Erwin Panofsky’s memoirs on “Three Decades of Art History in the United States” contain a story of how Walter Cook, then director of New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, described the process by which the NYU art-history faculty suddenly became the most prestigious in the world: Hitler “shakes the tree and I collect the apples.” When one considers the equally impressive displacement of German artists and architects, including Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius—who managed to effect a sea change in American architectural education by the mid-1950s—it becomes evident that the American experience with the visual arts since the early-1930s contains a rich and vibrant Teutonic strain. Needless to say, most intellectuals concerned with the arts today would be loathe to explore the consequences of this historical fact.

Over the course of the last two decades I have become increasingly fascinated by the similarity of the American dilemma with so-called postmodernism and the German dilemma with modernism before the advent of Hitler. My fascination never evolved into a systematic investigation partly because I suspected that the American dilemma, though reflecting Germanic sensibilities and concerns, exhibits nowhere near the conceptual sophistication, visual nuance, and critical subtlety of the German experience. The book under review has convinced me of many things, the first of which is that my initial suspicion was right: the German debate on the advance of the visual arts in the early years of this century was far more compelling, engaging, and, in the final