self-regulating promises of the market.

C. Fred Bergsten (Institute for International Economics) rounded up the presentations with a look into the twenty-first century. While the U.S. is becoming more and more interdependent with the global economy, Europe is headed in the opposite direction, with integration resulting in a much smaller external dependency ratio for each country. Bergsten expressed his belief that there will be a move toward convergence between the American and the European models in the next century. In contrast to Gordon, Bergsten was bullish both on European integration, whose voluntary ceding of sovereignty he sees as setting the pattern for decades to come, and on the Euro, whose creation, he believes, will mark a major structural change in the world economy. As after 1945, new forms of joint international management and a substantial increase in transatlantic cooperation will be required to handle the transition.

Each presentation provoked a lively discussion that was further animated by recollections of Robert Bowie, former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Henry "Joe" Fowler, Jacques Reinstein, and Robert Wolfe, among others.

"The Culture of Rights: Civil Rights, Participation Rights, and Social Rights in Germany and the United States from the Late 19th Century to the Present."

Conference at the German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C., June 11-14, 1997. Conveners: Manfred Berg and Martin H. Geyer.

The emergence of modern democracies and their concept of citizenship have been critically shaped by the expansion of individual and collective rights, usually categorized as civil rights and liberties, participation rights, and socioeconomic entitlements. By putting this historical process into a comparative perspective, the organizers of this conference hoped to open up new discussions about the so-called "rights revolution" in America and its equivalents and repercussions throughout the Western world. Their cultures rooted in the Western tradition of rights, Germany and the United States meet the basic criteria for an instructive comparison. They bear enough similarities to make a comparison possible, but there are also enough differences to make it fruitful. As a general rule, the American tradition has valued the rights and liberties of the individual very highly, whereas in Germany notions of the common good and the interest of the state have often prevailed.

The term "culture of rights" as the leitmotif for this conference has a twofold meaning: As a descriptive term, it refers to the extent and manner in which rights are part of the social and political life of any given society. This part may well be very small in some cases. As a normative concept, the term implies that social and political life should be governed by the recognition of rights based on the principles of equality and reciprocity. In this sense, the expansion and cultivation of rights holds the promise of a more equitable and just society.

The conference brought together twenty scholars from Europe and the United States representing a variety of fields, including the social sciences, legal studies, cultural studies, and, of course, history. In his keynote lecture, Hugh Davis Graham of Vanderbilt University provided an overview of the developments of the political culture of rights in both the United States and postwar Germany. Although both countries face similar problems, Graham argued, Germany has largely adhered to its traditional concept of class-based social integration, whereas in the United States, identity-based cultural issues have sharply transformed the political order since the late 1960s.

The first session dealt with the right to vote. Manfred Berg of the GHI Washington spoke about the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and its discursive strategies to regain suffrage for Black Americans. Peter Ling (University of Nottingham) elaborated on "education for citizenship in Cold War America" with a close look at the activities of the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee and the League of Women Voters to promote democracy at home and abroad. Merith Niehuss (University of the Bundeswehr, Munich) argued that the political participation of German women after World War II and their perception of the right to vote was largely shaped within the family and reflected the dominant position of men in the family.

The second panel on social rights included four papers. Martin Geyer of the GHI Washington compared concepts of social rights and citizenship as they emerged during World War II in Germany, Britain, and the United States. Eileen Boris of Howard University focused on the role that the Fair Employment Practices Committee played in shaping the fight against racial and gender discrimination in employment. Michael Hughes (Wake Forest University) dealt with the arguments made by Germans who had suffered property damages during the war in support of their demands for sharing the burdens of the war and the restoration of their rightful place in society. David Abraham (University of Miami) addressed the issue of "recognition and redistribution as components of citizenship" in Germany and America and the problems that result from the decreasing capacity of the nation-state to meet the demand for redistribution based on social rights.

In the third session on the rights of immigrants, Hasia Diner of New York University looked at the way Jews have viewed their rights as citizens in America, where they have enjoyed an unprecedented degree of equality and religious freedom. Dietrich Herrmann (Technical University Dresden) discussed the impact and repercussions of the Cold War on immigration legislation in the United States. In his comparison of migrants' rights in Germany and the United States, Christian Joppke (European University, Florence) focused on the legal theories that have been employed by the courts in determining the rights of aliens and argued that the traditional blood-based German concept of citizenship is rapidly crumbling.

The fourth session on "Racism and the Denial of Rights" featured four contributions. Paul Finkelman (Hamline University) discussed the changing notions of color blindness as a legal and political concept since the late nineteenth century. In his paper on the Nuremberg Laws, Karl Schleunes (University of North Carolina at Greenesboro) explored the process of undoing equal rights for Jews in Nazi Germany. Yara-Colette Lemke Muniz de Faria (Technical University Berlin) described the debates on the status of Afro-German children after World War II. Roger Daniels (University of Cincinnatti) gave an overview of the rights that were denied to and attained by Asian Americans since the nineteenth century.

The fifth panel addressed issues of rights in the context of multiculturalism and sexual definition. Ann Taylor Allen (University of Louisville) compared the different concepts of women's rights in the American and German women's movements associated with the paradigms of equal rights feminism and social feminism, respectively. The struggle for the rights of gays and lesbians in Germany and the United States was analyzed by Michael Dreyer (University of Jena). Berndt Ostendorf's (University of Munich) paper explored the attitudes of Americans and Germans toward the "politics of difference" and the concomitant quest for minority rights.

In the final session on the state and the individual, Stephen Halbrook of Fairfax, Virginia, argued in favor of "the right to bear arms in defense of human rights against oppression." Margaret Dalton (University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa) explored the emerging new right to information in Germany and the United States.

Although the twenty individual papers represented a broad variety of topics, the discussions continued to revolve around key concepts, such as equal opportunity versus equal outcomes, the dual meaning of rights as symbols of inclusion and as instruments in attaining material benefits, and the historical significance of the shift to a concept of rights based on racial and cultural distinctions. The GHI plans to publish the proceedings of this conference in its series with Cambridge University Press.

"Politics and Propaganda: New Approaches to German-American Relations, 1933-1945."

Panel at the Annual Conference of the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR), Georgetown University, Washington, D.C., June 22, 1997. Participants: Philipp Gassert, Michaela Hönicke, Detlef Junker (chair), Frank Ninkovich, Alex Shannon.

In his introductory remarks, Detlef Junker (GHI Washington) reminded the audience that the struggle between the National Socialist Third Reich and the United States was a defining moment in modern American history, transforming not only American society but also America's outlook on the world. Franklin D. Roosevelt, in his public debates with the isolationist majority in the years preceding the bombing of Pearl Harbor, developed the major components of U.S. global policies in the twentieth century. Warning against the impending world domination by an enemy power, Roosevelt defined U.S. national interests in a global context, including not only traditional principles of free trade and an open world economy, but also global definitions of freedom and self-determination, as well as a new understanding of America's security.

From the German point of view, the mutual relationship was even more central to the development of Germany's domestic and foreign affairs. It was the United States that helped to found the liberal democracies of Weimar and Bonn, provided the crucial support for the process of peaceful unification in 1989-90, and also frustrated the imperial ambitions of the German elites in two world wars. Summarizing the scholarly debate over the past decades, Junker concluded that the three papers presented at the session take advantage of the most recent developments in international history by using culture, ideology, images and popular perceptions, and the creation and transformation of memory to shed new light on German-American relations in the era of World War II.

In his paper entitled "Chaos, Conflict, and Confrontation: Nazi Propaganda in the United States, 1933-1939," Alex Shannon (Madison, Wisconsin) argued that the existing literature on Nazi movements in the United States places too much emphasis on German plans and intentions while devoting too little space to the American political culture in which the activities of Nazi propagandists took place. "An American penchant for sensationalism," both in the press and among politicians, as well as "an almost obsessive fear of radical conspiracies," led many Americans to believe that a small band of several hundred Nazis posed a major threat to the security of the United States. American reactions to the violations of human rights as well as the persecution of Jews and other minorities in the Third Reich stood at the beginning of an American "brown scare." It immediately put Nazi propagandists on the defensive, undermining their efforts directed at the American public.

Well-publicized meetings and marches organized by American Nazi groups led to a backlash that culminated in the congressional investigations of the mid-1930s (the Dickstein and Dies committees). Shannon placed these developments in the context of similar events, which were usually directed against the Left, like the "red scare" of 1919, the Fish committee of 1930, and McCarthyism in the 1950s. In conclusion, Shannon argued that, although the Nazis were persistent in their efforts to influence American public opinion until shortly before Pearl Harbor, they never operated effectively within the United States. Above all, they were never a serious threat to American democracy, as some scholars have argued. Nazi propaganda was at best ineffective, at worst destructive.

The second paper, "'Why Do Germans So Easily Forfeit Their Freedom?' Psychological Interpretations of Nazism in Wartime America," by Michaela Hönicke (Free University Berlin), analyzed the controversial, well-informed, and often sophisticated debate on Germany within governmental circles as well as among the American public. Hönicke argued that psychologically inspired studies on Germany, which too often have been dismissed as marginal or abstruse, enjoyed a widespread appeal and present some of the most "fascinating and illuminating wartime attempts to understand and represent the 'German problem.'" They raised the ambiguous nature of the American wartime approach to the Third Reich-which was best captured in the metaphor of disease-to a more explicit level. With their language of deviance and illness, they could disparage, denigrate, and characterize the enemy. At the same time, they addressed the desire to find an adequate "diagnosis" of the German problem and expressed the confidence that it could be "cured." Whereas most Americans maintained a differentiation between the Nazi leadership and the majority of the German people, most of the psychologists who published in the field seemed to agree that National Socialist ideology was deeply rooted in German history and culture and would be difficult, if not impossible, to remedy. Within the American government, the Office of War Information (OWI) represented the first approach, whereas the War Department, which prevailed in the internal bureaucratic struggle, emphasized the popular support for Nazism in Germany. In the end, this ambivalence toward the German people would never be resolved. As Hönicke showed in her paper, American observers in Germany in 1945-such as Saul K. Padover, who, in his published accounts of his experiences in Germany, stressed his disillusion with, disgust with, and scorn for the German people-nevertheless recommended a much more optimistic and benevolent attitude toward their superiors.

Looking at mutual perceptions from the German point of view, Philipp Gassert (GHI Washington) presented a paper entitled "'Almost Like People From Another Planet': Ordinary Germans View the United States, 1939-1941." Analyzing the regime's own popular opinion surveys as well as reports prepared by exile groups, Gassert argued that, in contrast to the anti-American propaganda campaigns of the regime, which tried to build on century-old stereotypes of the United States, many Germans came to a realistic assessment of the overall military situation and understood the impact of the American entry into World War II. Although ordinary Germans tended to share many of the prejudices of the propagandists, the specter of an American intervention in World War II was looming large over the German war effort and dominated German discussions between 1939 and 1941. Two collective experiences were critical in determining such a "realist" perception of the United States: first, the "lessons of 1917," meaning the decisive impact of the American entry on the outcome of World War I; and second, the "Americanism debate" of the 1920s, which had firmly established the image of the United States as the world's most advanced society and an economic powerhouse. Ironically, the German leadership seemed to have shared many of the concerns of the general population. In 1944/45, the "American myth" that Nazi propaganda had hoped to destroy was alive and well among the younger generation. Although the circumstances had changed, the situation resembled that of the 1920s, when Germany was divided between those who promoted the Americanization of Germany and those who rejected Americanism because it seemed to undermine Germany's indigenous culture. It was the breakdown of the National Socialist order, however, that paved the way for a new phase of cooperation between Germany and the United States.

In his commentary, Frank Ninkovich (St. John's University, New York) placed the three papers into the context of the larger debate about culture and international relations. What is the relevance of this new body of research with respect to the analysis of power politics and conflicts among nations, both of which have been considered the centerpiece of diplomatic history? Taking the example of Shannon's paper, Ninkovich asked what impact Nazi propaganda in the United States had on the decision-making process within the American government? How might propaganda have been deployed more effectively, and what does it tell us about the propagandists themselves? Can we define propaganda as an effort to tilt the international flow of communication? Was Nazi propaganda in the United States ineffective, or was it only counterproductive?

Addressing Gassert's contribution, Ninkovich underscored that mutual perceptions between Germany and the United States present a prime example of a history of cultural misunderstanding, because Germans and Americans drew diametrically opposing conclusions from the World War I experience. Whereas Germans seemed to emerge as realists perceiving the global role of the United States actually before the fact, Americans were still debating what the "lessons of 1917" had been and what their role in world politics should be. Furthermore, two cultures seemed to exist within Germany. National Socialist Germany was not as monolithic as it might have been perceived from the outside. In this respect, the German case resembled Japan, where nationalist and internationalist sentiments were always in conflict with one another.

In his comments on Hönicke's paper, Ninkovich stressed the fact that the psychoanalytical approach was a sign of the times. However, what was the political relevance of the discourse about Germany and what does it tell us about postwar planning and the American occupation regime? Furthermore, the usage of the disease metaphor during World War II seemed to be markedly different from, for example, Franklin D. Roosevelt's application of similar language in his famous 1937 Quarantine Speech. Finally, as we know from the existing research on Japan, the rapid transformation of the image of the American enemy in 1945 was accomplished ideologically. Did a similar development take place in postwar Berlin?

In conclusion, Ninkovich noted that the new cultural history has injected a strand of optimism into a field that always used conflict as its point of departure. The final discussion centered on those issues, particularly on the question of what the meaning of culture for the study of German-American relations in the era of World War II could be.

"Universities in Medieval Society."

The impact of late medieval society on the internal structures of universities and the influence universities and their graduates exercised in that society are topics that have received greater attention among historians in recent years. The trend toward approaching university history from the standpoint of social history has been particularly strong in Europe and has led to a number of publications that have transformed the research field of late medieval and pre-Reformation education. Some of the major contributors to that discussion have been American and German scholars, many of whom knew each other only through their published work. To correct that deficiency and to bring about greater cooperation and interaction between those two groups of scholars, a conference on universities in medieval society was organized under the auspices of the German Historical Institute in Washington. Planned almost two years earlier, the conference brought together a group of prominent German and American scholars working in the field of university history. The purpose of the meeting was to explore the social dimension of medieval universities, both the social and geographical background of students at various universities as well as the impact of university education on careers, secular and ecclesiastical government, urban institutions, and royal and princely courts. It gave an opportunity to discuss the direction of research, to coordinate research efforts between the two national groups, and to plan for future exchange and cooperation. The American scholars in attendance were John Baldwin of Johns Hopkins University, Uta-Renate Blumenthal of the Catholic University of America, William Courtenay of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Jo Ann Hoeppner Moran of Georgetown University, Howard Kaminsky of Florida International University, Darleen Pryds of Virginia Polytechnic Institute, Michael Shank of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Thomas Sullivan of Conception Abbey, Katherine Tachau of the University of Iowa, and John Van Engen, director of the Medieval Institute at Notre Dame. The participants from Germany were Martin Kintzinger of the Free University Berlin, Jürgen Miethke of the University of Heidelberg, Peter Moraw of the University of Giessen, Frank Rexroth of the Humboldt University Berlin, Rainer Schwinges of the University of Bern, Helmut Walther of the University of Jena, and Klaus Wriedt of the University of Osnabrück. The focus of the first day's meeting was on the social and geographical composition of European universities in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and their influence on the world outside the universities. Welcoming remarks of Detlef Junker, director of the German Historical Institute, opened the conference, and the morning session contained three presentations. In the opening paper William Courtenay examined the numerical strength and influence of German students at Bologna and Paris in the fourteenth century. His paper was followed by the presentation of Rainer Schwinges on the social structure of students and masters at German universities in the late fourteenth and the fifteenth century and the degree to which university education was or was not an avenue of advancement in social status and career opportunity. Klaus Wriedt concluded the morning session with an analysis of the role of university graduates in town government and German society in the fourteenth to the sixteenth century. The afternoon session included two presentations. The first was by Thomas Sullivan, who examined the merit ranking among students in theology at the University of Paris at the time of licensing to teach theology. The last presentation was by Peter Moraw on the proportion of university students who belonged to the political elite in fifteenth-century Germany, thus addressing a long-standing question of a numerical rise in social status among students able and willing to attend universities in the late medieval period. The second day of the conference began with a session devoted to developments in particular faculties in German universities in the late Middle Ages. Helmut Walther spoke on juridical studies in Italy and Germany and the role played by canon law graduates in princely administrations of that period. Katherine Tachau discussed the influence of earlier English and Parisian masters on discussions of the inner senses among German arts masters in the late Middle Ages. Martin Kintzinger looked into the career possibilities of training in the arts (as distinct from the higher faculties) and the role of university arts programs in the training and preparation of school masters. The final day of the conference broadened the discussion by introducing a number of important related themes. Frank Rexroth examined the rituals associated with the ceremonies that marked the opening of newly founded universities in Germany. Michael Shank reported on the strong interest in astrology in university and court circles in Vienna in the fifteenth century. Darleen Pryds looked at the preaching of King Robert d'Anjou at the University of Naples in the fourteenth century, and the role such sermons played in propagandizing the learning and spirituality of the king. The concluding presentation was by Jürgen Miethke on the influence of the political writings of university-trained masters, particularly Giles of Rome, William of Ockham, and Marsilius of Padua, in shaping political thought in the late Middle Ages. One of the major accomplishments of the conference was that it brought together, in most cases for the first time, the leading scholars in Germany and the United States who are working on late medieval universities. It gave a chance to compare the research being done in the two countries and to share approaches and methodologies. As was to be expected, there was no unanimity on the extent to which university education aided social mobility in late medieval society, but there was agreement that further prosopographical work needs to be done before a more precise answer can be given to that question. Other areas that were identified as needing further research concerned the production of law graduates in fifteenth-century universities, which grew despite what appears to have been declining career opportunities at the highest levels of late medieval society; and the interrelation of universities and pre-university training in town schools throughout Germany and Europe. Perhaps the most important outcome of the conference were the explorations for future scholarly exchange, particularly ways of encouraging and providing opportunities for doctoral students and those at the beginning stages of a professorial career to visit and undertake research in Germany, and for German scholars to come into closer contact with American scholars. Some initial planning began for a future conference on urban schools in late medieval Germany and continental Europe that would bring together German and American scholars who are working on that important pre-university dimension of late medieval education.

The conveners would like to thank Eckhardt Fuchs of the GHI Washington for his support in organizing the conference and helping to make it a success.