Teaching U.S. History in Germany

Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht is a Heisenberg fellow teaching at the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main. She has taught at the Universities of Virginia, Bielefeld, Heidelberg, the Universität Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, Harvard University and the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin. Her field of interest is the interplay of culture and international relations since the early modern period. Gienow-Hecht’s study Transmission Impossible: American Journalism as Cultural Diplomacy in Postwar Germany, 1945-1955 (Baton Rouge, 1999) was co-awarded the Stuart Bernath Book Prize (best first book in diplomatic history) as well as the Myrna Bernard Prize (best book in diplomatic history written by a woman), both given by the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. Her latest study, Sound Diplomacy: Music and Emotions in German-American Relations, 1850-1920 will be published by the University of Chicago Press, in 2009.
Sound Diplomacy elucidates the cultural agency of representatives of German music and their art in the United States in the context of German-American relations since the mid-nineteenth century. It investigates international cultural initiatives in the United States prior to World War One, the lives and motivations of musicians and their immediate impact on urban audiences, and he growing antagonism of American critics to the preponderance of German music in the decades before 1917. Sound Diplomacy focuses on "non-material" means of communication and people who dedicated their lives to the power of emotions in international relations. These contacts, Gienow-Hecht argues, proved much more enduring than political ties, surviving broken treaties, mutual alienation, and several wars.