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By Root 1279 0

affect the all-important stages of their development,” a top executive at the Gepetto Group told the audience at a recent KidPower conference, “and they apply to any kid in Berlin, Beijing, or Brooklyn.” The KidPower conference, attended by marketing executives from Burger King and Nickelodeon, among others, was held at the Disneyland outside of Paris. In Australia, where the number of fast food restaurants roughly tripled during the 1990s, a survey found that half of the nation’s nine- and ten-year-olds thought that Ronald McDonald knew what kids should eat. At a primary school in Beijing, Yunxiang Yan found that all of the children recognized an image of Ronald McDonald. The children told Yan they liked “Uncle Mc-Donald” because he was “funny, gentle, kind, and… he understood children’s hearts.” Coca-Cola is now the favorite drink among Chinese children, and McDonald’s serves their favorite food. Simply eating at a McDonald’s in Beijing seems to elevate a person’s social status. The idea that you are what you eat has been enthusiastically promoted for years by Den Fujita, the eccentric billionaire who brought McDonald’s to Japan three decades ago. “If we eat McDonald’s hamburgers and potatoes for a thousand years,” Fujita once promised his countrymen, “we will become taller, our skin will become white, and our hair will be blonde.”

The impact of fast food is readily apparent in Germany, which has become one of McDonald’s most profitable overseas markets. Germany is not only the largest country in Europe, but also the most Americanized. Although the four Allied powers occupied it after World War II, the Americans exerted the greatest lasting influence, perhaps because their nationalism was so inclusive, and their nation so distant. Children in West German schools were required to study English, facilitating the spread of American pop culture. Young people who sought to distance themselves from the wartime behavior of their parents found escape in American movies, music, and novels. “For a child growing up in the turmoil of [postwar] Berlin… the Americans were angels,” Christa Maerker, a Berlin filmmaker, wrote in an essay on postwar Germany’s infatuation with the United States. “Anything from them was bigger and more wonderful than anything that preceded it.”

The United States and Germany fought against each other twice in the twentieth century, but the enmity between them has often seemed less visceral than other national rivalries. The recent takeover of prominent American corporations — such as Chrysler, Random House, and RCA Records — by German companies provoked none of the public anger that was unleashed when Japanese firms bought much less significant American assets in the 1980s. Despite America’s long-standing “special relationship” with Great Britain, the underlying cultural ties between the United States and Germany, though less obvious, are equally strong. Americans with German ancestors far outnumber those with English ancestors. Moreover, during the past century both American culture and German culture have shown an unusually strong passion for science, technology, engineering, empiricism, social order, and efficiency. The electronic paper-towel dispenser that I saw in a Munich men’s room is the spiritual kin of the gas-powered ketchup dispensers at the McDonald’s in Colorado Springs.

The traditional German restaurant — serving schnitzel, bratwurst, knackwurst, sauerbraten, and large quantities of beer — is rapidly disappearing in Germany. Such establishments now account for less than one-third of the German foodservice market. Their high labor costs have for the most part been responsible for their demise, along with the declining popularity of schnitzel. McDonald’s Deutschland, Inc., is by far the biggest restaurant company in Germany today, more than twice as large as the nearest competitor. It opened the first German McDonald’s in 1971; at the beginning of the 1990s it had four hundred restaurants, and now it has more than a thousand. The company’s main dish happens to be named after Hamburg, a German