Konrad H. Jarausch

Scott H. Krause

Stefanie Eisenhuth

Introducing Cold War Berlin -- From Heart of Darkness to Heap of Rubble: Berlin as Nazi Capital -- Division of the Spoils: Berlin as Symbol and as Prize -- Policing the Border Area in East Berlin: Rules, Conflicts and Negotiations, 1961-1989 -- Kennedy, Khrushchev, King, and Springsteen: Staging Visits in a Divided City -- From Old War to Cold War: Berlin as Urban Planning Laboratory in the First Postwar Years -- Entangled Entertainment: Cinema and Television in Cold War Berlin -- The Politics of Subculture in both Berlins -- Living in the Wall's Shadow: Berlin's Turkish Community, 1961-1989 -- Experimental Art and Cultural Exchange in Late Cold War Berlin -- Behind the Wall, across the Wall: Gay Activism in East-Berlin -- Exhibiting Berlin: Local History in its Museums -- Performing Berlin: The Rivaling 750th Anniversaries of 1987 -- Divided Memory in United Berlin -- Border Fragments, Border Fantasies: Cold War Berlin in Retrospect -- Index.

Confrontations, Cultures, and Identities

Cold War Berlin

Within the span of a generation, Nazi Germany’s former capital, Berlin, found a new role as a symbol of freedom and resilient democracy in the Cold War. This book unearths how this remarkable transformation resulted from a network of liberal American occupation officials, and returned émigrés, or remigrés, of the Marxist Social Democratic Party (SPD). This network derived from lengthy physical and political journeys. After fleeing Hitler, German-speaking self-professed "revolutionary socialists" emphasized "anti-totalitarianism" in New Deal America and contributed to its intelligence apparatus. These experiences made these remigrés especially adept at cultural translation in postwar Berlin against Stalinism. This book provides a new explanation for the alignment of Germany’s principal left-wing party with the Western camp. While the Cold War has traditionally been analyzed from the perspective of decision makers in Moscow or Washington, this study demonstrates the agency of hitherto marginalized on the conflict’s first battlefield. Examining local political culture and social networks underscores how both Berliners and émigrés understood the East-West competition over the rubble that the Nazis left behind as a chance to reinvent themselves as democrats and cultural mediators, respectively. As this network popularized an anti-Communist, pro-Western Left, this book identifies how often ostracized émigrés made a crucial contribution to the Federal Republic of Germany’s democratization.

A Shared German–American Project, 1940–1972

Bringing Cold War Democracy to West Berlin

No other European city can claim to have experienced such division and togetherness as Berlin. This volume of essays attempts to address the question of the peculiar character of divided Berlin during the years of the Cold War - and connects the history of this embattled city with the over-all East-West conflict. A wide range of transatlantic contributors addresses Berlin as a global focal point of the Cold War, and also assess the geopolitical peculiarity of the city and how citizens dealt with it in everyday life - exploring not just the implications of division, but also the continuing entanglements and mutual perceptions which resulted from Berlin's unique status. Finally, the book then asks how these experiences were and are told: What identities did the division create, what narratives did it produce and how do they shape today's debates? Has the city managed to forge a common memory culture out of a divided past? An essential contribution to the study of Berlin in the 20th century, and the effects - global and local - of the Cold War on a city.

Scott H. Krause

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