Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-06, Section: A, page: 2609.

Adviser: Jon Butler.

This dissertation explores transatlantic history with a focus on Europe, Germany America, and on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century transnational processes of cultural exchange. The project traces the transfer and impact of writings about the United States' westward expansion in Europe, concentrating especially on German reactions towards encounters with racial Others. These responses reveal how "unexceptional" America was deemed to be by many Germans. These intellectuals believed that the United States was governed by political developments also at work in Europe and viewed the United States as an imperial power in a process of territorial expansion, not unlike Britain or France. America was therefore, despite its republican constitution, perceived as an integral part of a world dominated and colonized by the major European powers. Eventually, this belief had a strong impact on German colonial discourse in late nineteenth-century Germany, as German imperialists began to view the United States as a model empire. After the founding of the German Empire, Germans could draw on a vast body of imagery that had America as its focus, and which painted a picture of a nation destined to expand, educate and dominate other races. Once the right political conditions were in place, Germans incorporated this perception of America into their own expansionist ideologies.

This dissertation traces the transformation of German observations of American expansion and race from the time of the French Revolution to the beginning of the twentieth century, delineating how these images changed from transnational visions of the American frontier as part of the global advance of European civilization to nationalist interpretations of the same process. From the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, German interest in the United States always had various foci. The American Revolution, America's political system, and the country's fast-paced, "modern" social and economic life were among them. However, there also existed darker currents of the German discussion of the United States. Racism, racial segregation, expulsion of Native Americans and territorial expansion were issues that nineteenth-century Germans frequently pondered when reading and thinking about "Amerika." These largely ignored aspects of the German fascination with the U.S. are the subject of the following analysis.