Americanization in West Germany: A conceptual overview of the term “Americanization” in German contemporary history Akiko Tanaka The USA had great influence in various areas at the birth and development of West German society. Although the Americanization in West Germany has been an object of studies for a long time, there is a little agreement to the definition of “Americanization”. This paper is intended as investigation of various paradigms of “Americanization” in contemporary German history, especially about West Germany. It is reasonable to consider the debate on Americanization through three types of paradigms: (1) Americanization as political integration into the West, or Americanization as westernization (2) Americanization as modernisation, (3) cultural Americanization. These three paradigms, which reflected the political state of the Cold War, tended to regard Americanization as a systematic change in general. With the end of the Cold War and the development of the historical-empirical scrutiny about the postwar era in West Germany since the late 1980s corrected the former ideas of the American influence on West German society. On the one hand, it has been pointed out that Americanization in the first decade after the war matured only gradually. In addition, discovering of continuity of Americanization under National Socialism questioned the assumption of simultaneous penetration of political Americanization and cultural one. On the other hand, several new approaches to cultural Americanization suggested by social and cultural historians, requires further attention about complexity of each process of cultural transfer across the Atlantic.