Description
Book SynopsisWar of Words is a volume of essays on the role of propaganda, mass media and culture in the development of the Cold War in Europe. Exploring a dimension of the political and diplomatic rivalry of interest to historians principally in the last decade, these essays explore the cultural dimensions of the early Cold War. The powers felt it necessary to explain and justify to Europeans the division of the continent into two hostile blocs and to mobilise them behind these reinvented European identities, by drawing on elements of national tradition while at the same time invoking modernity. The mass media and popular culture (whose penetration into parts of Eastern and South Eastern Europe was still relatively recent) were harnessed to the demands of propaganda. Even the built environment was mobilised to this end. The antithetical character of the two blocs was not in all respects as absolute as it seemed at the time. Similar cultural and social trends influenced the politics of culture on both sides of the Iron Curtain. This book examines some of these similarities and parallels as well as the intentions and articulation of official policy.
Trade Review"This collection belongs in any good collection of Cold War history. Highly recommended." -- Choice "Choice" 'There are countless studies of the Cold War. Is there room for another one? Having read this book, the answer is very much affirmative - One of its many attractions is that it is not dominated by American and British writers but by authors from countries that formed the battle lines - Another attraction is that it is sensibly edited - the writing is direct and jargon free.' John Kirkaldy, Books Ireland, March 2014
Table of ContentsEditors' Introduction; SECTION 1 EASTERN APPROACHES: MYTHS AND THEIR MAKERS; Russel Lemmons: 'Out of your sacrificial death grows our socialist deed': Ernst Thalmann, the Antifascism Myth and Buchenwald Concentration Camp in East German Political Propaganda 1948-58; Balazs Apor: The Leader Cult in Communist Hungary, 1946-1956: Propaganda, Institutional Background and Mass Media; Judith Devlin: Soviet Power and its Images: Celebrating Stalin's Seventieth Birthday; Jana Fischerova: Ideological Pressure and Censorship: Czech Literature, 1948-57; Marietta Stankova: The Department of Agitation and Propaganda in Bulgaria, 1944-56; Niamh Cullen: Remembering the 'Martyrs of Antifascism' in Republican Italy: Piero Gobetti and the Italian Communist Party; SECTION 2 GETTING THE MESSAGE ACROSS Jennifer Spohrer: Radio Luxembourg and Cold War Changes in European Attitudes towards International Broadcasting; Vlasis Vlasidis Greek and Yugoslav Public Radio in the 1940s and 1950s; Nicola Hille Print, Power and Persuasion: Political Poster Art in the two German States in the first decade of the Cold War; Hans-Jurgen Schroder: West European Identity in Marshall Plan Propaganda Films; Arnold Bartetsky: New Cities for New People: Urban Planning and Mass Media Propaganda in Stalinist Poland and the GDR; Marina Dmitrieva 'Stalin's Skyscrapers' and the Propaganda of the New World Order after World War II; SECTION 3 THE POLITICS OF ENTERTAINMENT; Olaf Mertelsmann: The Media Audience of a Soviet Republic in the Early Cold War: The Estonian SSR; Elisabeth Kolleritsch: Jazz in Austria in the Allied Powers' Cultural Propaganda during the Cold War, 1945-55; Imre-Jozsef Balazs: The Making of Communist Man: Minority Media and Literature in Romania, 1948-65; Christoph Hendrik Muller: Jazz, Rock and Roll and Halbstarke: American Popular Culture in the West Germany between Weimar Conservatism and Cold War Liberalism; Nils Arne Sorensen: Kampagnen mod Atomvaben and the Making of the New Left in Denmark, 1956-66; Index.
