When Bismarck created Imperial Germany in 1871, the United States was not yet a world power, but the two states were rising Protestant empires with rapidly growing, religiously heterogeneous populations. In the age of imperialism the three Protestant empires, the third being Great Britain, were bound to compete with one another, France, and Russia, yet the form of the conflict, peaceful or military, and the kind of coalition were historically open. After the Spanish-American War of 1898 - an ascending Protestant power defeating a moribund Catholic power - Imperial Germany launched not only a naval armament program against Great Britain, but also a cultural offensive toward the United States aimed at containing the dominant Anglo-Saxon influence. At a time when German emigration had tapered off, academic travel to America became fashionable for German professors, exchange professorships were established - and many illusions were nourished. The St. Louis World Congress of 1904, attended by Max and Marianne Weber, Ernst Troeltsch, and many other German academics, was a high point in this cultural endeavor. Part of this story is told by Hans Rollmann in this volume. Few contemporaries would have believed that it would take until 1987 before an institution like the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C., would be established. Unavoidably, the intellectual transactions became entangled with the political ups and downs in the relations between the two countries that confronted one another in two world wars. The first war, fought by most German academics under the banner of Kultur contra Zivilisation, damaged the international prestige of German culture significantly. The second completely destroyed the claims once advanced by Max Weber's generation on behalf of Germany's global Kulturmission.