Transmission Impossible : American Journalism as Cultural Diplomacy in Postwar Germany, 1945-1955 (Eisenhower Center Studies on War and Peace)

In this innovative study, Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht challenges long-standing analyses of the United States' ""cultural imperialism"" that emphasise the policy makers' determination to export U.S. culture in order to spread capitalism and gain access to overseas markets and raw materials. She also contests the claims by scholars of reception theory that foreign audiences deliberately condition the reception of U.S. culture abroad. Studying the example of the U.S. Army newspaper the Neue Zeitung, published for the German population from 1945 to 1955, she convincingly demonstrates that U.S. officials actually exerted very little direct influence on their cultural and information programs in postwar Germany, leaving the initiative to binational midlevel agents. Transmission Impossible reveals that the selection of agents who transmit political and cultural values to the foreign world is as crucial to the success of the enterprise as the package of values itself. The Neue Zeitung was run by German--speaking émigrés, mostly of Jewish descent, who had fled the Third Reich in the 1930s and whose political history ranged from communism to fascism. Children of Weimar Kultur, but beneficiaries of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, these men and women possessed a unique understanding of how to present the American way of life to a German audience. They intertwined European concepts of culture and gender with U.S. politics, showing that democracy was reflected in values of high culture, such as artistic freedom, creativity, individualism, and tolerance. In the dawning Cold War, the paper's large circulation, extending even into the Soviet occupation zone, indicated the success of its approach and the editors' lasting political and cultural influence in postwar Germany. In retracing the history of the Neue Zeitung, Gienow-Hecht focuses on the editors' biographies and their conflicts with the U.S. War Department, charting the newspaper's political and philosophical changes over th