The chapter explores the long and checkered history between Germany and the United States up to the end of the Cold War. It takes into account the political, security, economic, cultural, and societal dimensions of the transatlantic relationship, while, due to the overarching interest in soft power within the bilateral relationship, the latter two receive special attention. Despite periods of upheaval, conflict, and even war, America has displayed pervasive soft power toward Germany to an extent virtually unrivaled by any other political entity on earth—from the explorers and cartographers who—quite literally—put America on the map in the early sixteenth century; to the millions of immigrants who arrived on its shores seeking economic prosperity, political liberty, and religious freedom from the seventeenth century onward; to the promise that the American struggle for independence and the U.S. experiment in self-government evoked in the eighteenth century; to the admiration for the thriving and expanding nation in the nineteenth century; to the profound attractions of U.S. culture in the twentieth century, when, after World War II, relations grew particularly close during the Cold War. Consequently, the body politic on the North American continent that would evolve into a global superpower of virtually unprecedented scale has consistently exerted considerable soft power toward Germany, springing from its culture, its values, its policies, and, not least, influential individuals. Therefore, the tale of the two countries told here, effectively ranging across five centuries of transatlantic interaction, has been decisively shaped by America’s profound and powerful forces of attraction.