I was living in Europe during the Marshall-plan years and Berlin airlift. Even then, many Europeans thought that the US was acting for purely self-interest reasons and felt no gratitude towards America.
” ... many Europeans thought that the US was acting for purely self-interest reasons and felt no gratitude towards America.”
I briefly lived in France on two separate occasions in the early to mid 1990s. I was pleasantly surprised when many older Frenchmen, upon learning that I was an American, expressed deep gratitude for the U.S. role in helping to liberate France from the Nazis. It went a long way to dispel my preconceptions about the “arrogant, haughty” French.
By contrast, I briefly lived in England in 2000 and found some Brits to be completely disdainful of Americans in general and, initially, of me in particular. It was only when I won the title of “Pub King” at a local watering hole in Oxford that I gained a modicum of respect!
The next generations were trying to bury their own history and forget everyone and everything that transpired in WWII. The teen age girls liked American boys and that grated on the metrosexuals the German males had become.