Norman Stone - The Atlantic and Its Enemies

The course of the Vietnam War worried the Europeans: did it mean that the Americans had given them up? Germany was now a fat target, but lacking her own nuclear weapon, and the Berlin crisis in 1961 had shown that the Americans were not anxious to move, whatever Kennedy said. Why, anyway, should the USA risk the obliteration of Chicago for a West Berlin of which American bombers had already made a considerable mess? In any case, the USA very obviously did not mean to let West Germany have a finger on any nuclear trigger, and the arms control proposals put to Moscow in spring 1962 amounted in effect to joint American-Soviet control, with only face-saving clauses for the NATO allies. Was this a moment for united Europe to assert itself? It had recovered from the war, and the Common Market was proving to be a great success. The old European world, with great numbers of peasant farmers, was rapidly going, and the towns boomed through hard-working rural migrants — a sure-fire formula for success in all economies except the Communist ones. Prosperity of an American sort proliferated — more cars, domestic tools, holidays in the sun. But what did it all signify?

In the immediate post-war decades, civilization was still defined by Europe. British and French writers and restaurants, Italian film-makers, the Vienna Staatsoper dominated the stage. The great universities of Europe were still vastly attractive to foreigners, who learned French or German as a matter of course; American graduate students came to Cambridge to take an undergraduate degree and American academics, visiting European institutions with their families, found that their children, at school, were a year or two behind. True, this cultural Europe did not extend into mass culture, which had been Americanized, and was to become ever more strongly so. As to this there was resentment. At this stage the Germans were in no mood to contest the American empire politically, but, especially in the Catholic south, they resisted the cultural side-effects and despite the best efforts of a would-be democratizing occupation education expert, one Zink, they had been able to retain the old divisions in education, as between academic and technical. If you opened a German newspaper, you were going to be instructed. The various German states competed with each other in cultural matters, and supported outstanding museums or opera houses; Wagner’s Bayreuth returned to the world’s stage, with command performances on traditional lines from Birgit Nielsen or Hans Hotter, and the Austrians, even more conservative, maintained the standards of the Vienna Opera or the Salzburg Festival, where Karl Böhm and Herbert von Karajan drew audiences from around the world; the Wiener Philharmoniker still excluded women. That world resisted Americanization, but Americanization was very difficult to resist.

It affected language. The bestselling weekly journal in Germany was Der Spiegel , which had been set up in British-occupied Hamburg after the war, with advice from the British (along with the left-liberal Die Zeit , modelled on the Observer in London, owned and run by David Astor). It did not express itself in the standard German literary style, lengthy verbs-at-the-end-sentences and all: it aimed for English brevity, and in time Spiegeldeutsch was such that the magazine could only be understood if you knew American English quite well. There was a bestselling book in France at this time, Étiemble’s Parlez-vous franglais? It is a long book, giving many examples of the corruption of French, not just by Anglo-American words, but even by Anglo-American usages — for instance, the translation of the World Bank’s formal title to include développement , whereas mise en valeur gives a better understanding of the English original. There was some justice in the French campaign. After all, up until very recent times French had indeed been a dominant language, and when de Gaulle appeared at a state visit in London in 1962, and was accompanied by the Comédie-Française and the great Racine actress and director Marie Bell, the London theatre was enthusiastically full up for her productions of Bérénice and Britannicus , austere alexandrines in a language that, today, even most of the French would find testing. As it happened, Étiemble (who was of peasant origin) had spent seven years in Chicago and had hated much about it. A French West Indian academic colleague had come to see him at home, and the landlord had nearly thrown him out; he remarks, of ‘the American way of not living’, ‘how can you not deplore the great sexual misery of a people with frigid, obsessive, puritanical and bossy women for whom the men stupifiedly kill themselves with work and alcohol?’ and asks what might be done with ‘the infantile cuisine to which the Yankees are reduced and which they take such joy in’. He adds that he would never be attracted by a woman wearing jeans. Étiemble (who lived to an immense age) had no illusions as to what might be done: he recognized that French writers were simply not as interesting as they had been even in the recent past, when French theatre had had worldwide resonance, and he would soon have had to admit as well that the great French cinema was producing mainly clichés. Such campaigns were all too easy to ridicule. At least Luther in the sixteenth century had been robust and not long-winded, but in the 1880s there had been an absurdly pompous effort to prevent words such as ‘telephone’ entering the German language directly: ‘far-speaker’ ( Fernsprecher ) was substituted, and ‘round-spark’ ( Rundfunk ) for ‘radio’ (an even more absurd Croat effort to avoid that word came up with krugoval , ‘round-spark’ in South Slavonic). This was a hopeless business, and Étiemble had the humiliation of seeing ambitious Frenchmen and Frenchwomen of a sort he detested make the standard trot to Harvard or Stanford business school, there to be deracinated into unmemorable miniature Jean Monnets.

There was another famous French book at this time, another of those silly-clever sixties bestsellers, Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber’s Le Défi américain. He, in a later work, suffered from strange notions, that, to stop Indian textiles from competing with their own, the British in India had cut off the little fingers of Hindu girls’ hands. However, the earlier title made at length the point that the Americans were buying up Europe: multinationals such as IBM were moving in; they were taking advantage of cheap labour, and yet by setting up in France they could duck under the French protectionist walls and thereby keep French industry from developing. However, they could do this because they could quite literally just print off dollars on paper which everyone else had to accept as if it were real gold. As had been feared from the start of the new system devised at Bretton Woods, in 1944, American paper money was international legal tender because two thirds of trade was conducted with the dollar (the pound sterling accounting for most of the remainder). In theory it could be converted into gold, at the famous formula of $35 per ounce, but even in 1960 the American gold reserve at Fort Knox was less in value than the number of dollars kept abroad and especially in Europe. What was to stop the Americans from just printing pieces of paper and buying up Europe? This was a fraudulent point, because the same system, triumphantly and perhaps perversely in the case of the British, enabled Europeans to invest in the USA. ‘S-S’, as he was called (he produced a would-be French version of Time magazine, became an internet-is-the-answer bore, and had his children brought up in Pittsburgh, generally at the business school), also failed to notice that French industry, far from languishing, was doing better than it had done since the 1890s, when the arrival of electrical energy had enabled it to bypass the coal in which France was poor. Quite soon France was going to overtake England, for the first time since the French Revolution itself.