Aspects of literary anti-Americanism in the interwar years

In Eurozine:

This essay offers a modest contribution to such a literary history of anti-Americanism. The period discussed is the interwar years, which is indisputably one of the high-water marks in the history of European hatred of America, not only in terms of intensity, but also in terms of what might be called the discursive inventiveness. Anti-American discourse consists at any given time of both traditional and innovative elements: on the one hand it recycles and varies familiar, time-honoured motifs; on the other hand it develops new motifs, which typically target aspects of the contemporary United States, thereby bringing the discourse up to date with present-day reality. The traditional core of anti-Americanism was developed by the Romantics, who in the first half of the nineteenth century drew up a basic vocabulary of prejudices concerning the lack of history and culture, the vulgarity, the materialism, the corruption, the subtle forms of bondage, and the hypocrisy in the United States (Gulddal 2007). These notions have never lost their appeal; they have been passed on from generation to generation and were thus also repeated incessantly throughout Europe in the interwar period. At the same time, however, this period gives rise to an impressive array of new anti-American prejudices, all of which represent the United States as the quintessence of a traumatic, unbridled modernity that presages the future, if not the destruction, of Europe. It is above all these discursive novelties that are analysed in this essay from the point of view of literary history.