Separated by the Atlantic Ocean, two entirely different media worlds developed in Germany and the United States. Or so it seemed when, during the Allied occupation of Germany, the two societies encountered each other, only later to disparage their respective media traditions. A report to the American sector's military government stressed that “the traditions of German newspapers … are unsuited to developing a democratic mentality or only to maintain such a mentality. … German newspapers … are usually written and presented in a very boring way … going, as it were, over the heads of many of their readers.” German journalists saw things differently, reprimanding the American mass media for their “principle of being without principle” and their hunt for “sensation in every area”: “dominated by ‘sob stories’ and society stories, [American] newspapers are produced for the ‘man of the street’ this is done by eliminating the political and emphasizing the ‘human side.’”

This snapshot from the era of occupation reflects durable prejudices on both sides that derive primarily from the stronger market orientation of the American media. What is at issue in this stereotype? Have the mass media in the United States always been more commercial in nature? What was the orientation of the German media if not toward the market? Have there not been more parallels than differences in the media histories of the two countries? Can a transatlantic comparison distinguish which media system was more compatible with a “democratic mentality” and which with dictatorship? To answer these questions, one must take a close look at both societies.

In the nineteenth century, a new type of mass media emerged on both sides of the Atlantic that was directed toward an anonymous, transregional, and diverse mass public. Emerging mass media promoted developments that were fundamentally similar in both countries. They brought about a steadily advancing “mediatization” of politics and society, meaning that political and social systems increasingly conformed to the conditions of a mass media environment. Everywhere it occurred, mediatization was a powerful spur to the formation of national identities because the mass media were increasingly able to serve as a dominant forum – ubiquitous in the public mind – molding the themes and the language of political debate within emerging nation-states. In public spheres shaped by the mass media, national images overtook regional and local ones.

Anti-Americanism has accompanied the military, political, economic, and cultural rise of the United States in the twentieth century. It has long constituted a response to the role of the United States in international politics. At the same time, German criticism of America has reflected internal debates over Germany's path into modernity since the early nineteenth century. Critics of the “Western” model, which America seemed to embody more than any other country, juxtaposed “special German consciousness” against the political ideals of the late-eighteenth-century transatlantic revolutions. This difference found its expression in the familiar dichotomies of Western “society” and national “community,” of German “culture” and Western “civilization.” The discussion of American modernity along these lines peaked in the 1920s and World War II, which the National Socialists interpreted as a conflict of Weltanschauungen not only with the East, Bolshevism, and the Soviet Union, but also with “Americanism,” liberalism, and Western democracy.

Even after 1945, German criticism of the United States fell back upon the clash between Western, American civilization and traditional German (and European) culture. In contrast to the 1920s and 1930s, however, anti-Americanism in the postwar “post-totalitarian ideological landscape” constituted an important but not formative force in West Germany’s political culture. Although large parts of the population may have harbored inner reservations about the West, anti-Americanism essentially remained the domain of fringe groups on the Left and Right.

After World War II, as in the pre-1945 period, “America” was an arena for internal German debates on the country's political and social orientation. The West German Left, despite reservations about tying the country's foreign policy to the United States, maintained an overwhelmingly positive image of America up into the 1960s and argued for cultural and intellectual integration of Germany into the West. The right, despite its agreement with the United States on foreign policy, showed anti-American inclinations, which were directed against the cultural and social Westernization of the Federal Republic. This constellation dissolved in the course of the 1960s. The center left Social Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, or SPD) came to hold a strongly pro-American position. The New Left and the student movement, by contrast, shared the radical right's reservations about the Federal Republic's social and political integration within the West. At the same time, the ideological differences between the two major parties diminished. Emerging conflicts over the environment, peace initiatives, and immigration policy in a “multicultural” society weakened the opposition between classic “left” and “right” positions. Belief in or opposition to the West” once again became an important dividing line in German politics. It was not a coincidence that “Antiamerikanismus” became a polemical term in the West German political vocabulary during the 1970s. At the same time, the increasing integration of the Federal Republic into the West meant that anti-American ideas often reflected Americans’ own criticisms of conditions in the United States and led to the formation of alliances between critics of “America” on both sides of the Atlantic. This was true for the student movement and the New Left as well as for the New Right since the 1980s.