East is East and West is West? Towards a comparative socio-cultural history of the Cold War

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

1. John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

2. Lynn Boyd Hinds and Theodore Otto Windt, The Cold War as Rhetoric: The Beginnings, 1945-1950 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1991); Martin J. Medhurst et al., Cold War Rhetoric: Strategy, Metaphor and Ideology (Ann Arbor: Michigan State University Press, 1997); Shawn J. Parry-Giles, The Rhetorical Presidency, Propaganda and the Cold War, 1945-1955 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001).

3. But see Christian G. Appy (ed.), Cold War Constructions: fie Political Culture of United States Imperialism, 1945-1966 (Amherst: Massachusetts University Press, 2000); Peter J. Kuznick and James Gilbert (eds.), Rethinking Cold War Culture (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institute Press, 2001).

4. Kenneth A. Osgood, ‘Hearts and Minds: The Unconventional Cold War’, Journal of Cold War Studies 4/2 (2002), p.107. See also Tony Shaw, ‘The Politics of Cold War Culture’, Journal of Cold War Studies 3/3 (2001), pp.74-5. A pathbreaking new examination of links between social protest and global diplomacy is Jeremi Suri, Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Detente (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).

5. For instance, Arthur Marwick, The Deluge: British Society and the First World War (London: Bodley Head, 1965), and Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men's Bodies, Britain and the Great War (London: Reaktion Books, 1996).

6. Among the notable works are Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), and Jay Winter, Sites ofMemory, Sites ofMourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

7. Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: Harperperennial, 1993); Robert Gellately, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Gemzany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

8. Sarah Davies, Popular Opinion in Stalin's Russia: Error, Propaganda and Dissent, 1934-1941 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); see also Robert W Thurston, Life and Error in Stalin's Russia, 1934-1941 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996); Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Catherine Merridale, Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Twentieth-Century Russia (London: Granta, 2000).

9. E.P Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Penguin Press, 1991, original edn. 1963), p.12; Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (London: Hutchinson, 1975, original edn. 1973), p.14.

10. Robert D. Dean, ‘Masculinity as Ideology: John F. Kennedy and the Domestic Politics of Foreign Policy’, Diplomatic History 22 (1998), pp.29-62. See also idem, Imperial Brotherhood: Gender and the Making of Cold War Foreign Policy (Amherst: Massachusetts University Press, 2002).

11. Scott Lucas, Freedom's War: The US Crusade against the Soviet Union, 1945-56 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999). Although covering the whole of the twentieth century, rather than being specific to the Cold War, an agenda-setting approach to bringing ‘culture’ into the study of international society is Akira Iriye, Cultural Internationalism and World Order (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).

12. Geoffrey Barraclough, An Introduction to Contemporary History (London: Watts, 1964).

13. Tony Shaw, ‘The Politics of Cold War Culture’, Journal of Cold War Studies 313, p.74.

14. Philip Jenkins, The Cold War at Home: The Red Scare in Pennsylvania (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999). See also Richard Fried, The Russians are Coming! The Russians are Coming!: Pageantry and Patriotism in Cold-War America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998) One of the pathbreaking works linking the Cold War and American social history was Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988); innovative recent examples include Lee Bernstein, The Greatest Menace: Organized Crime in Cold War America (Amherst: Massachusetts University Press, 2002) and Daniel Horowitz, Betty Friedan and the Making of fie Feminine Mystique: The American Left, the Cold War, and Modern Feminism (Amherst: Massachusetts University Press, 2000).

15. For an excellent discursive overview: Stephen J. Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2nd edn., 1996).

16. For example, Peter Weiler, British Labour and the Cold War (Stanford, CA.: Stanford University Press, 1988).

17. Irwin M. Wall, The United States and the Making of Postwar France, 1945-1954 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); James E. Miller, The United States and Italy, 1940-1950: The Politics and Diplomacy of Stabilization (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986).

18. Peter Hennessv. The Secret State: Whitehall and the Cold War (London: Penguin. 2002).

19. Christopher diggan and Christopher Wagstaff (eds.), Italy in the Cold War (oxford: Berg, 1995).

20. Chrjstoph Kleßmann and Georg Wagner (eds.), Das gespaltene Land: Leben in Deutschland 1945 bis 1990: Texte und Dokumente (Munich: Beck, 1993).

21. Journal of Cold War Studies 4/1 (Winter 2002).

22. One of the few exceptions is Jeffrey Brooks, Thank you, Comrade Stalin!: Soviet Public Culture from Revolution to Cold War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp.210-32, though the primary focus is on the earlier years.

23. Eric Shiraev and Vladislav M. Zubok, Anti-Americanism in Russia: From Stalin to Putin (New York and Houndmills: Palgrave, 2000).

24. A good cross-section of the ZZF's work is available in English in Konrad H. Jarausch (ed.), Dictatorship as Experience: Towards a Socio-Cultural History of the GDR (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 1999); see also Mark Allinson, Politics and Popular Opinion in East Gemany, 1945-68 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000) and Corey Ross, Constructing Socialism at the Grass Roots: The Transfomation of East Gemany, 1945-65 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000).

25. Kieran Williams, The Prague Spring and Its Aftemath: Czechoslovak Politics 1968-1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

26. Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978).

27. Jens Gieseke, Die Hauptamtlichen Mitarbeiter der Staatssicherheit: Personalstruktur und Lebenswelt 1950-1983/90 (Berlin: Links, 2000).

28. A notable journal in the Chinese academic trend of examining the post-1949 Chinese experience as history rather than as contemporary politics is Dangdai Zhongguoshi yanjiu (Research in Contemporary Chinese History), though the journal's focus is primarily on high politics. One particularly valuable collection of primary sources, though in this case not authorized by the Chinese government, is the Chinese Cultural Revolution Database (Hong Kong: The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Universities Service Centre for China Studies, 2002). A major new contribution is Charles K. Armstrong, ‘The Cultural Cold War in Korea, 1945-1950’, Journal of Asian Studies 62/1 (Feb. 2003), pp.71-100.

29. On Britain's Information Research Department, see Paul Lashmar and James Oliver, Britain's Secret Propaganda War, 1948-1977 (Thrupp: Sutton, 1998). Also on the US, see Lucas, Freedom's War: The US Crusade against the Soviet Union, 1945-56.

30. For a Freudian take, using much visual imagery, see Sam Keen, Faces of the Enemy: Reflections of the Hostile Imagination: The Psychology of Enmity (San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row, 1986).

31. Deutsches Historisches Museum (ed.), Deutschland im Kalten Krieg 1945 bis 1963 (Berlin, 1992); James Aulich and Marta Sylvestrova, Political Posters in Central and Eastern Europe: 1945-1995: Sinns of the Times (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999).

32. Ron Robin. The making of the Cold War Enemv: Culture and Politics in the Militarv-Industrial Complex (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).

33. Benjamin I. Page and Robert Y Shapiro, The Rational Public: Fifty Years of Trends in Americans' Policy Preferences (Chicago: Chicago Univesrsity Press, 1992).

34. Allinson, Politics and Popular Opinion in East Gemany, and Ross, Constructing Socialism at the Grass Roots.

35. Studs Terkel, The ‘Good War’: An Oral History of World War Two (New York: Ballantine, 1984); Nina Tumarkin, The Living and the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia (New York: Basic Books, 1994); Rana Mitter, The Manchurian Myth: Nationalism, Resistance and Collaboration in Modern China (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000).

36. For a handy overview, see John Whiteclay Chambers and David Culbert (eds.), World War II, Film, and History (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).

37. See also Carola Tischler's project on Soviet film at the Zentrum fiir Zeithistorische Forschung in Potsdam, aired at the 2002 American Historical Association conference.

38. Although not dealing with the Cold War framework directly, an intriguing analysis of how films about the Sino-Japanese War were oriented during the 194649 Civil War in China is Paul G. Pickowicz, ‘Victory as Defeat: Postwar Visualizations of China's War of Resistance’, in Wen-hsin Yeh (ed.), Becoming Chinese: Passages to Modernity and Beyond (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000).

39. See Christopher Murphy's doctoral work at Reading University, UK.

40. John W Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Aftemath of World War II (London: Allen Lane, 1999).

41. We are grateful to Philip Murphy of Reading University for raising this point at our initial gathering.

42. Spencer R. Weart, Nuclear Fear: A History of Images (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); Robert J. Lifton and Greg Mitchell, Hiroshima in America: A Half Century of Denial (New York: Putnam's, 1995).

43. Kathleen A. Tobin, ‘The Reduction of Urban Vulnerability: Revisiting 1950s American Suburbanization as Civil Defence’, Cold War History 2/2 (2001), pp.1-32; Andreas Wenger and Jeremi Suri, ‘At the Crossroads of Diplomatic and Social History: The Nuclear Revolution, Dissent and DCtente’, Cold War History 1/3 (2001), pp.142, especially, 10-15. See also Guy Oakes, The Imaginary War: Civil Defence and American Cold War Culture (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); Paul Boyer, By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Andrew D. Grossman, Neither Dead Nor Red: Civilian Defence and American Political Development during the Early Cold War (New York and London: Routledge, 2001); Kenneth D. Rose, One Nation Underground: The Fallout Shelter in American Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2001).

44. Leon Gouré, Civil Defense in the Soviet Union (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1962).

45. For the East-West gulf, see Václav Havel, ‘Politics and Conscience’, in Václav Havel, Living in Truth, ed. Jan Vladislav (London: Faber, 1987), pp.136-57.

46. For the reshaping of Japanese culture and society in the early Cold War, see Dower's monumental Embracing Defeat. On popular culture, see John Whittier Treat, Witing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), and Mick Broderick, Hibakusha Cinema: Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Nuclear Image in Japanese Film (London and New York: Kegan Paul International, 1996).

47. James L. Kauffman, Selling Outer Space: Kennedy, the Media and Funding for Project Apollo, 1961-1963 (Tuscaloosa: Alabama University Press, 1994); Howard E. McCurdy, Space and the American Imagination (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997).

48. See also David Seed, American Science Fiction and the Cold War: Literature and Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999).

49. This is a relatively new area, but a fascinating recent work that explores the damage to China's environment caused by the technological obsession of Maoism, is Judith Shapiro, Mao's War Against Nature: Politics and the Environment in Revolutionary China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

50. Patrick Major, The Death of the KPD: Communism and Anti-Communism in West Gemany, 1945-1956 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp.294-304. On the shaping of the Chinese civil war by the Cold War, see Odd Arne Westad, Cold War and Revolution: Soviet-American Rivalry and the Origins of the Chinese Civil War, 1944-1946 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).

51. Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998).

52. However, see Georg H. Hodos, Show Trials: Stalinist Purges in Eastern Europe, 1948-1954 (New York: Praeger, 1987); Merle Goldman, Literary Dissent in Communist China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967).

53. Sheila Fitzpatrick and Robert Gellately (eds.), Accusatory Practices: Denunciations in Modern European History, 1789-1989 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1997).

54. A notable exception, but with a necessarily specific remit, is Timothy Garton Ash, The File: A Personal History (London: Harper Collins, 1997).

55. Herbert Mitgang, Dangerous Dossiers (New York: Donald J. Fine, 1988); Jon Wiener, Gimme Some Truth: The John Lennon FBI Files (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999).

56. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology ofAdvanced Industrial Society (London: Routledge, 1964).

57. Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders (New York: McKay, 1957).

58. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991 (London: Michael Joseph, 1994), ill. 64.

59. Most recently: Heide Fehrenbach and Uta Poiger (eds.), Transactions, Transgressions, Transformations: American Culture in Western Europe and Japan (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 1999). France tends to dominate the literature: see Richard F. Kuisel, Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993).

60. Derek L. Hulme, The Political Olympics: Moscow, Afghanistan and the 1980 US Boycott (New York: Praeger, 1990).

61. Susan E. Reid and David Crowley (eds.), Style and Socialism: Modernity and Material Culture in Post-War Eastern Europe (Oxford: Berg, 2000).

62. Patrick Major, ‘Going West?: The Open Border and the Problem of Republikflucht’, in Patrick Major and Jonathan Osmond (eds.), The Workers' and Peasants’ State: Communism and Society in East Germany under Ulbricht, 1945-71 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), pp.190-208.

63. Artemy Troitsky, Back in the USSR. The True Story of Rock in Russia (London: Omnibus, 1987), p.4.

64. Timothy W. Ryback, Rock Around the Bloc: A History of Rock Music in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).

65. Michael Rauhut, Schalmei und Lederjacke: Udo Lindenberg, BAI: Underground: Rock und Politik in den achtziger Jahren (Berlin: Schwarzkopf and Schwarzkopf, 1996).

66. Walter L. Hixson, Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture and the Cold War, 1945-1961 (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1997).

67. Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta, 1999). See also Christine Lindey, Art in the Cold War: From Vladivostok to Kalamazoo, 1945-1962 (London: Herbert Press, 1990), and more recently Volker R. Berghahn, America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001).

68. Slmone Barck et al., Jedes Buch ein Abenteuer: Zensur-System und literarische Offentlichkeiten in der DDR bis Ende der sechziger Jahre (Berlin: Akademie, 1997).

69. Tony Shaw, British Cinema and the Cold War (London: I.B. Tauris, 2000).

70. Malcolm Turnbull, The Spycatcher Trial (London: Heinemann, 1988).

71. Margot A. Henriksen, Dr. Strangelove's America: Society and Culture in the Atomic Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

72. Disaster novels and movies have attracted more than their fair share: Martha A. Bartter, The Way to Ground Zero: The Atomic Bomb in American Science Fiction (New York: Greenwood, 1988); Nora Sayre, Running Time: Films of the Cold War (New York: Dial, 1982); Jack G. Shaheen (ed.), Nuclear War Films (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978).

73. For the 1980s see Ellen Mickiewicz, Split Signals: TV and Politics in the Soviet Union (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). There are also the beginnings of a fascinating application of popular culture to Cold War studies, but again, so far only for the US. See Bradford C. Wright, Comic Book Nation: The Transfornation of Youth Culture in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); Woody Haut, Pulp Culture: Hardboiled Fiction and the Cold War (London: Serpent's Tail, 1995).

74. Andrei Gulyashki, The Zakhov Mission (London: Cassell, 1968, original Russian edition 1963).

75. Personal communication of Jens Gieseke, at Federal Commission for the Stasi Records.

76. Andrew Lycett, Ian Fleming (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1995), p.350.

77. Peter Hutchings, “'We're the Martians now”: British SF Invasion Fantasies of the 1950s and 1960s’, in I.Q. Hunter (ed.), British Science Fiction Cinema (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), pp.36-46.

78. We would encourage any readers who would care to be involved in this agenda to contact the editors, on [email protected] or [email protected].