Quotes from Andrei S. Markovits

I was always admonished by my English teachers in their heavily accented, Viennese-inflected English not to speak this abomination of an "American dialect" or "American slang" and never to use "American spelling" with its simplifications that testified prima facie to the uncultured and simpleton nature of Americans.

There can be no doubt that anti-Americanism has become a kind of litmus test for progressive thinking and identity in Europe and the world (including the United States itself). Just as any self-respecting progressive and leftist in Europe or America, regardless of which political shade, simply had to be on the side of the Spanish Republic in the 1930s, antiAmericanism and anti-Zionism have become the requisite proof of possessing a progressive conviction today.

Thus, for example, an article in the German weekly news magazine Der Spiegel proclaims that this women's soccer has nothing to do with sports—a standard European reaction to women's soccer in America.47 "Typically American" were the first two words in the introduction to the article, so that the reader would know right away what to expect.

today's West Europe these two closely related antipathies and resentments are now considered proper etiquette. They are present in polite company and acceptable in the discourse of the political classes.

Sooner or later, almost every problem in the European working world is either branded with the label "Americanization" or blamed on the culprit of Americanization—or both.

the West European media report almost nothing that they associate with America in a neutral, matter-of-fact manner. Most things engender a palpable tone of irritation, derision, annoyance, dismissal.

The fact that obesity in both Europe and America is chiefly a class-specific phenomenon—obese people disproportionately inhabit the lower rungs of the social scale on both sides of the Atlantic—appears hardly a matter for reflection and pales in comparison to the ubiquitous mention of the sole culprit: the "Americanization" of European life.

Antipathy and aversion to America thus became a solid component of the elite discourse in Europe long before the United States emerged as a global power.

bonus." The subject is anti-Americanism for its own sake, where resorting to general assumptions about the United States contributes nothing, either descriptively or analytically, to understanding the topic at hand, but instead chiefly serves the purpose of confirming and mobilizing preexisting prejudices.

amthus following the methodological claim asserted by Melvin L. DeFleur and Margaret H. DeFleur, who in their study Learning to Hate Americans aim to establish what they call a "dual pattern" that differentiates clearly between "attitude objects" pertaining to the United States government and its policies, on the one hand, and the American people, on the other.

Buffon argued that the New World was just that: new. This adjective brought with it positive connotations of potential, excitement, energy, but it also implied lack of maturity, development, and sophistication, a view that Europeans have shared about America to this very day. Rather

Two thoughts went through my head as I read this: First, that Perlentaucher would never have added a remark like this about any other country on Earth: not North Korea, nor Saudi Arabia, Germany, nor even Israel,

An apposition like this either would not have occurred to the editors in the case of any other country or, if it had passed through their minds, they would have guarded against relating it to those readers interested in what the left-liberal Frankfurter Rundschau has to say.

In current German usage, the concepts "Americanization" (Ameri-kanisierung) and "American conditions" (amerikanische Verhaltnisse; amerikanische Bedingungen) almost invariably stand for something negative, bad, and above all threatening, something that absolutely has to be avoided or—if the European patient has already contracted this ailment—somehow needs to be alleviated or diminished.

Originally, anti-Americanism was an ideological value supported by educational elites and the aristocracy, while less well-to-do and underprivileged Europeans demonstrated sympathy for America by emigrating there.

Erbring's research demonstrates that the German media liberally and regularly resort to negative stereotypes about America and Americans that they would not use in the case of reporting on any other country, certainly never on anything pertaining to Germany.

This pattern—portraying unwanted changes as American or a consequence of Americanization—has been a prerogative of not only the German Left. Indeed, threats of alleged "Americanization" are voiced among conservatives just as readily to discredit their Social Democratic opponents.

Moreover, using America and Americanization as a convenient bogeyman to garner points in an internal conflict that has nothing to do with America certainly is not confined to Germany.

America as a European obsession has a long, complex relationship, one constantly vacillating between flashes of adoration and profound antipathy.

The label "from the American" has, of course, very little to do with being precise about accent, vocabulary, writing style, orthography, geography, or citizenship. It simply has to do with the ascription of a cultural inferiority.

cannot recall a single one of my numerous stays in German-speaking Europe in which I was not at some time confronted with the lovely statement, "The Americans don't even speak proper English.

Because so many Germans came into contact with America and Americans, Germany provided the most productive and widely read authors in Europe dealing with the New World.

Such criticisms of America and the American way of life focused specifically on countering popular myths about abundance, ease of life, and freedom, insisting that "America is anything but a paradise . . . one has to work a lot harder than in Germany to get anywhere.

the course of the following decades, as Germans increasingly came to view themselves as potential victims of America's insatiable drive for capitalist growth, prey to all the negative consequences of modernization, they began to identify with North American Indians and their fate.