German Pop Culture: How American is It?

German Pop Culture sheds new light on the Americanization of German culture during the latter part of the 20th century, with special emphasis on post-Unification literature, music, and film. America and its iconography have been instrumental in defining German political and aesthetic culture, especially since World War II, and most recently in the aftermath of September 11. Surrounding this indisputable phenomena, questions of the role and place of a popular German culture continue to trigger heated debate. Embraced by some as a welcome means to break out of the German monocultural mind-set, American-shaped pop culture is rejected by others as polluting established values, leveling necessary differentiation, and ultimately being driven by a capitalist consumer society rather than by moral or aesthetic standards.

This collaborative volume addresses a number of intriguing questions: What do Germans envisage when they speak of the Americanization of their literature and music? How do artists respond to today’s media culture? What does this mean for the current political dimension of German-American relations? Can one speak meaningfully of an Americanized German culture? In addressing these and other questions, this work fills a gap in existing scholarship by investigating German popular culture from a multidisciplinary, international perspective.

Contributors to this volume:
Winfried Fluck, Gerd Gemunden, Lutz Koepnick, Barbara Kosta, Sara Lennox, Thomas Meinecke, Uta Poiger, Matthias Politycki, Thomas Saunders, Eckhard Schumacher, Marc Silberman, Frank Trommler, Sabine von Dirke