A New Start and Old Prejudices: The Cold War and German-American Cultural Relations, 1945-1968

Summary

the cold war as culture

Despite conflicts between East and West over cultural policy, the Cold War was not a clash of cultures. Rather, it developed a cultural dynamic of its own. The culture of propaganda developed during World War II had suffused word and image with confrontation across the globe. The Cold War became a new and fertile field for this confrontational language, and both sides had few qualms about reviving it. The Cold War produced its own heroes and provided the opportunity for a globally recognized power of violence and rhetoric of violence to enliven a gray political reality. The Cold War gave birth to its own issues, made careers, and allowed politicians and the military to define and dominate the language used to discuss contemporary problems. Finally, the Cold War had such an influence on cultural developments originating in the social and technical modernization of the 1920s and 1930s that it is not always easy now to distinguish clearly between forces pushing forward (mostly in the West) and forces exerting a backward pull (mostly in the East).

The Cold War overcame centuries of cultural polarity between Europe and America. At least, that is what politicians liked to proclaim. It does not matter how culture was understood: European-American and German-American relations were permanently changed by the general consensus that culture could be defined politically and by the sense of proximity, rather than a customary distance, that came with transatlantic communication. But it is less certain whether the process of cultural rapprochement was as rapid as has often been claimed since the 1950s. The following overview devotes particular attention to this issue.