“Germans in the New World”: The Contemporary Reception of the First Manned Moon Landing in German-Language Newspapers in the USA and Canada

This article examines the contemporary reception and portrayal of the first manned moon landing in German-language newspapers in North America. The analysis of a total of 14 periodicals from the United States and Canada written in German shows a marked interest in the events surrounding space flight. Embedded in the Soviet-American dualism for global hegemony, the moon landing was perceived as a unique world-historical event and culmination of the Space Race. Various journalists also used it to recall the importance of the German-American population to the United States. The authors referred to German participation in the American space program in the form of the German rocket scientists recruited by the U.S. after World War II in Operation Overcast and Operation Paperclip, respectively, and accentuated the relevance of a collective German-American identity they postulated. Articulated at a time of sociocultural marginalization, the autoaffirmative ethnocultural confessions of the German-language contributors found pointed expression in the stylization of Wernher von Braun as a figure of identification and role model for the German-American population rooted in two worlds.