Interview with Manfred Henningsen, author of Der Mythos Amerika

Recently I reviewed Der Mythos Amerika by Manfred Henningsen, professor of political science at the University of Hawaii.  Professor Henningsen kindly agreed to respond to some of my questions about his book.

 Dialog International: It has been more thirty years since you came out with “Der Fall Amerika”.  What motivated you to write “Der Mythos Amerika”? Who is your intended audience?

Henningsen: I had promised at the end of my book Der Fall Amerika (1974) that I would follow up this volume, which dealt primarily with European anti-Americanism from the French Revolution to the early 1970s, with a book on American self-understanding. I wanted to make Germans realize that America is not an appendix to Europe. The main thesis of the 1974 book was that Europeans, not only Germans, were unable to understand the United States. They engaged in all kinds of ways of substituting European realities for American experiences.

In Der Mythos Amerika I try to make a German-speaking audience come to terms with an America they haven’t seen or refuse to see. This is however a critical reading of America. The longer I have lived in this society the more I have realized how difficult it is for many Americans to recognize the phenomena of evil that belong to the historical record of their society. Their basic belief in the exceptional qualities of American history remains unshaken. The USA is for them and the majority of American politicians who represent them the best and the greatest society in human history.

Dialog International: Have anti-American attitudes among European intellectuals changed much in the meantime?

Henningsen: The attitudes of European intellectuals toward the U.S. have not changed dramatically, even if the election of Barack Obama in 2008 undermined the self confidence with which they articulated their prejudices. These attitudes though are not always anti-American, very often they are simply based on a lack of knowledge.

Dialog International: How has the “myth” of America changed since Vietnam?  Why has America been unwilling or unable to adequately look at its violent history (lack of “Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung”)?

Henningsen: I don’t think that the outcome of the Vietnam-War enhanced the critical processing of the past in the U.S. The pervasive jingoistic tone of the public debate about America’s role in the world is today as unreflective as before Vietnam. The Reagan years and the two Bush presidencies and especially the collapse of state socialism in Eastern Europe and the collapse of the Soviet Union itself restored the imperial self confidence, if not hubris. The lack of public support for critical movies that have come out of Hollywood in the last years about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is a good illustration. This year’s Oscar for the apolitical and uncritical movie The Hurt Locker captures the majority sentiments

Dialog International: The book has a comprehensive survey of the scholarship on slavery in North America, but very little discussion of the civil rights movement  in the 1950s/1960s.  Doesn’t this movement represent a real “coming to terms” with the original sin of slavery?  In view of the civil rights movement and its real achievements, it is still correct to see racism as the force that blocks progressive movements (such as a social democratic workers movement) in the US?

Henningsen: The Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s is the Black end to the Civil War. This movement put pressure on the White political class of this country to finally deliver and enforce the laws that were promised by the 14^th Amendment of 1868. The overcoming of institutional racism with the civil rights legislation of 1964/65 ends the proto-fascist Jim Crow period of American history.

The election of the 44^th President represents the symbolic lifting of the curse of racism that has hovered over this nation since the Founding. Though the election was dramatic and decisive, it has also become quite clear since that event that millions of White Americans have still problems with a Black occupant in the White House. I’m convinced that the irrational and politically inane protest movement that has emerged in the U.S. in 2010 is at its core racist.

I do not think that the U.S. will experience in the 21st century the emergence of a left alternative political formation. All successful left parties in the West came into historical being in the last decades of the 19^th and the first decades of the 20^th century. I believe that W.E.B. Du Bois (in his Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880. 1935) was right when he blamed racism for the failure of the American Left in the late 19^th century, in the first Gilded Age, to become a viable political force when they refused to organizationally integrate the 4 million freed slaves. These black proletarians were left in large numbers to become vagrants and be re-enslaved again (D.A. Blackmon, Slavery by another Name. The Re-Enslavement of Black People in America from the Civil War to World War II. 2008)

Dialog International: Is it valid to compare racism in the US with anti-Semitism in Germany and Europe?

Henningsen: My comparison of American racism with German anti-Semitism has one simple goal, namely to reject the notion that one can explain the macro-killing project of Nazi Germany out of historical German anti-Semitism. If historical anti-Semitism explains the Holocaust, why did anti-Black American racism not lead to a Black genocide? Anti-Black racism in the U.S. from the end of the Civil War to 1933, when the Nazis came to power in Germany, was more vicious and murderous than anti-Semitism had been from the creation of the German nation state in 1871 to 1933. Germans didn’t follow a national ‘separate-but-equal’ policy and didn’t lynch Jews on the regular basis Blacks were lynched in the U.S. Germans didn’t lynch Jews in that period at all whereas American Blacks were lynched even after WWII. In addition, Germany was, next to the U.S., the preferred immigration destiny for Russian and Eastern European Jews in the 19^th and early 20^th century. There were almost twice as many Jews living in Germany in 1932 than in France and Great Britain put together. Were those Jews blind or consumed by a death wish when they moved to Germany? Something is wrong with this determinist explanation. My argument is that racism or anti-Semitism in itself doesn’t lead to genocide; a political regime has to come to power to promote, enable and legitimate genocidal action. This happened in Germany in 1933 but never occurred in the U.S. I’m quite certain that a regime could have come to power in a victorious confederate South, promoting, enabling and legitimating genocidal action against Blacks.

Dialog International: The book ends with the election victory of Barak Obama, which you see as a “Zaesur”  ( a "Break") from America’s ahistorical embrace of “Der Mythos Amerika”.  How do you see it now, more than one year into Obama’s presidency?

Henningsen: I see Barack Obama still as the major incision in American history and I will always remind Germans and Europeans of the extraordinary fact that a majority of Americans leapt over a massive hurdle when they voted for him. However that majority came together and whatever racist groups have reemerged out of the sewers of American society since that day in November 2008, the exceptional moment of truth will always remain one of the proudest moments in American history. I’m not disappointed about Obama’s tenure so far. Having always been of the opinion that the U.S.A. is a deeply divided society, I’m aware that the Republicans will do almost anything in order to make the first Black President fail. All the absurd categorizations from fascist and Nazi to communist and socialist of his political goals, demonstrate to me to what extremes the contemporary Know-Nothings in America will go in order to make him fail.

Dialog International: How has the book been received so far?  Any plans to come out with a version in English?

Henningsen: The book has sold from June to December 2009 3500 copies and received good reviews in newspapers, radio programs and some journals. I have not heard of any plans for an English translation. I fear this book will face the same fate my first book on America experienced. American publishers told my then Verleger List in Munich that Americans are not interested in European views of their country.

Dialog International:  Professor Henningsen, many thanks for answering our questions and good luck with the book.

 

Comments

[Bushama Hussein]

My opinion remains that the best cure for "America" would be a nice and thorough carpet bombing campaign. Let them taste their own medicine, it worked so well with the Nazis too.

Certainly, one beautiful day of liberation the world will come together and gain freedom from imperial terror, racism and capitalist exploitation.