Chapter 29 - Americanism

Summary

EVEN IN THE THROES OF DEFEAT, Austrians had an ambivalent relationship with the American victors who had helped to conquer their empire and break it down into the tiny “rump state” known as German Austria. While the Mission to Austria of the American Relief Administration (A.R.A.), European Children's Fund (E.C.F.) of 1919 prefigured the massive scale of the various public welfare programs of the Social Democrats and kept many of the city's children from starvation, American profiteers were seen as exacerbating Austria's economic recovery, and the United States became associated with the excesses and dangers of unfettered capitalism. Many German-speaking intellectuals, including citizens of the newly minted Austrian Republic, pondered the demise of their once-great empire and the rise of the new, powerful nation across the Atlantic. In 1918, a Viennese press published the first edition of Oswald Spengler's Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West), a pessimistic comparative study of the decline of history's great cultures. In his work, Spengler (1880–1936) argued that every organic, creative culture in world history had enjoyed a golden age of art and beauty, but eventually ossified into a technocratic, superficial civilization. Just as the clarity and genius of classical Greece had devolved into the decadent excesses and metropolitan perversities of Rome, so Europe’s profound and productive culture was nearing its end. The end of Western culture, Spengler argued, was brought about by the overwhelming force of American civilization with its ubiquitous mass culture, rationalized factories and cinema.

Spengler provided a tangible enemy to those Europeans who saw themselves in a deep and irreversible cultural crisis, mourning the loss of the great gilded age that had not only cemented the privilege of the aristocracy but also given security and immense cultural and financial capital to the denizens of the Bildungsbürgertum, Europe's newlydefunct educated middle class. The delicate, nuanced and deeply individualistic European experiences of art, literature, and music stood no chance, as Stefan Zweig famously states in his 1925 feuilleton “The Monotonization of the World,” against the onslaught of schlock art, simple dances, popular music, and mass-produced American goods that are quickly taking over the world. Worst of all, America represented the soulless pursuit of profit and the end of the well-rounded, educated human subject.