Divided, But Not Disconnected: German Experiences of the Cold War

By Tobias Hochscherf and Andrew Plowman

The Allied agreement after the Second World War did not only partition Germany, it divided the nation along the fault-lines of a new bipolar world order. This inner border made Germany a unique place to experience the Cold War, and the “German question” in this post-1945 variant remained inextricably entwined with the vicissitudes of the Cold War until its end. This volume explores how social and cultural practices in both German states between 1949 and 1989 were shaped by the existence of this inner border, putting them on opposing sides of the ideological divide between the Western and Eastern blocs, as well as stabilizing relations between them. This volume’s interdisciplinary approach addresses important intersections between history, politics, and culture, offering an important new appraisal of the German experiences of the Cold War.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Release date: Dec 1, 2010
• ISBN: 9781845456467

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DIVIDED, BUT NOT DISCONNECTED

Divided, but Not Disconnected

German Experiences of the Cold War

Edited by

Tobias Hochscherf, Christoph Laucht and Andrew Plowman

First published in 2010 by

Berghahn Books

www.berghahnbooks.com

©2010, 2013 Tobias Hochscherf, Christoph Laucht and Andrew Plowman

First paperback edition published in 2013

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Divided, but not disconnected : German experiences of the Cold War / edited by Tobias Hochscherf, Christoph Laucht and Andrew Plowman.

  p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-84545-751-8 (hardback) -- ISBN 978-1-84545-646-7 (institutional ebook) ISBN 978-1-78238-099-3 (paperback) -- ISBN 978-1-78238-100-6 (retail ebook)

1. Germany—History—1945–1990. 2. Historiography—Germany—History—20th century. 3. Political culture—Germany—History—20th century. 4. Germany—Politics and government—1945–1990. 5. Germany—Civilization—20th century. 6. Cold War—Social aspects—Germany. I. Hochscherf, Tobias, 1976– II. Laucht, Christoph, 1976– III. Plowman, Andrew, 1966–

DD258.7.D59 2010

943.087—dc22

2010023960

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Printed in the United States on acid-free paper.

ISBN: 978-1-78238-099-3 paperback   ISBN: 978-1-78238-100-6 retail ebook

Contents

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

Introduction

Tobias Hochscherf, Christoph Laucht and Andrew Plowman

1. Divided, but Not Disconnected: Germany as a Border Region of the Cold War

Thomas Lindenberger

2. Fighting the First World War in the Cold War: East and West German Historiography on the Origins of the First World War, 1949–1959

Matthew Stibbe

3. The Sideways Gaze: The Cold War and Memory of the Nazi Past, 1949–1970

Bill Niven

4. Recasting Luther’s Image: The 1983 Commemoration of Martin Luther in the GDR

Jon Berndt Olsen

5. West German Labour Internationalism and the Cold War

Quinn Slobodian

6. The German Question and Polish–East German Relations, 1945–1962

Sheldon Anderson

7. From Bulwark of Freedom to Cosmopolitan Cocktails: The Cold War, Mass Tourism and the Marketing West Berlin as a Tourist Destination

Michelle A. Standley

8. Projections of History: East German Film-Makers and the Berlin Wall

Séan Allan

9. Defending the Border? Satirical Treatments of the Bundeswehr after the 1960s

Andrew Plowman

10. East versus West: Olympic Sport as a German Cold War Phenomenon

Christopher Young

11. Films from the ‘Other Side’: The Influence of the Cold War on West German Feature Film Import in the GDR

Rosemary Stott

12. The Shadows of the Past in Germany: Visual Representation, the Male Hero, and the Cold War

Inge Marszolek

13. Reenacting the First Battle of the Cold War: Post-Wall German Television Confronts the Berlin Airlift in Die Luftbrücke – Nur der Himmel war frei

Tobias Hochscherf and Christoph Laucht

14. Unusual Censor Readings: East German Science Fiction and the GDR Ministry of Culture

Patrick Major

15. Funerals in Berlin: The Geopolitical and Cultural Spaces of the Cold War

James Chapman

Select Bibliography

Notes on Contributors

Index

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the British Academy for the award of a grant that supported speakers attending a symposium held in Liverpool in September 2006, at which many contributors to the volume were able to meet and exchange ideas. A special note of thanks must also be directed at the School of Cultures, Languages and Area Studies at the University of Liverpool, particularly to Professor Eve Rosenhaft, for the provision of financial and – above all – organizational support. We would also like to record our gratitude to Marion Berghahn and Berghahn Books for their valuable encouragement and comments from the early stages of a proposal outline to the final manuscript.

Abbreviations

Introduction

Tobias Hochscherf, Christoph Laucht and Andrew Plowman

On a basic level, it was its inner border that made Germany a unique place to experience the Cold War. The settlement agreed between the Allies at the Potsdam Conference not only partitioned Germany but divided the German nation, alone among the nations in Europe, along the fault lines of a new bipolar world order. With the integration of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) into the political, military and economic alliances of the West and the German Democratic Republic (GDR) into the Soviet bloc, the divide was cemented and the two states evolved in contrary directions.

The ‘German question’ in this post-1945 variant remained inextricably entwined with the vicissitudes of the Cold War until its end. Today, no event is more symbolic of the end of the conflict than the fall of the Berlin Wall, the preeminent symbol of German division following its construction in 1961. But unlike the apparent fixity – at least until 9 November 1989 – of the stone and concrete that made up the Wall, the border itself was never a wholly fixed value. This is true for the different ways in which it was experienced and in turn shaped experience within the two German states. For one thing, the meanings of Germany’s inner borders were hotly contested between West and East Germany, and they changed over time, particularly in the West, where they became less important. Further, the existence of an inner border running along the fault lines of the Cold War also, as Thomas Lindenberger observes in the opening essay, assigned new and, again, different meanings to Germany’s outer borders in their respective Western and Eastern geopolitical contexts. If the inner-German border, finally, was where – in Europe, at least – the two sides in the conflict stood most starkly opposed to one another, then it was also the site of competition and trade-offs between the two Germanys. The character of these interactions, which shaped the experience of the conflict so deeply (and again, unevenly) in so many areas, were owed to another unique fact about Germany in the Cold War: namely, that the two states shared the same language and a common history, as well as kinship structures across the divide.

This book offers an analysis of divided Germany as a unique site in the global Cold War, and it focuses in particular on the various kinds of interaction between the two halves that made it so. Employing a resolutely interdisciplinary approach, the essays in the volume explore how the fact of German division shaped the various experiences of the conflict in politics, society and culture at different times, and in different places and contexts in the FRG and the GDR.¹ Because the conflict could be felt in so many walks of life, the contributions gathered here examine how the different experiences of the Cold War left their mark on a cross-section of areas, including history, memory and international relations, as well as popular culture. The chapters offer case studies in a wide range of topics, from sport to science-fiction writing to border conflicts and development aid. As a set, these range from the early years of the conflict, when the discourses that came to define the conflict were only beginning to be implemented, to its decline. Some of them – such as Bill Niven’s discussion of the conflicts over the memory of the National Socialist past – compare and contrast developments in both Germanys. To the extent that specific experiences need not, and in some cases cannot, be compared on a one-to-one basis, others – like Patrick Major’s account of the negotiations between authors of science fiction and pre-censors in the GDR – focus more on one side, though always with a view to the broader interpretative framework of the Cold War. Two contributions place themes relating to the conflict in later, broader contexts: Tobias Hochscherf and Christoph Laucht’s and James Chapman’s examinations respectively of the post-unification representation of the Berlin airlift of 1948–49 and of divided Berlin as a preferred setting for international spy thrillers. What is fascinating here is to see how specific German experiences of the conflict shade into the competing and complementary ‘cultures of remembrance’ that for one commentator now define the memory of it.²

In the years since the end of the Cold War, scholars’ understanding of both the ‘shape’ of the German question within it and the nature of the fronts on which the conflict was ‘waged’ has undergone important shifts. Even shortly before the events of 1989–90, comparatively few observers might have taken issue with any expert who chose to stress the growing political, social and cultural differences between the GDR and the FRG as they became embedded in the respective ideological blocs. Above and beyond cultural elites, ‘ordinary’ Germans too felt these differences whenever they met their relatives from the other side. The logic of division was accepted in East and West Germany by the 1970s at the latest. The last great moment of crisis between the two states, the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, had in the short and medium term stabilized relations between them. By 1971, the GDR was pursuing an aggressive policy of ‘demarcation’ from the West that saw references to the ‘German nation’ dropped from its 1974 constitution. Around the same time, Chancellor Willy Brandt’s enunciation of Ostpolitik in the West in practice acknowledged the existence of the GDR, though short of full recognition and without renouncing the FRG’s claim to be the sole legitimate representative of the German nation.³

The construction of difference was a real and deeply entrenched process on both sides. Some years after unification, however, scholars across a range of disciplines have grasped how comprehensively previous assumptions about the development of the two parts of Germany need rethinking. A pioneer here was the historian Christoph Kleßmann. As early as 1988 he had proposed, in the face of the ‘common-sense’ view that the two Germanys were growing apart, that the relation between them be understood as one of ‘asymmetrical entanglement’.⁴ The logic of grasping postwar German history in terms of both separation and interconnection and in a way that reflects the greater influence of the FRG on the GDR has become widely accepted. More recently, too, Kleßmann has remained at the forefront of thinking about the issues of perspective that Germany’s divided past now throws up. Primary among these is the need to avoid the temptation to read backwards from the telos of unification in a fashion that turns Germany’s dual history into a single one in disguise, while at the same time cultivating a fresh sensitivity to the elements in it that made unification possible.⁵ The notion that Germany was ‘divided, but not disconnected’ underpins this volume. If it can seem like a truism today, it is worth remarking how much work remains to be done to map out how specifically it shaped everyday practices and culture in the two Germanys, both in detail and across a broad range of areas.⁶

Where the wider Cold War is concerned, attention has shifted from the diplomatic towards the cultural dimension of the conflict. While the ‘new’ Cold War history, championed among others by John Lewis Gaddis,⁷ continues to plot its course in the arena of high politics, commentators such as Patrick Major – a contributor here – and Rana Mitter have argued for examining its sociocultural aspects more paradigmatically.⁸ All wars, including hot ones, have been fought using words and images, and in the case of the Cold War, film and television, books and comics, sports and music can also illuminate its cultural and psychological aspects.⁹ The shift towards the sociocultural dimension of the conflict has brought with it a greater focus on the construction of ideological meanings on the home front. This is neither to suggest that the Cold War can be reduced to a number of cultural experiences (or even a specific monolithic cultural experience) nor to posit that all social and cultural phenomena are ultimately linked to the conflict, but such an approach offers rich dividends with regard to the entanglements in the German situation.¹⁰ Nowhere else did the broader geopolitical fault lines of the conflict overlap so closely with the home front. Nowhere else, indeed, were the home fronts themselves so enmeshed as each side sought to assert its own legitimacy and to negate that of the other.

Thomas Lindenberger’s concept of Germany as a border region of the Cold War, which he explains in this volume’s opening essay, also offers a way of conceptualizing how the interfaces between the FRG and the GDR shaped the German experiences of the conflict in both a political and a broader cultural sense. What is at issue here is not simply a history of the structures that divided the two Germanys – whether in the form of the sectoral borders established after 1945, the German-German border effectively sealed off in 1952, or the Wall itself. Though these frequently come into view, the overarching emphasis is rather on the way the contradictory effects of borders as such made themselves felt in the unique situation of German division. As Lindenberger explains, borders as lines separate polities territorially; but as zones they create the need for interaction and exchange – sometimes less, sometimes more amicable. In the German case, processes of mutual delimitation on the one hand and interaction on the other influenced social and cultural experience as profoundly and widely as they did because the points at which the two states were forced to confront one another were so many, in view of their shared heritage (in both its positive and its negative dimensions).

While the increasingly lopsided character, in Kleßmann’s sense, of the relationship between the two Germanys is an explicit or implicit theme in many chapters, Lindenberger’s approach offers a heuristic model for understanding the ever more obvious imbalances in the ways in which they reacted to and interacted with one another. For the Federal Republic, Germany’s inner border finally lost much of its signal importance in the process of its integration into the West. As its neighbours and allies there became the yardstick by which West Germany measured itself politically and socially, the ‘other’ Germany and division itself became less of an issue in day-to-day life. For the GDR, by contrast, the border to the FRG remained fundamental and demanded constant vigilance. As everyone knows, the Berlin Wall never provided the hermetic seal the regime desired. Whether it was the existence of West Berlin (which literally fixed the border at the heart of the GDR) or, to name just two examples, the availability of West German television and the access to American popular culture that partly followed from this fact, the task of delimiting itself from the FRG remained a source of pressure for East Germany. Where the authorities did not, or could not, police points of contact as rigorously as they did the border, or where they were forced to enter into negotiations, they risked surrendering some of their authority. This basic lack of symmetry was reflected from the outset in the very language used to articulate the basic fact of the border in discourses on each side. A chief metaphor of the Cold War, the ‘Iron Curtain’ (or ‘the Wall’), was charged from the Western perspective with the ideological association of restriction for the other side: one either enjoyed liberty in a privileged position ‘in front of’ it, or was confined ‘behind’ it. For its part, the official designation of antifaschistischer Schutzwall or ‘anti-fascist protection wall’ in the GDR was visibly always oriented towards the West in so far as it was premised on the threat and influence that was perceived to emanate from it.¹¹

In Chapter One, Thomas Lindenberger thus opens up a broader theoretical space for the examination of the distinct experiences of the conflict in the chapters that follow. In addition, he himself offers a clarification of this fundamental concept in relation to three areas central to the German experience of the conflict: the question of Germany’s territorial integrity, the inner-German antagonism over the National Socialist past and the intersection of the mass media public spheres of the two states. Lindenberger concludes by considering the lessons that the singular German case can offer for understanding other manifestations of the conflict and other geopolitical confrontations across the globe.

The following four chapters consider how the Cold War inflected historiography, cultural memory and politics of both sides of the border. Focusing on disputes over the decision of leadership of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) to vote for war credits in August 1914 in Chapter Two, Matthew Stibbe contrasts the interpretation of the First World War by West and East German historians. While the disputes were important for the attempts of the GDR regime to establish a Marxist-Leninist historiography able to compete with the allegedly ‘bourgeois’ historiography of the West, it also showed, he argues, how historians on both sides claimed to represent the national interest of all Germans. Bill Niven follows on in Chapter Three by considering the conflicts over the interpretation of National Socialism in the two Germanys between 1949 and 1969. Niven shows how these, too, became crucial battlegrounds in which each side sought to demonstrate its own legitimacy and the illegitimacy of the other: the significance of the Cold War for the memory of National Socialism was that Germans were encouraged to look ‘sideways’, westwards or eastwards, for the guilty party rather than confront their own responsibility. Chapter Four deals with the contested memory of Martin Luther on the occasion in 1983 of the 500th anniversary of his birth. In this chapter, Jon Berndt Olsen explores how the GDR, which had previously mistrusted Luther as a reactionary figure on account of his opposition to the peasants’ uprising of 1524, sought to lay claim to the image of Luther after a shift in policy towards the past. Where Olsen deals with competition between the two German states for ownership of Germany’s past cultural achievements, Quinn Slobodian, in Chapter Five, examines the struggle for influence in the developing world in the present. Slobodian’s specific focus is the way organizations linked to the West German labour movement adopted stances in support of the foreign policy of the West German state abroad in the political climate of the Cold War that were at odds with their position in domestic politics at the time.

The overarching theme for the following set of chapters is the motif of the border itself in politics and culture. In Chapter Six, Sheldon Anderson looks at the controversies surrounding the GDR’s external border with Poland. From the West, the GDR and Poland may have looked like part of the seamless unity of the Warsaw Pact. But as Anderson demonstrates, the Oder-Neiße border looked very different on the East German side, being a constant source of tension and antagonism between these states, deeply historically rooted and compounded by disagreements about Soviet-bloc policy towards West Germany. The next two contributions focus on Berlin and the Berlin Wall as specific Cold War sites. Examining the promotional activity of West Berlin’s tourist industry, in Chapter Seven Michelle Standley explores the marketing of West Berlin as a Cold War tourist destination around the time of the construction of the Wall and the shift away from this after the 1970s as emphasis switched to presenting the Western part of the city above all to younger travellers as a trendy Western metropolis. In Chapter Eight, Seán Allan analyses the representation of the Wall in East German films. He focuses on a handful of treatments of its construction, such as Karl Gass’s documentary Schaut auf diese Stadt (Behold this City, 1962), and explains the developments in cultural policy that made further engagement with the subject impossible after 1967. He then concludes with a discussion of cinematic images of the demise of the Wall. In Chapter Nine Andrew Plowman’s examination of satirical images of the West German Bundeswehr illustrates the asymmetrical relations between the two German states. East German satire in matters of rearmament resolutely targeted the Bundeswehr. But whilst they mocked the ability of the Bundeswehr to defend the inner-German border, he argues, West German satirists foregrounded the debate surrounding military reform in the Federal Republic rather than the ‘other side’.

The next two chapters look at the way in which the FRG and the GDR confronted one another and were of necessity forced to compete and interact with one another in the sphere of culture. Christopher Young’s topic in Chapter Ten is the sporting battle between the two states at the Munich Olympics in 1972. Young examines how the staging of the Games in Germany added impetus to each side’s efforts to trump the other. Whilst state sponsorship of sport ensured that the GDR ran out clear winners, Young emphasizes – in a rare example, perhaps, of the FRG attempting to match East German achievements – how sporting success on both sides was owed to the rivalry between them. In Chapter Eleven, Rosemary Stott examines a neglected aspect of cultural transfer between the two Germanys in the sphere of film. Stott argues that the case of feature-film imports from the FRG to the GDR since the 1970s not only illustrates the latter’s growing reliance on imports from the hitherto most mistrusted of all Western film-producing nations, but also an increasing convergence in audience tastes on either side.

The final chapters focus more specifically on the way in which various media have both served to implement and in turn represented various German experiences of the Cold War. Inge Marszolek explores the construction of masculinity as the male hero in photographs and posters in the conflict’s early years in Chapter Twelve. She demonstrates how images strongly associated with the Weimar Republic, National Socialism and the Second World War were encoded with new meanings and exploited to construct a cultural memory in tune with the respective ideology on each side. In Chapter Thirteen, Tobias Hochscherf and Christoph Laucht examine how Dror Zahavi’s recent television film Die Luftbrücke – Nur der Himmel war frei (The Airlift – Only the Sky Was Open) reinterpreted the story of the Berlin airlift for contemporary viewers in 2005. They show how a popular contemporary film in many respects exemplary of a wider trend in German culture constructs the events of 1948–49 as a German foundation narrative that is both Americanized and characterized by a search for a new, independent national identity. Patrick Major considers how literary censors dealt with the science fiction produced by GDR authors in Chapter Fourteen. A preeminently though not exclusively Western genre, science fiction often sold well in the East, where it was a telling example of the negotiation of cultural power. While authors were forced to navigate the tension between the futurological speculations associated with the genre and the supposedly more ‘scientific’ predictions of Marxism-Leninism, Major argues, official readers often chose to promote a commodity that was in short supply as well as the claims of a limited public sphere. Finally, Chapter Fifteen reminds us that the perception of Germany as a border region was also part of a wider experience of the Cold War. In an examination of the representation of Berlin as a geopolitical space, James Chapman shows how Anglo-American spy novels by the likes of John le Carré and Ian Fleming, and the films based on them, forged an iconography of the conflict that persists in audience memories beyond Germany’s own frontiers.

Given both the interdisciplinary nature of the collection and its breadth, many readers will approach it with a view to finding out more about specific topics that are treated here. But while it may be presumptuous to prescribe any manner of reading a text, we as editors hope that it should be approached also as a whole. To this end, we have included a number of cross-references throughout the volume that are designed to highlight central thematic continuities across it and to illuminate some of the many facets of Cold War culture. While some of the chapters engage with existing debates, others seek to open up new and neglected areas of study. In both respects, the volume is intended to act as a stimulus to scholars wishing to develop their own work on Cold War Germany in key political, cultural and even transnational contexts. In a Germany in which the legacy of division in the conflict forms an important part of cultural memory, the need to understand the past will always have an urgent resonance; thus the scholar who approaches it has a special responsibility. The divided memory of the Cold War past has become an important field in German cultural studies in its own right and need not be fully entered into here.¹² Yet here too, a clear grasp of the way in which past experiences do and do not filter into the construction of present memories can only further our understanding of the lasting impact of the inner-German border.

A recent example pertinent to one of the final contributions to the volume illustrates this. As US and British air veterans, former West German support staff, politicians and journalists from various nations descended on Berlin in June 2008 to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of the start of the Allied airlift, one may reflect on the dynamics at work as the Germans remembered the events. Was the act of remembering one in which the end of the airlift had become overlaid with the memory of the fall of the Wall and the end of the Cold War itself? What justice did the commemorations do to East German memories of the event? In short, were these memories that were shared by all Germans or that continued to divide them? This anniversary of the airlift perhaps offered only an inkling of the questions that the German memorial year 2009 would throw up as the unified nation marked both the sixtieth anniversary of the foundation of the two German states and the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. There is a very real risk that in Germany today the asymmetry that once characterized the relation between the two German states may be writ large in the form of a public memory that privileges the point of view of a Federal Republic that was on the side of the ‘victors’ of the Cold War. In the face of such pressure, it is important to insist on the diversity of Cold War experiences as the conflict unfolded. A fresh consideration of the manifold ways in which Germany was ‘divided, but not disconnected’ can form an important part of this process.

Notes

1. Holger Nehring makes a similar point about the experience of the conflict when he describes the pluralistic ‘cultures of the Cold War’. See ‘The British and West German Protests against Nuclear Weapons and the Cultures of the Cold War, 1957–64’, Contemporary British History, 19.2 (2005), 223–41 (p. 224).

2. Jost Dülffer, ‘Cold War History in Germany’, Cold War History, 8.2 (2008), 135–56 (p. 135).

3. Konrad H. Jarausch, Hinrich C. Seeba and David P. Conradt, ‘The Presence of the Past: Culture, Opinion and Identity in Germany’, in After Unity: Reconfiguring German Identities, ed. by Konrad H. Jarausch (Oxford: Berghahn, 1997), pp. 25–60 (pp. 40–42).

4. Christoph Kleßmann, Zwei Staaten, eine Nation: Deutsche Geschichte 1955–1970, 2nd rev. edn (Bonn: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, 1997), p. 13.

5. Christoph Kleßmann, ‘Introduction’, in The Divided Past: Rewriting Postwar German History, ed. by Christoph Kleßmann (Oxford: Berg, 2001), pp. 1–9 (pp. 1–3).

6. An attempt to unravel the issues in the case of consumer culture is Consuming Germany in the Cold War, ed. by David Crew (Oxford: Berg, 2003).

7. John Lewis Gaddis, We know now: Rethinking Cold War History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

8. Rana Mitter and Patrick Major, ‘East is East and West? Towards a Comparative Socio-Cultural History of the Cold War’, in Across the Blocs: Cold War Cultural and Social History, ed. by Rana Mitter and Patrick Major (London: Cass, 2004), pp. 1–20 (pp. 1–2).

9. Tony Shaw, ‘The Politics of Cold War Culture’, Journal of Cold War Studies, 3.3 (2001), 59–76 (p. 59).

10. Not least in a classic study of the influence of American culture on both sides of the divide such as Uta Poiger, Jazz, Rock and Rebels: Cold War Politics and American Culture in a Divided Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).

11. Christian Koller, ‘Der Eiserne Vorhang: Zur Genese einer politischen Zentralmetapher in der Epoche des Kalten Krieges’, Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenshaft [hereafter ZfG], 54.4 (2006), 366–384 (p. 367). Patrick Major examines the impact the Berlin Wall had on everyday life in the GDR in Behind the Berlin Wall: East Germany and the Frontiers of Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

12. See for example Paul Cooke, Representing East Germany since Unification: From Colonization to Nostalgia (Oxford: Berg, 2005).

1

Divided, but Not Disconnected

Germany as a Border Region of the Cold War

Thomas Lindenberger

‘Cold War Experience’ and ‘Cold War Predicament’

Within historical literature, it has increasingly become standard practice to refer to the ‘Cold War’ as an ‘experience’ rather than just a brute fact. From a strictly methodological point of view this may seem banal, since ‘experience’ is the way in which humans confront, form and remember any ‘reality’. To emphasize the dimension of subjectivity and perception here recognizes, of course, the paramount weight of the seemingly ‘objective’ and life-threatening ‘facts’ through which the Cold War marked world history for more than four decades. Bernd Stöver has convincingly made the case for considering the Cold War as a ‘system’ constituted by the basic ideological conflict between the two hegemonic powers on the one hand, and the threat of extermination through nuclear warfare on the other.¹ With the establishment and stabilization of this system after 1945 a number of non-hegemonic countries and societies were forced to align themselves within it. This occurred on essentially nonvoluntary grounds in the Soviet, and on an essentially voluntary basis in the American sphere of influence, reflecting an asymmetry that was itself a constituent of the ideological conflict. The inevitability with which the bipolar world order imposed itself on its spheres of influence relied on a fundamental fear of absolute