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.