Patrick Major

Across the Blocs : Exploring Comparative Cold War Cultural and Social History

1. East is East and West is West?: Towards a comparative sociocultural history of the Cold War 2. The Man Who Invented Truth: The tenure of Edward R. Murrow as director of the United States Information Agency during the Kennedy years 3. Soviet Cinema in the Early Cold War 4. Future Perfect?: Communist science fiction in the Cold War 5. The Education of Dissent: Radio free Europe and Hungarian society, 1951-56 6. The Debate over Nuclear Refuge 7. Some Writers Are More Equal Than Others: George Orwell, the state and Cold War propaganda

The death of the KPD : communism and anti-communism in West Germany, 1945-1956

Why was the West German Communist Party banned in 1956, only 11 years after it had emerged from Nazi persecution? Although politically weak, the postwar party was in fact larger than its Weimar predecessor and initially dominated works councils at the Ruhr pits and Hamburg docks, as well as the steel giant, Krupp. Under the control of East Berlin, however, the KPD was sent off on a series of overambitious and flawed campaigns to promote national unification and prevent West German rearmament. At the same time, the party was steadily criminalized by the Anglo-American occupiers, and ostracized by a heavily anti-communist society. Patrick Major has used material available only since the end of the Cold War, from both Communist archives in the former GDR as well as western intelligence, to trace the final decline and fall of the once-powerful KPD.

‘Smut and Trash’: Germany’s Culture Wars Against Pulp Fiction

From the late nineteenth century, ‘Schmutz und Schund’, or ‘smut and trash’, became the German moral establishment’s battle cry against all forms of ephemeral mass literature, from ‘penny dreadfuls’ and dime novels to comic books and later even films. For its critics, it signified modernity in its worst form, mass culture and Vermassung (‘massification’), as well as Americanization, or perhaps more accurately ‘Anglo-Saxonization’, and thus an early form of cultural imperialism. Whereas from the later 1950s such fears were transferred to other media, such as film and television, it was the masses’ reading habits which provoked the first waves of conservative cultural pessimism. With the growth of a national school system after 1871 based on the Pmssian model, reading was no longer an elite pursuit. Imperial Germany enjoyed some of the highest literacy rates in the world by 1900. Even the working class during the second industrial revolution of the 1880s and 1890s was beginning to find the leisure time to devote to new hobbies and pastimes, including reading for pleasure. New production techniques in newspapers meant that books and magazines, with illustrations, could be produced cheaply enough to sell to a mass readership. Yet rapid industrialization and urbanization generated anxieties among the political classes. The moral guardians of the new nation-state took upon themselves the task of protecting the working class and a youth in danger, as they saw it, of ethical corruption and ‘un-Germanization’ in the Kulturnation of ‘thinkers and poets’.1

Listening behind the curtain: BBC broadcasting to East Germany and its Cold War echo

This is the first study of the BBCs East German Programme, a radio broadcast to the GDR. It traces the origins of the section from the Second World War, before analysing some of the output, above all the satirical Two Comrades programme which poked fun at apparatchiks, and the ‘Letters without Signature’ feedback programme from East German listeners. The piece therefore tries to close the transmitter–receiver loop, as well as suggesting ways in which audiences influenced broadcasters as well as vice-versa in the generation of public opinion in an (almost) closed system.