In October, a high-profile project: “year of Germany United States begins”. With over 1000 events, it will have an effect on the image of Germany by the Americans. But as the Germans about America thinking?
“In Your arms I feel free,” sings the Freiburg singer-songwriter Philipp Poisel. “I am Yours and You are mine….my America”. Such a Declaration of love has become rare in Germany. Since Donald is the U.S. Trump ruled, converts the image of America in many culture people – once again.
Coincidentally, the long-planned “year of Germany USA to begin this fall”. Agreed, the then Federal foreign Minister, Sigmar Gabriel, and his American colleague Rex Tillerson. Their intention: to maintain The decades-long German-American friendship and to expand.
Are planned over 1000 events in the fields of culture, economy, science and sports. Winner of the Event after this, the Federal Foreign office, the Goethe-Institute and the Federal Association of German industry (BDI).
Philipp Poisel revered America – with poetic vocals
Also, Federal foreign Minister, Heiko Maas, has recently called for, to measure the partnership between Germany and the USA, “new”. To not let “them behind us, but to renew it and preserve it,” said Maas in an article for the “Handelsblatt”, where he outlined the key elements of a new US strategy of the Federal government. The idea is to have A “balanced partnership, in which we form a counter-weight, where the red lines are exceeded”.
New USA strategy
As the “year of Germany USA” fits into the new strategy must show. Johannes Ebert, Secretary General of the Goethe-Institut concretised thus: “50 million Americans have German roots. These relationships we want to strengthen. For the purposes of this new strategy, we want to address, but also in discussions of the things we see differently. In this respect, the Interview is not a contradiction,” says Ebert in the DW.
Musical dialogue: impression from the last year of Germany in Mexico.
A German-American bridge beat in these days, the art historians Barbara Schaefer and Anita Hachmann. “Once upon a time in America,” have you baptized your exhibition in Cologne’s Wallraff-Richartz-Museum. Over the coming Winter, showing American art from three centuries, the gamut of works from the colonial period up to the representatives of Abstract expressionism in the 1950ger years. A mammoth project without a doubt, for the the Cologne on loan inside of the most important museums in the USA were able to get out of.
Art-bridge to America
“My parents came from the Generation that experienced the war,” says Barbara Schaefer, Born in 1968, “that’s why I grew up with the image of America as the Land of unlimited possibilities, a positive image of America.”
US President, Donald Trump, the carnival see: snap-shot at the carnival parade in Düsseldorf, Germany in 2017.
In contrast, Institute Infratest – dimap-hold – according to surveys by the opinion research, the majority of Germans to America for “power greedy, arrogant and grip.” The Germans at the beginning of the Millennium, included in the European comparison to the top group of the American experts, as they are today, the very back, as the PEW Research Center in Washington. Only the Russians, the USA is still unlikable.
As part of the preparation of your exhibition, you’ve observed “problems and Concerns” with their American colleagues at the Museum, says Schaefer: “you can feel it, you can’t hide all the positive basic attitude.” The ten years younger Anita Hachmann, as you insert, a complicated relationship to America.
Nevertheless, it has been in the project preparation “insanely difficult”, “this is a very beautiful, iridescent ideal idea of a country’s hide, in which every wish come true, where everyone will be lucky and his fortune, in spite of the daily news and what all is at an Alarming in America is doing.”
Emigrants in a terminal in the port of Hamburg around 1900
Goethe: “America, You did it better.”
In the last US Census of 2010, about 50 million Americans claimed German roots. It is not a coincidence: In the course of the 19th century. Century began in the small German States of mass emigration to America. Initially, it was mainly impoverished peasants from Germany, the left in the new world.
After the failed Revolution of 1848, many intellectuals were added, who emigrated for political reasons or in search of religious freedom. Out of economic necessity, craftsmen and other professional groups followed, eventually.
Has a German great-grandfather: the Hollywood actress Angelina Jolie
Even Hollywood Star Angelina Jolie has a German great-grandfather, as the US-genealogy Portal, Ancestry, indicating a Westphalian tailor named Joseph Kamp.
In the country of your dreams, the comers came, sometimes really bad abuses – in the big cities were rife of mass poverty and impoverishment. The edge groups have been disadvantaged – African Americans, American Indians and immigrants.
“America You have it better,” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote in his Xenien, “as our continent (…)You will not interfere in the interior to live time to Remember useless and futile dispute.” The Prince of poets, would have been, he would have been younger, probably in the Land of promise opened the door.
Change in the German image of America,
At the latest with the world wars in the 20th century. Century the image of America, many Germans changed: The “evil America” rose, the more the US rises politically, culturally and economically. Increasingly, the United States stood at once for mass culture, mass consumption, flattening, and Degeneration. “At the same time, the United States will be a new reference point in the coordinate system of the German identity,” said the cultural scientist Wolfgang Kaschuba from the Berlin Institute for migration research recently in an Interview with German radio station Deutschlandfunk (DLF).
“I have a lot of US in me, because I don’t love so much as Afro-American music,” says the in lower Bavaria living author and musician Thomas Meinecke. For the native of Hamburg, living in Germany seems to be greatly from the American Way of Life characterised. For 35 years, Meinecke plays in the avant-garde Band F. S. K. (“Voluntary self control”).
The Band cites US role models and employees for a long time with “electrified-broken, contemporary TRANS-Atlantic Folklore”. They explored the roots of German music in the USA and brought them back to Germany. What excites Meinecke America? “In a sense, the US is the counter-model to the place of longing of the Germans from the past centuries, whatever was Italy,” says Meinecke in a DLF-Interview, “by contrast, the United States offered the Heterogeneous, the lurking is completely Blind, in the abyss.”
“Advertising for Germany is good”
“The United States is not a role model for peace and freedom,” the göttingen fiction and non – fiction author Wolfgang Bittner. A lawyer by training, Born in 1941, criticized especially the loss of the rule of law in the United States since the terrorist attacks of September 11. September 2001.
Critical Distance: The Author Wolfgang Bittner
The country was badly governed, have a drug problem, a broken health care system, schools that did not deserve the name, suffer from racism and excessive police violence. “The US should solve its own problems, to organize instead of Chaos in the world,” asks Bittner. He has friends in the United States and recommends to distinguish between the population and the policy. A “year of Germany USA” welcomes the intellectual: “advertising for Germany is good.”
At the dedication of the Thomas Mann house in June in Los Angeles Heinrich Detering was the guest of honour at the side of the Federal President of Germany Frank-Walter Steinmeier. Detering is Germany’s profiled estermann-researcher, he teaches literature in Göttingen. Germany’s most famous author had complained as early as 1947 in the American exile, on political conditions in post-war America, he says.
The former Thomas Mann shines in a new gloss-Villa in Los Angeles
Now Detering traveled “with a strange sense of mixture” in the USA. “The presence of pouring the vinegar the Interview, to the historical pleasure,” Detering in the DW. “I was in America during the months in which the Tea Party movement articulated for the first Time, massively, publicly, in the fight against Obama’s health care reform. And I felt at the time as shock detention, such as the aggressive racist discourse, was nowhere to escape, suddenly, my bright image of America, darkened.”
On his 2016 released CD “My America,” whispers, sings, shouts, and the young Freiburg bard Philipp Poisel sobs. He signed the dream image of his youth from the Land of unlimited possibilities: “Like a road in the South of / as a Corn field, beating endlessly / like rivers in their beds through the gorges, High passes, deep snow / like a summer in the desert / Like Woodstock in the middle / deep forests, cold seas, / In your arms I feel free”.
Poisels Song was created just before the Era Trump. Inspired the now 35-Year-old “memories of Mickey Mouse, ‘The three question marks’, and countless afternoons with the Nintendo console on your lap.”