Divided Dreamworlds? The Cultural Cold War in East and West (original) (raw)
Related papers
Negotiating Cold War Culture at the Crossroads of East and West
2011
Since the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, our understanding of Cold War history has changed considerably. The wave of new research spurred by the opening of archives and opportunities for novel East-West comparisons threw into sharper relief aspects of the Cold War contest that had received little attention previously. It has become increasingly clear that the Cold War was not only a military, political, and economic conflict, but also one profoundly implicated in, and shaped by, key transformations in twentieth-century culture. 1 Capitalizing on the increased accessibility of primary sources from former socialist states, recent research has provided valuable insights into the politics of everyday culture on both sides of the Iron Curtain, 2 and we have seen as well the publication of several transnational accounts of the cultural Cold War spanning the West and the East. 3
Between East and West: Memories of the Cold War
History of Classical Scholarship, 2019
For the last fifty years the Respublica Litterarum in classical scholarship has been dominated by the divisions brought about by the Cold War. As this traumatic period begins to fade I have tried to recall the attempts of one classical scholar to bridge this gap between east and west. Let us not forget the past in building a new future.
This workshop assembles scholars who will illuminate cultural interactions across continents during the Cold War, exploring the ways that cultural contacts between the East, West and South served both domestic and international agendas. Their contributions will examine how the staging of art exhibitions, international biennials and conferences, as well as the expansion of mass media, were enmeshed with ideological positions. This event will highlight how these activities aimed to both redefine national identities and global positions, as well as pursue new political, economic, and cultural alliances and networks.
Beyond the Divide: Entangled Histories of Cold War Europe
The Cold War is already history. Still, it has maintained a surprisingly strong role in defining European historiography to this day. For example, widely used concepts such as “post-Socialism” or “countries of the former Soviet bloc” presuppose that the countries located east of “the Iron Curtain” were detached from their western neighbors and have only recently started to become like them. In this book, we argue that the Cold War era saw not only the division of Europe into two warring camps, but that there were also a plenty of connections over the East-West divide. Instead of two separate histories of Europe, these connections speak for entangled histories, urging us to go beyond the binational orientation and examine simultaneous interaction of several countries, people, and organizations. The research on the Cold War and related issues has expanded during the past twenty years, and today it is completely legitimate to study topics that were still unthinkable quite recently, like interaction and cooperation between Capitalist and Socialist worlds, or the cultural and social implications of the conflict. Furthermore, there have also been an increasing number of studies investigating how the Cold War affected the everyday life of ordinary citizens or whether the Cold War even mattered to them at all. Despite the emergence and current presentability of culturally and socially flavored Cold War research, much still remains unknown. This volume seeks to alter the way in which intra-European Cold War–era connections are perceived. Previous focus on superpower relations in Cold War research has resulted in the emphasis of East-West division. It is true that, for much of the twentieth century, both the Soviet Union and the United States had a major impact on Europe in intellectual, political, and cultural terms; their mere existence troubled, excited, outraged, and inspired people all over Europe. Often one superpower was seen as completely alien, while the other was considered as the savior of Europe. However, instead of being merely allies to superpowers, European countries were independent actors that harbored intentions and objectives beyond the superpower axis. These connections deserve more attention. For many of these countries, the relationships to countries on the other side of the Iron Curtain were often not so much about the Cold War as they were about normal dealings between two countries, and a number of these contacts were not new but originated from the prewar period. This kind of interaction escapes the traditional conception of the Cold War, and this has likely been the reason why they have not been examined extensively outside national scholarship.