European Anti-Americanism

(Via Der Spindoktor)Telepolis has a lengthy interview/discussion with Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, a professor of comparative literature at Stanford who has moved permanently to the United States. For the most part, I tend to ignore pronouncements about the "true America" from professors at elite universities. Have they ever spoken with an American outside of academia?  And these exchanges betwen Professor Gumbrecht and Rudolf Maresch are predictably tedious and tendentious – especially when Maresch dismisses American culture as "the history of chewing gum". But there is one section of the interview concerning European anti-Americanism that intrigued me:

Maresch: Hat der wachsende Antiamerikanismus nicht auch mit dem zu tun, was Nietzsche als "Ressentiment" bezeichnet, als Neid und Groll des Sklaven auf den Erfolg des Herrn?

Sepp Gumbrecht: Ja, die Nietzsche-Perspektive ist nicht von der Hand zu weisen. Man wollte in den zwanziger Jahren schon und dann wieder seit 1945 so wie die Amerikaner sein. Den Amerikanern nimmt man übel, dass genau das nicht gelungen ist. Es war ja auch immer ein gewisser Romantizismus á la Karl May im Spiel. Aber ein anderer Grund für die Verstimmung, ein Grund, der mich derzeit mehr interessiert, liegt wohl darin, dass man die "Homogenität der westlichen Kultur" maßlos überschätzt, was dann dazu führt, dass beide Seiten – die amerikanische wie die europäische – der anderen Seite beständig vorwerfen, wie sie angeblich gemeinsame Prinzipien verrät.

Nietzsche first discussed ressentiment in Zur Geneologie der Moral as the basis of Christian morality, which he rejected absolutely. Christianity, as seen by Nietzsche, was the creation of the enslaved masses, who felt powerless against their masters. The powerlessness of the slave is generative of morality – the "slave morality".

“The revolt of the slave in morals begins in the very principle of ressentiment becoming creative and giving birth to values — a ressentiment experienced by creatures who, deprived as they are of the proper outlet of action are forced to find their compensation in an imaginary revenge. While every aristocratic morality springs from a triumphant affirmation of its own demands, the slave morality says ‘no’ from the very outset to what is ‘outside itself,’ ‘different from itself,’ and ‘not itself’; and this ‘no’ is its creative deed.”

— Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals

European anti-Americanism springs from a ressentiment of America’s superior military power, economic dynamism and the all-leveling destructive force of its popular culture. Europeans have formed their identity as a negation of America – the ‘not-Americans’ and they have found their revenge in a superior moral values system – which again defines itself as a negation of perceived American immorality. And so it a supreme irony that in this Nietschean analysis secular Europe is seen as the embodiment of the pious Christian slave morality which Nietzsche despised as weak, while America – which sees itself as the last bastion of "Judeo-Christian" values – is the Anti-Christ.

anti-Americanism Antiamerikanismus