320
PARTISAN REVIEW
and considor the other side (whichever it may be) either a horror or
a delightful change of scene.
If
you grew up in Europe, you may find yourself missing wicker
chairs at the beach in America-so Jones Beach will never do as a
substitute for Norderney or Ostende. Along California's grandiose High.
way 101 you may miss the Roman aqueducts and Greek amphitheaters
and Moorish castles that made you love the road from Arles to Monte
Carlo. Europe supports a luxuriant growth of the past, America is
bare--to a European who cannot help comparing. Many a case of anti–
Americanism has its inception in the nonfulfillment of expectations
formed on the other side of the Atlantic. But today Europe is a colony
of its colony-and well on the way to becoming a second America.
If
in our day this extremely imaginary "Europe"-a museum pre–
tending to be a living culture--addresses an extremely real America
("real," however, being no criterion of value!) and demands that
America fulfill what it (Europe) could not itself fulfill, we are listening
(to assume the most honorable motivation) to mere baby-talk. Any
such ideal demand can be made only by those Americans who live by
their country's best tradition, which runs from Emerson to Dewey. And
the demand cannot be: Put Europe in order. He who would put things
in order must be in order himself.
But when this ethical demand comes from Europeans, it is very
much more than a diversion to conceal Europe's failure. It is an attack,
a highly camouflaged attack, against Europe itself. It is a (cowardly)
self-accusation. Europe's anti-Americanism is simultaneously European
self.hatred, a split personality which tries to insist that judge and accused
are two different persons. And the accused gets the name of America.
But judge and accused are one-even though day after day sees the
publication of the same old books about America,
in
which the authors
shed crocodile tears over American technology, notwithstanding the fact
that it impresses them so profoundly that they would love to crawl into
every big machine, provided they got the chance.
For a long time America was a collateral branch of the European
dynasty. Now it is the ruling branch. It is Europe-and at the same
time much more and much less: it is Europe in the middle of the
twentieth century. A Europe which is not a hallowed graveyard but
the youngest metamorphosis of the old and the known. As the Greeks
and the Jews used to talk about Rome
in
its might, so many Europeans
today talk about America-and for the same reasons.
But it
is
high time someone asked the question: What did Greece
and Jerusalem have to contribute when Rome took over?
(Translated tr.om the German
by
Willard
R.
Trask)
