| This dissertation deals with two overlapping "golden ages": midcentury American cultural diplomacy and midcentury American Studies, broadly considered. Its hub is the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies, established in 1947 by a left-wing Austrian emigre with the tenuous approval of the U.S. Military Government in Austria. From this central European vantage point, where displaced persons and former Nazis met on the "neutral ground" of Moby-Dick and Middletown, I identify competing visions of American cultural diplomacy, and corresponding transformations in what Sacvan Bercovitch calls "symbolic constructions of America." It begins with a semantic history of "national character," from its background in anthropology and social psychology to its World War 11-era apogee as an instrument of "democratic morale." After the war, when the U.S. embarked on halting and chaotic occupations of Germany and Austria, many American writers and intellectuals devoted themselves to European reconstruction, tying American literature and culture to an agenda of reeducation and democratization. At the nexus of these efforts was American Studies, then a new and ideologically diffuse movement of writers, public intellectuals and academics from many disciplines; the figures studied here---all affiliated with the Seminar in its early years---include Margaret Mead, Talcott Parsons, Reinhold Niebuhr, F.O. Matthiessen, Alfred Kazin, Max Lerner, and Ralph Ellison. Grounding the Salzburg Seminar in the cultural history of the American occupation illuminates a paradoxical postwar moment, characterized by an immense and unprecedented European vogue for American literature, and a similarly unprecedented wave of anti-Americanism. One of my major premises is that---contrary to our understanding of this era as one of liberal "consensus"---there was in fact little agreement among writers, scholars and statesmen about democratization and the Nazi past, about the role of literature in the American Kulturoffensive, about the contours and function of the American canon, and about the proper "projection of America abroad" in the accelerating Cold War. Bringing the unlikely ambassadors of "classic" American Studies scholarship into contact with a rich and varied body of European commentary about the United States, the Salzburg Seminar affords a glimpse of America viewed askance, in the shadow of its projection. |
