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21-03-2015, 16:53

Culture and the Cold War in Europe

Scholars interested in European-American cultural relations can draw on a plentiful literature. For a general assessment of US cultural diplomacy, see Frank Ninkovich, The Diplomacy of Ideas: US Foreign Policy and Cultural Relations, 1938-1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Hans Tuch, Communicating with the World: US Diplomacy Overseas (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990); Randolph Wieck, Ignorance Abroad: American Educational and Cultural Foreign Policy and the Office of Assistant Secretary of State (Westport, CT.: Praeger, 1992); and Laura A. Belmonte, Selling the American Way: US Propaganda and the Cold War (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).



For US cultural diplomacy in Europe, see Henry J. Kellermann, Cultural Relations as an Instrument of US Foreign Policy: The Educational Exchange Program between the United States and Germany (Washington, DC: US Department of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, 1978); and Manuela Aguilar, Cultural Diplomacy and Foreign Policy: German-American Relations, 1955-1968 (New York: Peter Lang, 1996).



Cultural imperialism and transmission since 1945 are the topic of Richard Pells, Not Like Us: How Europeans Have Loved, Hated, and Transformed American Culture since World War II (New York: Basic Books, 1997); Reinhold Wagnleitner, Coca-colonization and the Cold War: The Cultural Mission of the United States in Austria after the Second World War (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina, 1994); Rob Kroes, Robert W. Rydell, and Doeko F. J. Bosscher (eds.), Cultural Transmissions and Receptions: American Mass Culture in Europe (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1993); and Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht, "Cultural Transfer," in Michael Hogan and Thomas Patterson (eds.), Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 257-78. In Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), Victoria de Grazia argues that American consumer society constitutes the key conquest of the twentieth century.



Reeducation and high culture in the media are at the heart of Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht, Transmission Impossible: American Journalism as Cultural Diplomacy in Postwar Germany, 1945-1955 (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1999); and David Monod, Settling Scores: German Music, Denazification, and the Americans, 1945-1953 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). Klaus Arnold analyzes East German broadcasting in Kalter Krieg im Ather: der Deutschlandsender und die Westpropaganda der DDR (Munster: LIT, 2002).



For analyses of US cultural diplomacy since the 1970s, see Hans Tuch, "Die amerikani-sche Kulturpolitik in der Bundesrepublik," in Die USA und Deutschland im Zeitalter des Kalten



Krieges: ein Handbuch, vol. II, ed. Detlef Junker in coUaboration with Phihpp Gassert, Wilfried Mausbach and David B. Morris (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 2001), 420-29.



The role of nongovernmental organizations is the subject of Hermann-Josef Rupieper, Die Wurzeln der westdeutschen Nachkriegsdemokratie (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1993). Historians haggle over the question of whether governments, NGOs, and secret services departed from a strict interpretation of "freedom" in order to funnel funds clandestinely to pro-American organizations. See Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta, 1999); Scott Lucas, Freedom's War: The US Crusade against the Soviet Union, 1945-1956 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999); Giles Scott-Smith, The Politics of Apolitical Culture: The Congress for Cultural Freedom, the CIA, and Postwar American Hegemony (London: Routledge, 2002); and Hugh Wilford, The CIA, the British Left, and the Cold War (Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 2003).



For European reactions to American cultural efforts, see Robert Hewison, In Anger: Culture in the Cold War, 1945-1960 (New York: Oxford, 1981); for reactions to the Marshall Plan, see Richard Kuisel, Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993); Brian McKenzie, Remaking France: Americanization, Public Diplomacy, and the Marshall Plan (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005); David Ellwood, "The Propaganda of the Marshall Plan in Italy in a Cold War Context," in Giles Scott-Smith and Hans Krabbendam (eds.), The Cultural Cold War in Western Europe, 1945-1960 (London: Frank Cass, 2004), 225-36.



Assessments of German youth culture in the 1950s are offered by Kasper Maase's BRAVO Amerika: Erkundungen zur Jugendkultur in der Bundesrepublik der funfziger Jahre (Hamburg: Junius, 1992); and Axel Schildt, Moderne Zeiten: Freizeit, Massenmedien und “Zeitgeist” in der Bundesrepublik der funfziger Jahre (Hamburg: Christians, 1995). For an introduction to the role of Hollywood, see David Ellwood (ed.), Hollywood in Europe: Experiences of a Cultural Hegemony (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1994). The role of American popular culture in East and West Germany is covered by Uta Poiger, Jazz, Rock, and Rebels: Cold War Politics and American Culture in a Divided Germany (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000).



The number of comparative research projects on the cultural dimension of the Cold War remains small. For a methodological discussion, see Patrick Major and Rana Mitter, "East Is East and West Is West? Towards a Comparative Socio-Cultural History of the Cold War," in Rana Mitter and Patrick Major (eds.), Across the Blocs: Cold War Cultural and Social History (London: Frank Cass, 2004), 1-22. Though critical, Frederick Charles Barghoorn's The Soviet Cultural Offensive: The Role of Cultural Diplomacy in Soviet Foreign Policy (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1976) praises the imagination and efficiency of Soviet cultural diplomacy. A regional approach is offered by David Pike, The Politics of Culture in Soviet-Occupied Germany, 1945-1949 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992). David Caute's The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Diplomacy during the Cold War (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003) is excellent. The Journal of Cold War Studies, 4, i (Winter 2002), offers a special issue on Culture, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War. On Soviet exchange programs, see Yale Richmond, Cultural Exchange and the Cold War: Raising the Iron Curtain (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2003). For East European interpretations of the cultural struggle between East and West, see Bradley Abrams, The Struggle for the Soul of the Nation: Czech Culture and the Rise of Communism (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2004).



 

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