To give a thorough summary of the American impact on Germany would exceed the 10000 character limit of Reddit, and be quite difficult besides. The impact of "America" (note quotes) upon Germany was multifaceted and involved intersections of multiple actors and developments. Some of the impact was a direct result of the American occupation, such as the incomplete impact of OMGUS on the future FRG state structure, while others had deeper roots that predated the caesura of 1945, or even that of 1933 or 1918. American music, movies, business models all penetrated Germany and often had their own equivalents or reinterpretations such as the Westerns novels of Karl May. The impact of America did not just begin or emanate from OMGUS, however important the US military occupation was for the future course of West Germany, but had many wellsprings that often interacted with each other.

The term used more often in anglophone scholarship to describe the complex relationship between the US and Germany is "Americanization." A number of scholars have questioned the validity or appropriateness of the term; especially since what many contemporaneous Germans disparaged as Amerikanisierung was sometimes a native or European development. Winfried Fluck's essay "The Americanization of German Culture? The Strange, Paradoxical Ways of Modernity" argues that Americanization is not a two-way cultural street, but a confusing global melange. Volker Berghahn's speech at the 1999 GHI conference "The American Impact on Western Europe: Americanization and Westernization in Transatlantic Perspective" defends the term's usefulness, but notes that the term should be qualified in its use.

For this project, the Berghahn essay is probably the place to start. The following is a list, which is by no means comprehensive, of useful titles and commentary on them broken down schematically.

• Globalization and Transnational To belabor a point, the Occupation did not happen in a vacuum, and many contemporaries understood this as well. Sebastian Conrad's Globalisation and the Nation in Imperial Germany and The Quest for the Lost Nation: Writing History in Germany and Japan in the American Century both tackle more than their titles hint at, and really put the period of postwar period of direct American political hegemony into context. Media culture is another area in which America's shadow looms large, and Corey Ross's Media and the Making of Modern Germany is an excellent study of German culture that eschews the traditional periodization of 1871/1918/1933/1945 that dominates a good deal of scholarship on German culture and society. Both Kindred by Choice: Germans and American Indians since 1800 and the anthology Germans and African Americans: Two Centuries of Exchange tackle racial matters while also sidestepping periodization based on political regime change.

• The Occupation Itself One of the dominant Leitmotifs of the historiography of the American occupation is that its half-measures and compromises scuppered chances at real substantive reform or even a thorough denazification. This view became quite dominant around the 1960s and 70s when the first real systematic studies of the Occupation found it rather wanting compared to the near hagiographic accounts produced by some of the principal actors of OMGUS/HICOG. John Gimbel's A German Community Under American Occupation: Marburg, 1945-52, followed up by The American Occupation of Germany: Politics and the Military, 1945-1949 helped to push back against this self-congratulatory image. Richard L. Merritt's Democracy Imposed: U.S. Occupation Policy and the German Public, 1945-1949 is a landmark text not only because of its lucidity, but also because it marshaled the voluminous OMGUS public opinion surveys of German opinion inside the American zone. Two recent monographs have a more favorable estimation of the Occupation than the scholars of the 1960s: Rebecca Boehling's A Question of Priorities and Michael Hayse's Recasting West German Elites. Boehling, for example, is quite critical of OMGUS's preference for conservative German intermediaries over bona fide anti-fascists, but also observes this was understandable in the context of the chaotic administration and lack of planning for the Occupation. Patrick Thaddeus Jackson's Civilizing the Enemy: German Reconstruction and the Invention of the West is an interesting monograph over the construction of a new identity for Germany by its occupier.

• Cultural Americanization OMGUS policy was not the only catalyst for change during the Occupation. Ute Poiger's Jazz, Rock, and Rebels: Cold War Politics and American Culture in a Divided Germany examines the first generation of postwar youth and the impact the cultural America had upon this cohort and the various intersections music had with others of the German postwar experience. The relevant sections The Miracle Years edited by Hanna Schissler also are useful windows into cultural Americanization. Even though it has to do with Austria, much of what Reinhold Wagnleitner describes in Coca-Colonization and the Cold War: The Cultural Mission of the United States in Austria after the Second World War can apply to other areas of Central Europe. Race After Hitler: Black Occupation Children in Postwar Germany and America by Heide Fehrenbach tackles one of the taboos of the postwar period for both the US and West Germany. A more broader look at gender relations is GIs and Fräuleins: The German-American Encounter in 1950s West Germany by Maria Hohn.

• Denazification and Postwar Justice Despite its popular reputation to the contrary, denazification was something of a qualified failure in all the occupation zones (Soviet and Western). Mission on the Rhine: Reeducation and Denazification in American-Occupied Germany by James F. Tent argues that the denazification of German education had a limited success. The Heidelberg Myth: The Nazification and Denazification of a German University by Steven P. Remy is a bit more skeptical of the success of denazification on higher education. Settling Scores: German Music, Denazification, and the Americans, 1945-1953 by David Monod not only has one of the great titles of recent monographs on postwar Germany, Monod also traces why Americans cut short their promises to purge out the former Nazis from German cultural institutions. Valerie Hebert's Hitler's Generals on Trial: The Last War Crimes Tribunal at Nuremberg and Tomaz Jardim's The Mauthausen Trial: American military justice in Germany are recent accounts on the subsequent Nuremberg proceedings launched by the United States, and they both have valuable insights in thier introductions as to the overall historiography of the National Military Tribunals.

• German Responses to America Naturally, the Germans were not passive partners in this process and a good deal of recent scholarship has been devoted to finding a German voice in the Occupation. Norbert Frei's Adenauer's Germany and the Nazi Past: The Politics of Amnesty and Integration is a landmark book on the evasions and obfuscations the nascent West German government engaged in both with the Americans as well as with other Germans. Jeffrey Olick's In the House of the Hangman: The Agonies of German Defeat, 1943-1949 examines issues like Jaspers' notion of collective guilt and other dimensions of how Germans dealt with the trauma of National Socialism. The anthology A Nazi Past: Recasting German Identity in Postwar Europe frames national and personal reinvention not only within the dynamics of the Occupation, but the wider Cold War and the growth of European sentiment. West Germans Against The West Anti-Americanism in Media and Public Opinion in the Federal Republic of Germany 1949–1968 by Christopher Müller notes not only the survival of a deep antipathy towards the US and its uncultured civilization, but also how Amerikanisierung was a boogeyman for West German cultural conservatives. Konrad Jarausch's After Hitler: Recivilizing the Germans, 1945-1995 examines both Germanys and the steps taken by the Allies to de-problematize a problematic country and the measured responses from the object of these efforts. Sean Forner's German Intellectuals and the Challenge of Democratic Renewal tends to eschew some of the judgemental pessimism of other historians of the postwar period and tries to uncover the postwar visions of Germany emerged in this period.