Workers, Women, and Afro-Americans: Images of the United States in German Travel Literature, from 1923 to 1933

Sara Markham draws on interdisciplinary scholarship and a rich variety of archival sources to provide a definitive analysis of German travel literature. She examines images of the United States in a multiplicity of cultural and historical contexts. Her study delineates and assesses socially critical, women’s literary, worker-oriented, socialist, and nascent anti-fascist tendencies in travel books of Weimar Germany. Markham’s focus on German perceptions of U.S. workers, women, and Afro-Americans illuminates the historical dimensions of the authors’ contributions and limitations in regard to German cultural legacy.