America first intruded on Germans' imagination during the Revolutionary War. “German newspapers,” wrote Johann Heinrich Voss in 1782, “are full of America.” To many German intellectuals, the colonists' struggle for freedom was one more sign of the changes taking place throughout late eighteenth-century politics and culture. But few Germans fully understood what was at stake in this distant conflict; they celebrated the colonists' struggle because of what it meant, or seemed to mean, for events closer to home. From this initial encounter until well into the twentieth century, the same process was repeated. Whether they viewed it with admiration or dismay, most German observers projected onto the American scene their own immediate hopes and fears, desires and anxieties. Thus Goethe's famous hymn “Den Vereinigten Staaten” tells us more about the poet's sensibilities than about its ostensible subject, just as Max Weber's famous analysis of Puritanism in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism has more to say about Imperial Germany than eighteenth-century America.

Until the second half of the nineteenth century, Americans paid little attention to German affairs. Unless they were of German background, few citizens of the United States knew or cared much about the complex political or cultural world of Central Europe. literature and philosophy were not much appreciated in the New World. And who could make sense of the crazy quilt of states in which Germans lived or of the confederation that sought to coordinate their political affairs? Even to the best-informed Americans, these matters seemed far away and of little interest. There were, after all, other, more pressing problems near at hand.