Abstract
Why leave the comforts of the Heimat when insult can pass for inquiry? [...]did German mandarins like Heine and Schlegel, Schopenhauer, Treitschke, and a line of others up to the present-day academy's most favored Nazi, Martin Heidegger, tow the same dyspeptically anti-American line. In works like Louis Veuillot's L'Univers and Edmund Jorg's History of Protestantism, in papal documents like Longinqua Oceani and Testem Benevolentiae, and in the bromides of Jesuits Camilo Mazzela and Salavatore Brandi, denouncing their Protestant neighbors from their fortress-Rome-in-isolation at Woodstock Seminary in Maryland, the voices of Catholic dogmatic orthodoxy furnished a virtual Greek chorus of mournful comment on America's foolish religious ways: its sins of egalitarianism, sectarianism, and bourgeois individualism, all laden with the great iniquity that had come of separating Church from State. Unlike their place-bound peers, pontificating in ignorance and reveling in caricature, both were true émigrés--men of the mind who did not just visit the United States but made it their home, coming gradually over time to appreciate the genius of its civil compact: the masterstroke of the First Amendment, the marvels of voluntarism and individualism, and the vitality that a truly egalitarian social order generated in the religious life of its congregations, synagogues, and parishes. The most emblematic expression of these narrow minds, as revealing as it is repellent, comes to us courtesy of that model of literary refinement, the poet Heinrich Heine, for whom America was a "God accursed land," a "monstrous prison of freedom . . . where the most repulsive of all tyrants, the masses, practice their vulgar domination" (53). Or, less politely put: can the continent whose intellectuals bequeathed to the West the three great authoritarian regimes of Catholicism, Communism, and Fascism really claim cultural superiority to the one whose shiploads of planes and tanks manufactured in bourgeois capitalist factories and manned by modestly educated Protestant farm boys from the midwestern plains ultimately rescued it from utter self-immolation?
