Any analysis of American cultural policy toward occupied Germany needs to take into account the occupiers' motives and goals and the events affecting those goals over time. Because cultural policy, even in an occupation setting, involves interactions and transactions, each group's understanding of its own as well as the other's culture must be considered. Germans differentiate between Bildung as the transmission of culture in a historical value-oriented context and Erziehung as intentional, structured learning by the individual. But whereas Germans tend to stress education and culture within the context of Bildung, Americans are prone to regard both as aspects of socialization.

American cultural policy in occupied Germany was based initially on the premise that German culture - elite, popular, and political - was complicit in the militarism that led to two world wars and in the failure of German democracy to prevent the rise of Nazism. The American planners of cultural policy were primarily education experts who took on what they saw as the task of socializing postwar Germans in order “to provide long-range protection against a recurrence of aggression.” This specific form of socialization was called “reeducation” and was meant to build “a psychological foundation on which political and economic reform could rest.”