AMERIKA, DU HAST ES BESSER: ZUR GESCHICHTE AMERIKAS IN DER DEUTSCHEN LITERATUR. (GERMAN TEXT) (HERDER, GOETHE, KAFKA)

In this dissertation, the literary image of America is being studied within the context of European history of civilization. The focus of the research is less on concrete images of America which can be found in literary travel accounts and especially in contemporary German literature. Instead, America is being analysed as a European projection of utopian and dystopian dreams. As a metaphor of the European vision of infinite human progress and its history, its images stretch from the plan of an ideal bourgeois society to the fear of totalitarian state, from the self-realization of the individual to the self-alienation of the bourgeois subject. America was Europe's biggest hope and its most serious disappointment. These images that formed between the 18th and the early 20th century seem to influence the European perspectives and judgements of America through the present day.; While many scholars in this area interpret the history of the literary representation of America as one of idealization, this study attempts to show that among German authors European-American concepts have been viewed much more critically. The vision of infinite human progress was not only questioned in this century. Johann Gottfried Herder already points to the connection between European progress, the enslavement of the Africans and the genocide of the American Indians. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe portrays an American utopia that predicts many of the contradictions of the current bourgeois society. Franz Kafka's America shows the full scope of the modern individual's struggle for survival in an industrialized world. The history of the German literary image of America reconstructed in this study will be a history of the literary critique of the European-American vision of infinite human progress.