Cold War and Culture Research Papers (original) (raw)

Cold War was the way of life between the Soviet Union and the West for many years. Since the war was not actual, battles were fought in buffer countries, sports arenas and last but not least in the media. Many today might still remember the cold war rhetoric of 1980ies when Washington, which TASS described as able to “…think only in terms of confrontation and bellicose, lunatic anticommunism” (Britannica) considered the USSR to be “Guided by a policy of immoral and unbridled expansionism…" (Farnham, 2001).

- by Phillip Y Freiberg
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- Russian Studies, Communication, Media Studies, International Communication

Na terenie okupowanych Niemiec, a następnie w RFN, funkcjonowało wiele cennych i ważnych inicjatyw środowiska polskich uchodźców. Do grona najciekawszych i najcenniejszych można zaliczyć działalność Komitetu Obrony Solidarności/Towarzystwa Solidarność w Berlinie Zachod- nim, które prowadziło działalność wydawniczą, publicystyczną oraz wspierało podziemie soli- darnościowe w PRL. Wielopłaszczyznowa aktywność tej organizacji, mimo dużego znaczenia dla środowiska uchodźców oraz opozycji w PRL, pozostaje niesłusznie zapomnianą inicjatywą.

- by Łukasz Wolak
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- Polish History, Cold War and Culture, Anticommunism (History), Polish Studies

Als dichotome Spaltung der Welt drang der Kalte Krieg auch in Gesellschaften ein, die nicht direkt in die „heißen“ Kriege des internationalen Dauerkonflikts verwickelt waren. Dort entfaltete er seine Virulenz und Persistenz dadurch, dass er permanent ausgemalt, inszeniert und materialisiert wurde. Von der sozialen Wirkmächtigkeit gesellschaftlicher Deutungsmuster und Symbolen ausgehend, fokussiert dieser Band auf das Imaginäre des Kalten Krieges: Auf Metaphern der Abgrenzung und Zugehörigkeit, Freund- und Feindfiguren, propagandistisch gestützte Emotionskulturen sowie Bedrohungs- und Schutzszenarien. Diese zirkulierten zwischen militärischen und zivilen Organisationen, staatlichen und kulturellen Institutionen und der öffentlich-politischen Sphäre hin- und her – und trugen so dazu bei, den Kalten Krieg am Laufen zu halten.
Konzeptionell gefasst in vier Dimensionen – Metaphern, Figuren, Emotionen und Simulakren – spürt der Band aus einer kulturgeschichtlichen Perspektive der Verbreitung des Imaginären im Ost-West-Konflikt nach. Er versammelt Beiträge aus der Geschichte, der Literaturwissenschaft, der Kulturwissenschaft, der Europäischen Ethnologie und der Soziologie und richtet den Blick mit Fallbeispielen zum geteilten Deutschland, zu Österreich, der Schweiz und Großbritannien primär auf Europa.

- by Sibylle Marti
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- European History, Cold War and Culture, Cultural Cold War, Cold War
- by Olga Dror and +1
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- Southeast Asian Studies, Youth Studies, Cold War and Culture, Cold War
- by Andrei Kozovoi
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- Russian Studies, Soviet History, Cold War and Culture, Russian History

Without the Cold War influence of General George C. Marshall, there would be no modern state of Taiwan.

- by Sean J Manross
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- Cold War and Culture, Cultural Cold War, Cold War, Cold War (History) (History)

Cuban culture has long been available to English speakers via translation. This study examines the complex ways in which English renderings of Cuban texts from various domains—poetry, science fiction, political and military writing, music, film—have represented, reshaped, or amended original texts. Taking in a broad corpus, it becomes clear that the mental image an Anglophone audience has formed of Cuban culture since 1959 depends heavily on the decisions of translators. At times, a clear ideological agenda drives moves like strengthening the denunciatory tone of a song or excising passages from a political text. At other moments, translators’ indifference to the importance of certain facets of a work, such as a film’s onscreen text or the lyrics sung on a musical performance, impoverishes the English speaker’s experience of the rich weave of self-expression in the original Spanish. In addition to the dynamics at work in the choices translators make at the level of the text itself, this study attends to how paratexts like prefaces, footnotes, liner notes, and promotional copy shape the audience’s experience of the text.

- by Robert S . Lesman
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- Translation Studies, Poetry, Cold War and Culture, Cuban Studies

This article looks into the extraordinary Cold War–era career of the Polish artist Aleksander Kobzdej in order to provide insight into the complexity of the emergence and demise of socialist realism in the People’s Republic of Poland and its repercussions for today’s discourses. The author reconstructs Kobzdej’s smooth shift from a much-awarded socialist realist artist into an internationally recognized modernist abstract painter through the analysis of his artworks, travels, and participation in major art exhibitions, and discusses them in the context of the larger changes that took place in the official state policies and cultural diplomacy as Stalinism was giving way to the cultural Thaw in the mid-1950s. This case study serves to argue that not just socialist realism but also much of the later modernist art produced in Poland should be seen as de facto communist, that is, as art that emerged as a product of the delicate but stable, and mutually beneficial, consensus between artists and the communist state.

- by Magdalena Moskalewicz
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- Cold War and Culture, Abstract Painting, Poland, Cultural Diplomacy
- by Lino Camprubí
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- History, Cold War and Culture, History of Science, Nuclear Weapons
- by Peter Borschberg
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- History, Military History, Modern History, Economic History

Seventy-seven years ago today, on January 17, 1945, a Swedish diplomat sent as a special envoy to Nazi-occupied Budapest with a mission to rescue Jews from extermination, was detained by the Red Army on suspicion of espionage. The diplomat was Raoul Wallenberg, a businessman and a member of a banking and industrial family; he was never again seen alive. Over the six months the 32-year-old Wallenberg spent in Budapest before his arrest, he issued several thousand protective passports that prevented Hungarian Jews from being deported to death camps across Europe. He also sheltered Jews in buildings designated as Swedish territory. Overall, Wallenberg is credited for saving thousands of Jews from starvation and imminent death. His disappearance in 1945 immediately drew international attention, and his continuous absence became a mystery. With the Cold War unfolding, the Wallenberg case reinforced tensions between two opposing political blocks separated by the Iron Curtain.
https://www.osaarchivum.org/blog/soviet-dead-end-solving-the-wallenberg-mystery-in-the-cold-war

- by Anastasia Felcher
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- Cold War and Culture, Cold War, Holocaust, Wallenberg's Syndrome

This extended encyclopedia entry was published in the "Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History" in 2018

From the history of the Polish translations of Croatian literature. The fourth chapter of the book "Croatica. Croatian literature and culture in Poland between 1944 and 1989" about the second part of the whole period. The Words in the title "The Yugoslav bomb" used Jerzy Putrament, prominent writer in PRL, to describe the political situation after the Cominform Resolution of June 28, 1948; Jerzy Putrament: Pół wieku. Zagranica. Warszawa 1965.

- by Leszek Małczak
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- Cultural Studies, Translation Studies, Propaganda, Cold War and Culture

Kulisy bliskiej współpracy komunistycznych służb z międzynarodowymi ugrupowaniami terrorystycznymi przez wiele lat należały do najpilniej strzeżonych sekretów PRL. Radykałowie z Bliskiego Wschodu oraz skrajnie lewicowi ekstremiści z Europy Zachodniej traktowali Polskę jako sprawdzonego sojusznika i bezpieczną przystań, gdzie można było skutecznie ukrywać się przed agentami służb zachodnich i w spokoju przygotowywać kolejne zamachy. Dzięki tajnym układom z peerelowskimi służbami cywilnymi i wojskowymi, terroryści czuli się w Polsce bezpiecznie. Omijali procedury wizowe, przysyłali rannych bojowników na odpoczynek, otrzymywali stypendia, otwierali własne firmy, handlowali bronią, a na nielegalnych interesach z państwowymi przedsiębiorstwami zarabiali miliony dolarów. Abu Nidal, Monzer Al-Kassar, Abu Dawud i Abu Abbas to tylko niektórzy z czołówki najgroźniejszych światowych terrorystów ostatniej dekady zimnej wojny, którzy nie tylko korzystali z gościny peerelowskich służb, ale traktowali Polskę jako ważne ogniwo przestępczej działalności. Dzięki drobiazgowym poszukiwaniom archiwalnym Autorowi udało się zrekonstruować najważniejsze siatki terrorystyczne operujące na terenie komunistycznej Polski oraz naświetlić okoliczności ich sekretnych powiązań z funkcjonariuszami aparatu bezpieczeństwa PRL.
https://ksiegarnia.pwn.pl/Zabojcze-uklady,713077485,p.html

- by Przemysław Gasztold
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- Terrorism, International Terrorism, Intelligence Studies, Polish History
- by Frank Jacob
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- Cold War and Culture, Cultural Cold War, Cold War, Cold War Science and Technology

The paper examines the “Andy Warhol” Millennium Show exhibited at the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg in 2000 and at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow in 2001. It first discusses why the U.S. government organized this show as part of America’s millennium celebrations abroad and why it chose Andy Warhol as America’s millennium artist. It then proceeds with explaining the political and art historical contents of the show, as well as its public reception by both the Russian media and the Russian artworld. The paper concludes that the “Andy Warhol” Millennium Show, despite its direct interrelatedness with the symbolic diplomatic ceremonial of millennium celebrations, was a groundbreaking cultural event, as it managed to familiarize the Russian public with key works of American Pop Art and with this build a “cultural” bridge between the U.S. and Russia in the post-Cold-War era.

- by Elena Sidorova
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- Cold War and Culture, Public Diplomacy, Pop Art, Cultural Diplomacy
- by Alexander Fedorov
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- Media Studies, Film Studies, Film Analysis, Cold War and Culture

This is the Contents, Preface, and Introduction to the book. Exchanges have rarely been taken seriously (in any detail) as a subject of study in diplomatic history, but that is a mistake. The influence is subtle, spread over time, and worth investigating. In the beginning this was going to be a study of the Leader Program in Western Europe, but I became so intrigued by the micro-history of the Program in these three countries that I had to give that up. This is really the embodiment of what someone else (Costigliola?) termed the 'capillaries of empire'.

- by Giles Scott-Smith
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- Cold War and Culture, Cultural Cold War, Public Diplomacy, Cold War

This book argues that the transformation of the print media in the 1950`s and 1960`s expanded the possibilities for social, individual and national identities in Japan. From the late 1950`s, the growth in the market for weekly magazines was fueled by the huge potential for advertising revenue, the rapid development of the Japanese economy, and the necessity for the growth of a consumer society. This resulted in the merging of national identity with individual subjectivity – which this book describes as 'national subjectivity' – as the Japanese media promoted individual consumption to aid the recovery of the Japanese nation as a whole.

- by Martyn Smith
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- Japanese Studies, Cold War and Culture, Cold War, Nationalism

This article has as subject the study of Détente during the Cold War. It will be done by the analysis of different frameworks used by scholars to examine that historical period. Thus, in this work, the development of a notion of Détente during the Cold War and the different détentes highlighted by diverse points of view will be subject of scrutiny. To do that, the article explores the main characteristics of the so-called French Détente, the Ostpolitik, and the US-USSR Détente.

- by Jacopo Galimberti
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- Cold War and Culture, Situationism, 20th century France, Georg Lukacs

Für Amerikaner und Westeuropäer war der Kalte Krieg nur am Rande ein bewaffneter Konflikt und mehr als eine reine Auseinandersetzung zwischen den zwei großen Ideologien Kommunismus und liberaler Kapitalismus. Er beeinflusste Gesellschaft, Wissenschaft und Kultur in den westlichen Staaten in ganz erheblichem Maße: Der Rüstungswettlauf war einerseits Projektionsfläche tiefgreifender Ängste vor einem atomaren Holocaust. Andererseits sollte diese Angst durch Planung und Verwissenschaftlichung in kollektive Sicherheit transformiert werden. In diesem Sinne versteht der vorliegende Band den Kalten Krieg als ‚Krieg der Imaginationen‘ (Mary Kaldor). Er führt Beiträge von Militär-, Sozial- und Ideenhistorikern in einer sozialen Ideengeschichte zusammen und bereichert unser Wissen über eines der am tiefsten einschneidenden Phänomene des 20. Jahrhunderts um wichtige, bislang aber vernachlässigte Facetten.

- by Patrick Bernhard
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- Military History, Cultural History, History of Education, Cold War and Culture
- by Marie Cronqvist
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- Cold War and Culture
- by Giovanni Bernardini
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- History, Cold War and Culture, Cold War, Cold War Science and Technology

La storia dei rapporti tra Italia e Germania dopo la seconda guerra mondiale è una delle chiavi per capire le contraddizioni dell'Europa contemporanea. L'Italia fu tra i principali sostenitori della rinascita di uno Stato tedesco affrancato dall'influenza sovietica: i due paesi dovevano far parte dello stesso sistema di relazioni economiche e politiche. Partendo dall'analisi del punto di vista italiano sulla «questione tedesca», il volume ricostruisce, anche attraverso le reciproche percezioni, le matrici politiche ed economiche alla base delle relazioni bilaterali dalla fine della seconda guerra mondiale alla metà degli anni Cinquanta. In questo decennio presero forma quelle peculiari condizioni geopolitiche su cui si sarebbero fondati i rapporti tra Italia e Repubblica Federale durante il periodo della guerra fredda.

From the very first days after the destruction of Hiroshima the coexistence of science and myth, rationality and mysticism, has gone hand in hand with the elaboration of a public debate over the atomic bomb (1). President Harry Truman's words over the radio when announcing the new weapon to the American people on the sixth of August 1945 describe it as «the basic power of the Universe», granted to the United States by God himself. He reiterated this a point three days later on his return from the Potsdam Conference (2). Truman presented the Bomb to the world using a religious type of rhetoric with tones of almost Messianic deliverance. Technological developments made by scientists from all over the world were embraced and united beneath the stars and stripes. The almost divine nature of the new form of energy may well have been capable of mass destruction, but if well managed it was also able to guarantee prosperity and progress for mankind (3). The capacity to create or annihilate lay in the hands of a man who, like some apprentice alchemist, had become the sole artisan of his own fortune. His was the power to shape the normal course of events, burning bridges with the past and throwing open the (1) The allusive and metaphoric power of the Bomb meant that two spheres, apparently worlds apart, such as science and religion, could be indistinguishably merged within a highly evocative plot.

- by Maurizio Zinni
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- Cultural History, Film Studies, Cold War and Culture, Cold War
- by Yuliya Komska
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- Border Studies, Cold War and Culture, War Studies, Cold War

This book aims at emphasizing the important role of broadcasting as central actor in the creation of a transnational and European communication space during the period of the Cold War. Its methodological design aims at linking the study of the circulation and appropriation of cultural performances with awareness for the crucial role of broadcast technologies as mediators and catalysts of cultural transfers. In studying Europe as a Cold War broadcasting space by describing and analyzing different transmission and reception technologies and by questioning their specific contribution to the medial construction of a transnational communication space in constantly changing political and cultural environments we hope to enlarge our understanding of the role of civil and institutional actors in the creation of transnational communities and European networks. It addresses media historians as well as historians of international relations, especially regarding the Cold War and European integration.

- by Jeffrey Longacre
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- Film Studies, Cold War and Culture, Alfred Hitchcock

Only excerpts available here. Full text is at https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/full/10.1162/jcws_a_00819 (or through library access)
Abstract:
From the late 1950s until 1975, the war between North and South Vietnam had both domestic and international consequences. Unlike the Cold War divide between the United States and the Soviet Union, the war between the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV, the Communist North) and the Republic of Vietnam (RVN, the non-Communist South) was an armed conflict between two polities that both identified themselves as Vietnamese. In this twenty-year-long struggle, the fates of the DRV and the RVN were tied to their success in producing new generations who would subscribe to their respective agendas. This was done through many venues, of which education was one of the most important.
This article analyzes the educational systems at the primary and secondary school levels in the DRV and RVN after the division of the country, with a special focus on the years between 1965 and 1975. It considers their respective “divorces” from the colonial educational system and explores their goals, their problems, and the means they used to overcome these problems. Moreover, the DRV attempted to create an educational mini-empire with the DRV centered agenda—establishing a Vietnamese-based system in China, bringing into the DRV Laotian children, and exporting their ideology in the educational system established in the NLF-controlled territories of the RVN. The DRV created a rigidly politicized school system focused on the war and the construction of socialism. The RVN, creating an educational antipode of the North, endeavored to separate schools from the war, largely taking politics out of the curriculum and leaving pupils to figure out for themselves the aims of the conflict and their place in it, stranding many of them in ambiguity. If the DRV system was depriving pupils of the means to challenge the government, the RVN was supplying children with such means. Relying on archival materials and published documents, this article compares the educational systems at the primary and secondary school levels in the DRV and RVN after the division of the country, with a special focus on the period 1965–1975.

- by Olga Dror
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- Education, Southeast Asian Studies, Youth Studies, Cold War and Culture
- by Daniel Humphrey
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- European Cinema, Cold War and Culture, Cold War, Film History

Table of Contents, Acknowledgements, and Introduction to my new book, The Last Good Neighbor: Mexico in the Global Sixties (Duke Univ Press), which examines Mexican internationalism—intersection of geopolitics, US-Mexican relations, and... more

- by Eric Zolov
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- Latin American Studies, Mexican Studies, Cold War and Culture, Cultural Cold War

In the mid-to-late 1980s, rap music became the soundtrack of Americanization. Along with breakdance, graffiti, and deejaying, rap inspired young people all over the world to create and practice their own versions of this popular culture. In my essay, I examine how hiphop pervaded the Iron Curtain. More specifically, I analyze the conditions under which hiphop culture became known and accepted in the GDR. Focusing on the interaction between representatives of the Socialist regime and young hiphop practitioners, I scrutinize their cultural transfers of hiphop and the different meanings both sides attributed to its practice. I flesh out the discrepancy between the hegemonic discourse on popular culture, which tried to recode hiphop into a desirable Socialist practice, and the youth cultural practice of hiphop, which deviated from this discourse. Paradoxically, young breakdancers, rappers, DJs, and graffiti artists hardly had to fear any consequences stemming from their practice. With my paper, I contribute to historical research on youth culture, the GDR's final years, and Americanization as one of the driving forces behind its disintegration.

- by Leonard Schmieding
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- Cultural Studies, German Studies, American Studies, Popular Culture

This paper aims to reconsider the issues of Sugimoto Hiroshi’s Japanese art history through exploring the History of History exhibition held in the 21st Century Museum of Art, Kanazawa in 2009. Although there is no etymological evidence, the term “history” is often considered “his-story.” Every historian interprets the factual matters from his/her perspective and thus narrates his/her own version of history. Based on this premise, I will demonstrate how Sugimoto’s version is narrated using his visual languages.
In Part I, I analyze the works presented in the History of History exhibition, curated from the works produced by Sugimoto as well as from the works collected by him, in order to reveal Sugimoto’s narration. In so doing, it becomes clear that these works concern mainly “spirituality” since they are objects to be used for ritual performances. Then, I will compare the Sugimoto’s Japanese art history with the so-called “orthodox” Japanese art history, which was another version constructed in the Meiji period by self-imposing the European art history model.
In Part II, I focus on the cultural and social background of USA, particularly California and New York where Sugimoto, respectively, studied the photography and engaged in art dealing in the 1970s. During this period, Sugimoto was associated with Flower Children counter-cultural movement. “Cold War Japonism” is a term coined by myself that explains how the earlier Japonism – the 19th century European boom of Japanese art and culture – was reinvented during the Cold War in the USA. Unlike the previous Japonism, which was interested in the popular culture such as ukiyo-e, Cold War Japonism emphasized Japanese spirituality based on Zen philosophy. This concept was particularly evident in calligraphic expression in Zen expressionist landscape and Zen gardens. I will reconsider the political reason that caused this cultural phenomenon.
Hence, this paper will shed a new light on the understanding of how Sugimoto’s Japanese art history is constructed by uncovering cultural and social environment of Cold War era that affected his own narration.

- by Kazuko Kameda-Madar
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- Cold War and Culture, Hiroshi Sugimoto
- by Francesco Zavatti
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- History, Intellectual History, Cultural History, Sociology