Author Description

"In this study, Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht challenges long-standing analyses of the United States' "cultural imperialism" that emphasize the policy makers' determination to export U.S. culture in order to spread capitalism and gain access to overseas markets and raw materials. She also contests the claims by scholars of reception theory that foreign audiences deliberately condition the reception of U.S. culture abroad. Studying the example of the U.S. Army newspaper the Neue Zeitung - published for the German population from 1945 to 1955 - she convincingly demonstrates that U.S. officials actually exerted very little direct influence on their cultural and information programs in postwar Germany, leaving the initiative to binational midlevel agents. Transmission Impossible reveals that the selection of agents who transmit political and cultural values to the foreign world is as crucial to the success of the enterprise as the package of values itself."--BOOK JACKET. "Containing a wealth of fresh information on the use of propaganda in the Cold War, the administrative structure of the U.S. occupation, Soviet-American conflicts, and Jewish biography, this book will be of interest to scholars of U.S. foreign relations, German history, occupation history, ethnicity, sociology, and culture."--BOOK JACKET.