Negotiating Cold War Culture at the Crossroads of East and West: Uplifting the Working People, Entertaining the Masses, Cultivating the Nation

Abstract

Since the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, our understanding of Cold War history has changed considerably. The wave of new research spurred by the opening of archives and opportunities for novel East-West comparisons threw into sharper relief aspects of the Cold War contest that had received little attention previously. It has become increasingly clear that the Cold War was not only a military, political, and economic conflict, but also one profoundly implicated in, and shaped by, key transformations in twentieth-century culture. Capitalizing on the increased accessibility of primary sources from former socialist states, recent research has provided valuable insights into the politics of everyday culture on both sides of the Iron Curtain, and we have seen as well the publication of several transnational accounts of the cultural Cold War spanning the West and the East.