The year 1945 offered German scholarship on the United States a chance to start over. The era of anti-American propaganda, the “Aryanization” of cultural studies and the social sciences, and the expulsion of Jewish and other scholars and intellectuals from the academy was now past. The few emigrants who returned to take up permanent residence in West Germany and to teach and conduct research at West German universities played a key role in furthering scholarly discussion of American culture, society, economics, and politics. The majority of the scholars who had been forced to flee Germany, however, remained a lost resource for both West and East Germany after 1945.

Only a few West Germans in 1950 saw American culture and scholarship as a model for German reconstruction. The majority looked to pre-1933 German academic traditions. Indeed, America's “cultural independence” came as a surprise to many, for America had traditionally been regarded as an intellectual colony of Europe. The resentment of a defeated and occupied nation also came into play. Given this situation, the Amerika-Hauser established in the American zone of occupation shortly after the war ended played an important role.

The exchange programs instituted by the United States would have far-ranging consequences. In 1948, German secondary-school and university students, academics, and journalists began streaming into the United States, and at the same time hundreds of American scholars in the humanities and social sciences came to Germany as guest professors. Assisted by the program that Senator J. William Fulbright initiated in 1946, 12,824 Fulbright scholars – Germans and Americans, students and professors – crossed the Atlantic between 1952 and 1988.