scholarly journals Encountering the ‘Other’ by Lifting the Iron Curtain: American Newspaper Editors’ Global Campaigns for Bridges of Understanding, 1961-1970

2021 ◽  
Vol 24 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Erin K Coyle ◽  
Elisabeth Fondren
2019 ◽  
pp. 243-265
Author(s):  
Benjamin Tromly

Chapter 10 addresses “redefection,” or the movement of Russian exiles back across the Iron Curtain from West to East. In mid-decade, in part as a reaction to Amcomlib’s emergence as a viable sponsor of psychological-warfare programs, the Kremlin launched a massive campaign to convince Soviet exiles to relocate to the USSR. The chapter depicts the return campaign, pursued through a KGB-front organization called the Committee for Return to the Homeland, as an effective tool for destabilizing and demoralizing the Russian anti-communists in Germany. While the return campaign damaged the émigré anti-communist camp badly, it also had the unanticipated consequence of encouraging American cold warriors and Russian anti-communists to bury their differences after the fiasco of the united-front campaign. In this way, the return campaign demonstrated the difficulty both superpowers experienced in influencing the Russian émigré milieu, as each step by one side produced a countermove by the other.


1948 ◽  
Vol 93 (569) ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
B. Kingsley Martin
Keyword(s):  

Author(s):  
Melissa Feinberg

Histories of the Cold War have often been preoccupied with issues of accountability and intent. Such histories have generally focused on leading political actors and concerned themselves with issues that implicitly or explicitly pitted one camp against another, asking questions such as: Who was responsible for starting the Cold War? Who made key decisions? Who won and who lost? This study has been motivated by a different set of concerns. Rather than setting one side against the other, it has examined the Cold War as a shared political environment and tried to illuminate some of the ways a political culture that relied on moral absolutes affected patterns of thought on both sides of the Iron Curtain. It has tried to expand the question of who knew what and when by shifting the focus to how knowledge about Eastern Europe was produced, showing how some experiences took on the weight of evidence, whereas others seemingly provoked little thought....


Author(s):  
Katherine Graney

This chapter introduces the author’s argument about Europeanization in the period since 1989, including the idea of a “Eurocentric-Orientalist Cultural Gradient” that guides understandings about Europe on both sides of the former Iron Curtain. It identifies three main phases of Europeanization since 1989: Europhoria, Europhilia, and Europhobia; three sets of actors working together to produce new institutional and ideational understandings of Europe since 1989: European gatekeepers in European institutions, the other great power in the region (Russia), and the ex-Soviet republics themselves; and three forces that animate the processes of Europeanization: the Eurocentric-Orientalist Cultural Gradient, values-based commitments of European institutions like the EU and NATO, and the instrumental concerns of Russia and the post-Soviet states. The chapter also briefly explores the three realms within which these processes of Europeanization play themselves out—the cultural-civilizational, the political, and the security realm.


Parasitology ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 131 (3) ◽  
pp. 435-436
Author(s):  
JERZY M. BEHNKE

As a zoologist, I have never really understood why those of us who study nematodes continue to partition ourselves into at least two distinct camps, one of which works on the plant-parasitic and free-living species, and the other primarily on animal-parasitic species. And I suspect that nematodes themselves are equally puzzled by this segregation of their ardent scholars. Historically, of course, plant nematologists aggregated in crop research and botany departments, whereas the animal nematologists were stationed in livestock, veterinary, medical and zoological departments of research institutes and universities. I found much of interest in NematologyVol. 1, but I was left with the impression that, whilst the ‘iron curtain’ was beginning to tumble, it still had a long way to fall. We have not yet reached a stage where nematodes as distinct organisms, whatever their niche, take priority in our thinking. But I race ahead. Let us retrace and begin with the details of this volume.


2013 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-69 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna von der Goltz

This article investigates contrasting memories of East Germany’s 1968 based on a sample of six life story interviews. Given the iconic events of West Germany’s 1968, there has been a growing interest in the events happened on the other side of the Iron Curtain. In unified Germany, however, commemorations of 1968 in the German Democratic Republic have focused on a particular type of 68er biography: those who broke with the regime as a result of the Warsaw Pact’s invasion of Czechoslovakia on 21 August 1968 and chose to pursue various forms of opposition in its wake. This article lends more nuance to the subject by examining three individuals who chose this path alongside three others who followed a different trajectory. The crushing of the Prague Spring and their own imprisonment for protesting against it led the latter to shun open opposition in favour of pursuing change from within official structures. By highlighting the plurality of East German experiences and memories of this period, this article seeks to make a contribution both to the study of the international 1968 and to the thriving scholarship on how the East German past is remembered in united Germany.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
OANA GODEANU-KENWORTHY

This article focusses on the American reception of a British–Romanian documentary about the black market for VHS Hollywood films in 1980s Romania. The film uses two different registers of nostalgia. On the one hand, it functions as an ostalgic media product that engages Eastern European viewers by building upon a sense of continuity with the socialist past. On the other hand, its surprising success in the American conservative blogosphere reveals the endurance of Cold War exceptionalist tropes. My analysis expands current discussions of post-socialist nostalgia, arguing for the relevance of the concept of ostalgia for the field of American studies.


2017 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 269-289
Author(s):  
Alexandra Schwell

This article is part of the special section titled From the Iron Curtain to the Schengen Area, guest edited by Wolfgang Mueller and Libora Oates-Indruchová. The cooperation between German and Polish border police from the middle of the 1990s to 2007 is characterized by a striking paradox: border guards on both sides claim their working styles are incompatible with one another while in most cases they cooperate very well. Yet, as this article argues, the border guards employ strategies of boundary-drawing and self-staging that help them cope with the asymmetry they encounter when cooperating with the “other.” German and Polish border guards develop informal strategies of action and communication that rest upon a joint professional culture, leading to mutual trust and solidarity and a congruence of subjective professional honor and official mandate. Yet, this win–win situation runs the risk of emphasizing police-cultural aspects that focus on security while leaving the underlying East–West asymmetry untouched.


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