The article explores the role of cultural diplomacy in Weimar Germany and France's competing efforts to win the sympathies and support of the United States after the First World War. In the post-war United States, both France and Germany used cultural initiatives to pursue their opposing visions of the new international order: France to maintain and extend wartime cultural alliances beyond the armistice and implement the provisions of the peace treaty; Germany to overturn these very alliances and build a desirable transatlantic ‘friendship’ in line with its efforts to revise the Versailles Treaty. By focusing on the Franco–German rivalry for US affinities, the article calls attention to the transatlantic dynamics of interwar cultural diplomacy. It shows that the emergence of German cultural diplomacy was strongly shaped by French competition for the affections of politically isolationist Americans and that, in general, the rapid expansion of cultural diplomacy in interwar Europe arose from mutual feelings of crisis, starkly competing ambitions as well as the rapid circulation of ideas and practices.

本文探讨了文化外交在魏玛德国和法国为赢得一战后美国的同情和支持而进行的竞争性努力中的作用。在战后美国，法国和德国都采取了文化举措来追求对新国际秩序的反对看法：法国在停战协定之外维持和扩大战时文化联盟，并执行《和平条约》的规定；德国根据其修订《凡尔赛条约》的努力，推翻了这些同盟，并建立了可取的跨大西洋“友谊”。通过着眼于法德对美国关系的竞争，这篇文章引起人们对跨战文化外交跨大西洋动力的关注。