By the late 1960s, German-American cultural relations reached the nadir of their post-World War II renaissance. To some of those who had been involved in the construction of this relationship, the precipitous fall had come abruptly - too abruptly. But by then the rosetinted view of America as the “Camelot” of the Western world, a view held by many in the postwar generation of young Germans in the 1950s and 1960s, had also become outdated. The German-American bond of the late 1940s and 1950s had to a large degree been created by the network of human relationships linking the two countries after World War II. The network had included many of the émigrés of the 1930s, half a million German prisoners of war who had spent years in the United States, tens of thousands of American and German officials who cooperated in rebuilding Germany, and the many German participants in the large educational exchange programs in the early postwar years.

The generation of the mid-1960s had no similar formative experiences and, consequently, no comparable commitment to the German-American relationship. The younger they were the less they remembered or even knew about the Marshall Plan, the origins of the Cold War and the NATO alliance, the Berlin Airlift, or the rebuilding of West Germany as a democratic, economically and socially stable society. Other factors contributing to disillusionment with America among young Germans were the opposition to America's war in Vietnam; the violence in America typified by the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy; and the upheavals in the United States caused by the civil rights revolution.