Book contents
- Frontmatter
- POLITICS: Détente and Multipolarity: The Cold War and German-American Relations, 1968-1990
- SECURITY: German-American Security Relations, 1968-1990
- ECONOMICS: Cooperation, Competition, and Conflict: Economic Relations Between the United States and Germany, 1968-1990
- CULTURE: Culture as an Arena of Transatlantic Conflict
- 1 American Cultural Policy Toward Germany
- 2 The Third Pillar of Foreign Policy: West German Cultural Policy in the United States
- 3 The Study of Germany in the United States
- 4 American Studies in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1945-1990
- 5 In the Shadow of the Federal Republic: Cultural Relations Between the GDR and the United States
- 6 American Literature in Germany
- 7 The American Reception of Contemporary German Literature
- 8 The Americanization of the German Language
- 9 Between Blight and Blessing: The Influence of American Popular Culture on the Federal Republic
- 10 Popular Music in Germany: Experimentation and Emancipation from Anglo-American Models
- 11 Hollywood in Germany
- 12 New German Cinema as National Cinema
- 13 Transatlantic Reflections: German and American Television
- 14 Performance Theater in the Age of Post-Drama
- 15 Beyond Painting and Sculpture: German-American Exchange in the Visual Arts
- 16 The Rediscovery of the City and Postmodern Architecture
- 17 Modernity and Postmodernity in a Transatlantic Perspective
- 18 Confrontations with the Holocaust in the Era of the Cold War: German and American Perspectives
- SOCIETY: German-American Societal Relations in Three Dimensions, 1968-1990
- 1 “1968”: A Transatlantic Event and Its Consequences
- OUTLOOK: America, Germany, and the Atlantic Community After the Cold War
- Index
7 - The American Reception of Contemporary German Literature
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2013
- Frontmatter
- POLITICS: Détente and Multipolarity: The Cold War and German-American Relations, 1968-1990
- SECURITY: German-American Security Relations, 1968-1990
- ECONOMICS: Cooperation, Competition, and Conflict: Economic Relations Between the United States and Germany, 1968-1990
- CULTURE: Culture as an Arena of Transatlantic Conflict
- 1 American Cultural Policy Toward Germany
- 2 The Third Pillar of Foreign Policy: West German Cultural Policy in the United States
- 3 The Study of Germany in the United States
- 4 American Studies in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1945-1990
- 5 In the Shadow of the Federal Republic: Cultural Relations Between the GDR and the United States
- 6 American Literature in Germany
- 7 The American Reception of Contemporary German Literature
- 8 The Americanization of the German Language
- 9 Between Blight and Blessing: The Influence of American Popular Culture on the Federal Republic
- 10 Popular Music in Germany: Experimentation and Emancipation from Anglo-American Models
- 11 Hollywood in Germany
- 12 New German Cinema as National Cinema
- 13 Transatlantic Reflections: German and American Television
- 14 Performance Theater in the Age of Post-Drama
- 15 Beyond Painting and Sculpture: German-American Exchange in the Visual Arts
- 16 The Rediscovery of the City and Postmodern Architecture
- 17 Modernity and Postmodernity in a Transatlantic Perspective
- 18 Confrontations with the Holocaust in the Era of the Cold War: German and American Perspectives
- SOCIETY: German-American Societal Relations in Three Dimensions, 1968-1990
- 1 “1968”: A Transatlantic Event and Its Consequences
- OUTLOOK: America, Germany, and the Atlantic Community After the Cold War
- Index
Summary
Translated by Sally E. Robertson
THE “HESSE CRAZE” AND ITS ROOTS
American readers' interest in German literature in the first two decades after World War II fixed largely on the question of the German dictatorship and its legacy. In the books of exiled authors such as Thomas Mann and numerous postwar writers ranging from Ernst Wiechert to Heinrich Böll and Günter Grass, Americans sought answers to questions about the Germany of the past thirty-five years and what had become of the country in the years following the war.
By the mid-1960s, however, Americans were preoccupied with themselves. The war in Vietnam and the riots in urban ghettos shook the nation. American youth were in rebellion. This manifested itself both in political activism and the essentially apolitical hippie and flower child movement. The latter made possible the sudden enthusiastic revival of an author who had been dead since 1962 and some of whose works had been written sixty years earlier: Hermann Hesse. His novels had begun to appear in America in the 1920s without attracting particular attention. As late as 1947, one critic was convinced that a new edition of Steppenwolf would not achieve a very large circulation. Twenty years later, however, a wave of Hesse works began to flood the American market. In 1969, Journey to the East (Die Morgenlandfahrt), the first volume of the ten-volume Hesse edition produced by the renowned publisher Farrar, Straus & Giroux, appeared. Other Hesse novels, from Siddhartha to Magister Ludi (Das Glasperlenspiel), were issued in new editions or as paperbacks.
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- Information
- The United States and Germany in the Era of the Cold War, 1945–1990A Handbook, pp. 319 - 325Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004