Eli Nathans. Peter von Zahn’s Cold War Broadcasts to West Germany: Assessing America

Abstract

It is well known that Western Europe and especially West Germany have been strongly influenced by the United States past 1945. Foreign correspondents played a crucial role in this field. One of the most influential postwar journalists in Germany, and the first permanent TV correspondent in the U.S., was Peter von Zahn (1913–2001). His weekly radio columns and his monthly TV documentary Bilder aus der Neuen Welt (Pictures from the New World) reached millions in the 1950s. Eli Nathans’s Peter von Zahn’s Cold War Broadcasts to West Germany: Assessing America is still the first book that analyzes the life and work of Zahn as an influential intermediary between America and West Germany. Luckily, many private letters of Zahn have survived in German archives and were intensively used by the author. Nathans’s first argument deals with Zahn’s biographical transformation. Nathans presents Zahn as a typical conservative German with a militant and elitist ethos before 1945, who changed his beliefs after the war. His first chapter about Zahn’s early biography shows contradictions that are typical for many German academics in these decades: after receiving a doctoral degree in history, Zahn joined the Nazi propaganda troops in the war, where he attended the shooting of partisans in Ukraine with an SS unit—although he had a British wife and a Communist sister. Nathans analyzes in detail Zahn’s thoughts within his private notes, memorandums, and letters to his wife, which show an “ironic and distanced approach to the war” (54) and to those mass killings. Zahn wrote propaganda brochures, gave speeches against Communists, and interrogated POWs, but he was never a member of the Nazi organization and his wife was temporarily arrested. In these chapters, the author discovers many new and significant details, but gets a bit lost in quotes and details.