Kulturkritik or Anti-Americanism? The Reception of Recent Popular American Cinema in West Germany, with Special Focus on Platoon.

ANTI-Americanism; FOREIGN opinion of the United States; MOTION pictures; POPULAR culture

GERMANY (West); UNITED States

This article attempts to achieve an additional perspective on the pessimism of West Germany to the U.S. Klaus Harpprecht, perhaps the most knowledgeable and certainly the most prolific West German journalist specializing in U.S. politics and culture, noted in a comprehensive article in Die Zeit in December 1984 the cultural pessimism is clearly on the rise in the Federal Republic. He went on to detail the great extent to which the U.S. was the recipient of much pessimism, mentioning particularly the irrational enmity towards the U.S. way of life. Nonetheless, he argued convincingly against the notion of a new anti-Americanism. As for the term anti-Americanism, it does not refer to the more blatant types of dislike of U.S. citizens and goods, such as the Ami go home mentality of some European groups of both the right and the left, or the various efforts to purge European mother tongues of the pervasive presence of English loan words. The primary focus on anti-Americanism here has to do with the reception of what is easily the most pervasive form of U.S. popular culture in the Federal Republic of Germany, the popular cinema, in this connection, one must of course bear in mind that not only is up to 80 percent of the popular movie fare in West Germany are American produced and/or distributed, but well over half of all entertainment programs broadcast on West German television are similarly U.S. made.