Anti-American movement in Germany plain silly
For this column, I had originally set out to try to describe how American politics looks from this angle: far from our shores I sought to depict how odd, different or silly we seem to be in the eyes of others.
It didn’t work out, though a fine set of lines of how the Brevard County School board is dead set on trying to keep children from dressing up like animals is now in tatters on the editing floor.
But something else intervened. German weirdness. Their politics – in all its oddness, differences, and abject silliness.
I’m in southern Germany right now, with a group of students working their way through various facets of German political history. We’re in Weimar, home of German culture and intellectual development. There’s lots to see and do, and we spent our first day walking the streets, seeing a church or two, paying a visit to the palace and visiting the new Museum of the Weimar Republic. At the end of the day, we caught dinner in a great Vietnamese bistro, then went in search of ice cream.
The famed ice cafés of Germany are, in fact, not German at all, but far more likely to be Italian. The Italians were some of the first immigrants to come to Germany as laborers following the second world war and the start of the U.S. Marshall Plan. As rebuilding went forward, many of the Italians turned to entrepreneurship, and brought their own special combination of ice cream, gelato and espresso to German street corners.
We found just such a place, in the plaza of Goethe and Schiller, and were just trying out some superb spaghetti ice cream when police strobes started flashing through the windows. We all looked up, and someone said “it looks like a parade” – as indeed it was.
It was some kind of political business, with middle-aged folks trundling along in tactical gear and military-like haircuts, waving flags. Some we recognized: the flag of Germany, and one of Thuringia. But leading the charge were some brand-new flags. With bright red fields and giant black lettering reading “AMIS GO HOME.”
Amis are us. Amis = Americans. What the heck?
I thought perhaps this had something to do with the rising popularity of American sports or maybe an anti-Budweiser action of some kind. Was it some new Barbie movie that’d hit the screens while my back was turned? Well, we did go home, after finishing our ice cream and paying the Italian guy, who was as baffled as we were.
A little Google research on return to the hostel filled me in. The new anti-American movement being flacked by the loony right apparently had its start in the cyber world of Russian propaganda. There, among the other figments of the Russian imagination, Americans are being blamed for most of the ills of Germany - a twisted effort to tie the presence of our few remaining troops to the inflation of the Euro, job-loss, and to German support for Ukraine. But the flags didn’t say this.
Telling Americans to “go home” is preposterous, of course.
We’re a pretty light touch over here. “Amis” love modern Germany. We invade with tourists, business folks, academics, students and dollars. “Amis” are tied to the EU economy in interesting and mutually beneficial ways. And, in the end, I could not take any of this very seriously. But it’s a bad look for the German right and maybe as silly as an august Florida County Board of Education calling for a dress code that bans mouse ears.
Bruce Anderson is the Dr. Sarah D. and L. Kirk McKay Jr. Endowed Chair in American History, Government, and Civics and Miller Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Florida Southern College. He is also a columnist for The Ledger.
This article originally appeared on The Ledger: Anti-American movement in Germany plain silly
