EUROPEAN ANTI-AMERICANISM
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Germany report that when they go shopping in food stores, German
housewives look at them with obvious disapproval. In Rome a passing
taxi
driver pointed to the American Embassy and remarked with a
sneer, "Those plunderers ..." We often complain about our fellow
beings. We often look at them disapprovingly. Such complaints and
such disapproval do not suffice to produce anti-Americanism.
Anti-Americanism is hardly ever found among streetcar conductors,
barbers, servant girls, and chauffeurs, but there is plenty of it among
journalists, professors, and theater people. One of my American students
wrote to me recently from a German university: "There is naturally
in
America, as in every land, very much that is worthy of criticism, but
I have yet to see intelligent criticism of America in Germany, only
vicious lies to make things seem as bad as possible. One can say that
the reactionary element in Germany is the Learned. Where it would
be expected that the educated classes would be the progressives and
liberals, as in America, the carrier of the Ph. D. degree in Germany
constitutes the most decadent and despotic group in the entire society,
since an academic title has too great an importance. It is correct to
say that the Germans got rid of their princes and then made princes
of their university men." I should qualify this youthful generalization
only by insisting that a distinction be made between old professors and
young students. But then, the truth that ideological acrobats are carriers
of the
bacillus ideologicus
is not confined to Germany.
Intellectuals are, among other things, a species which cannot live
without a protective ideology, for they are professionally accustomed to
it. They need a scapegoat who is to blame for everything. They need
a devil to justify their own somewhat dubious existence, a shooting–
gallery dummy as a target for revenge without risk (that is, ideological
revenge). In the lives of many European intellectuals, America plays a
leading role as scapegoat, prop of self-justification, and shooting-gallery
dummy. The name of America is the most indispensable term in the
European vocabulary.
It has always been Europe's revenge to degrade America to the
rank
of a country of barbarians, but never before has there been so
much reason to crave revenge. Europe's megalomania needs America
as a contrasting background for its own greatness-which no longer
exists. The function of the anti-Americanism of intellectuals looking for
self-justification can be very nicely studied, for example, in those re–
emigrants who first came to America from Europe and who are now
returning to Europe from America. They all had very valid reasons
for returning "home": they hadn't been naturalized; they couldn't
