West German President Heinrich Lübke’s 1963 trip to Indonesia was the first official visit of a Western head of state to the island nation. An official German photograph shows him paying his respects in a war heroes’ cemetery. This chapter explores the political significance of the ceremonial and deconstructs this photograph. The chapter is a thick description of this state visit as an interaction between West Germany and Indonesia at the time of decolonisation. The chapter departs from the realist paradigm of the history of diplomacy and interprets the visit in terms of the cultural history of diplomacy. Cultural aspects of diplomacy create political meaning and shape political outcomes. Style and substance of diplomatic encounters mutually condition each other. These insights provide the basis for a cultural history of global diplomacy, one that helps us break down boundaries between binary categories such as East and West, while at the same time displaying an awareness of global asymmetries.

In the 1940s and early 1950s, the Cold War convention of containment, which undergirded American involvement in Vietnam, was broadly shared, internalized, at times even fostered, by the United States European allies. This consensus broke down by the 1960s, as successive US administrations saw themselves locked ever more rigidly into Cold War logic which seemed to require going to war to preserve a noncommunist South Vietnam. By contrast, the United States transatlantic allies and partners increasingly came to question the very rationale of US intervention. By the mid-1960s there was a remarkable consensus among government officials across Western Europe on the futility of the central objective of the American intervention in Vietnam of defending and stabilizing a noncommunist (South) Vietnam. European governments refused to send troops to Vietnam. However, West European governments differed considerably in the public attitude they displayed toward US involvement in Vietnam, ranging from France’s vocal opposition to strong if not limitless public support by the British and West German governments. Across Western Europe, the Vietnam War cut deeply into West European domestic politics, aggravated political and societal tensions and diminished the righteousness of the American cause.

The chapter examines the relationship between the size and diversity of the expellee population and entrepreneurship and occupational change in West Germany. Using statistical data at the municipal and county levels, it documents a reversal of fortune: although expellee presence presented economic challenges in the immediate postwar period, in the long run, it increased entrepreneurship rates, education, and household incomes. The more regionally diverse the expellee population, the better the long-run economic performance in receiving communities.

This chapter examines the generalizability of the book’s main argument. It synthesizes the conclusions of other studies on the consequences of three similar episodes of forced migration in the twentieth century: the Greek-Turkish population exchange, the Partition of India, and the repatriation of Pied-Noirs to France. It then considers ways in which the argument can be extended to other cases of forced and voluntary migration.

This chapter examines the reception of expellees in West Germany. I show that expellees were perceived as foreigners, despite sharing ethnicity and language with the locals. I then document expellees’ exclusion from local voluntary associations and the formation of new associations based on migration status and region of origin. I conclude by analyzing contributions to public goods provision in Bavarian municipalities. I show that the more expellees a given community received, the lower the rates at which it taxed the locals’ property and business.

The Epilogue examines the failure of red secularism to reassert itself after 1945 due to the political climate in East and West Germany. It examines the further decline of Freethought as a consequence of lessening of confessional tensions in German society and the secularization and de-churching of German society in the 1960s.

West Germany finally realized the energy project Italy had begun and Austria had advanced. West Germany made material, through the capitalization of a durable infrastructure, the relationship the Soviets had sought with Western Europe for so long. In 1962 the United States had vetoed a series of oil-for-pipes contracts that would have brought Soviet energy to the heart of Europe. This chapter recounts how half a decade later, with the groundwork having been laid by its two southern neighbors, West German business, local governments, and finance assembled the technopolitical coalition that would redraw East–West politics and labor relations throughout Europe. With the vast, capital intensive construction that West German industrial and financial power made possible, the Soviets could draw on further reserves of capital backstopped by a nigh-irrevocable, material infrastructure.

The rivalry between the two states of divided Germany played out on a global scale across the Third World. The chain of upheavals in East Africa in 1964-65 led to Dar es Salaam becoming the first African capital south of the Sahara in which the German Democratic Republic maintained a diplomatic mission. This turned the city into a propaganda battlefield. East Berlin strove for full recognition from Tanzania, while Bonn tried to prevent such a development from coming to pass. In the face of this rivalry, Julius Nyerere’s government sought to pursue a non-aligned foreign policy and broker aid agreements to further its socialist project. Adopting a triangular approach, this chapter demonstrates how Tanzania’s relationship with the two German states turned on developments in Central Europe, especially West Germany’s Ostpolitik. It reveals the challenges of upholding non-alignment in a Cold War world which did not revolve around simple binaries and was complicated by politics ‘on the ground’ in Dar es Salaam.

One of the most ambitious ruptures inaugurated by punk was the break with previous historical continuities: ‘No Future’ urged youths to reimagine current and potential opportunities, but it also declared the past invalid for contemporary developments. Yet, despite such rhetoric, punk in West Germany looked back to Krautrock for inspiration and influence. From bands as diverse as S.Y.P.H., der Plan, D.A.F., die Krupps, and others, German punks turned to Can, Neu!, Faust, Tangerine Dream, and Kraftwerk – and the engineering talents of Conny Plank – to help them develop ‘new’ sounds, rhythms, and lyrics. Krautrock is often dismissed as irrelevant to German musical developments, drawing more interest abroad than back home in Germany. Except, as the case of punk indicates, both musically and practically, Krautrock deeply influenced punk efforts at pioneering new German popular musical advances. By examining the continuities and ruptures between Krautrock and German punk, this chapter shows how the former was a critical influence on later German musical developments, and how punk drew on past musical antecedents as they revolutionised German popular music and sought to emancipate German society.

Cuba is well-known for its mix of radical positions and skills at brokering agreements. Cuban internationalism began as a way to build alliances to counterbalance its geopolitical asymmetry with the United States and gain allies to ensure its survival. These skills are exemplified in the Tricontinental Conference. This investigation sketches the central role that Havana played in the development and hosting of the conference, then focuses on the negotiations undertaken by Cubans to keep the talks going in a thorny political climate in which many political positions were represented. More specifically, we focus on the role of Cuba before and after the Tricontinental in negotiating the tensions and infighting between stakeholders from anti-colonial and socialist liberation movements and parties in the Third World, as well as the emerging rift between the Soviets and Chinese. Finally, honing in on the example of West Germany, we consider how Western leftist participants at the conference saw Cuba’s role in this multidimensional, avant-garde camp that included not only guerrilla movements, communist parties, and other radical organizations, but social democrats as well.

After 1945, Romanian Germans explored multiple possibilities in their search to define a Heimat, taking us beyond the known narrative of the ‘other homeland’ in Germany. Their most hotly contested issue – where did they belong? – turned particularly acute during the Cold War, as the Romanian German community became more fractured and physically separated. Romanian German identity in this period, this chapter argues, was flexible and far more transnationally defined than often assumed. At its heart were opposing views of ‘regionalism’, nationalism, and belonging. Romanian German identity debates during this period operated on different scales in the community, which made identity contestation particularly messy. If the Landsmannschaften (homeland societies) in Germany encouraged greater emigration from Romania, other Romanian Germans, especially those close to the Lutheran Church, pushed back. Meanwhile, as this chapter demonstrates, the realities ‘on the ground’ reveal a rich cultural history of transnational Romanian Germans communicating across numerous borders, constantly rethinking their own roles in an uncertain Cold War.

The rivalry between the two states of divided Germany played out on a global scale across the Third World. The chain of upheavals in East Africa in 1964-65 led to Dar es Salaam becoming the first African capital south of the Sahara in which the German Democratic Republic maintained a diplomatic mission. This turned the city into a propaganda battlefield. East Berlin strove for full recognition from Tanzania, while Bonn tried to prevent such a development from coming to pass. In the face of this rivalry, Julius Nyerere’s government sought to pursue a non-aligned foreign policy and broker aid agreements to further its socialist project. Adopting a triangular approach, this chapter demonstrates how Tanzania’s relationship with the two German states turned on developments in Central Europe, especially West Germany’s Ostpolitik. It reveals the challenges of upholding non-alignment in a Cold War world which did not revolve around simple binaries and was complicated by politics ‘on the ground’ in Dar es Salaam.

This article examines the key biographies of Bertolt Brecht that have appeared since Brecht’s death in 1956, exploring the way that Cold War politics helped to determine how Brecht was seen in Germany and the English-speaking world.Whereas left-leaning and socialist biographers tended to admire and praise Brecht, anti-communist and anti-socialist biographers condemned him for his revolutionary politics and leftist commitments.The 1970s and 1980s witnessed renewed interest and admiration for Brecht even in the capitalist West; however, after the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the reunification of Germany in 1990, renewed recriminations against communism and socialism led to further attacks on Brecht and his legacy, culminating in John Fuegi’s 1994 biography Brecht and Company: Sex, Politics, and the Making of the Modern Drama. In more recent times, however, ongoing problems with globalization and capitalism have led to a renewed appreciation for and heightened interest in Brecht, his life, and his works.

Between the late 1970s and the mid-1990s, more than one million Vietnamese “boat people” fled from the Socialist Republic of Vietnam by crossing the South China Sea. Some 700,000 were permanently resettled more than two dozen countries across the world. This essay compares the resettlement of Vietnamese refugees in West Germany and the United States to illuminate similarities and differences in international and local responses to the influx of this refugee population within the context of the Cold War.Covering topics such as government responses, humanitarian interventions, public perception/reception, and refugee networks in the US and West Germany, the essay emphasizes connections overlooked in previous studies that examine Vietnamese boat people resettlement in only one national context.It underscores the multilateral impacts of the Vietnamese boat people exodus and its legacies in contemporary Germany and America.

In western Germany, a major controversy developed over the British and French policy of requiring German courts to prosecute Nazi crimes against humanity. German critics argued that this violated the violation on ex post facto law making. This, they said, made such trials unjust and similar to the courts of the Third Reich, which had also used ex post facto laws. The British and their German supporters argued that Nazi crimes could only adequately be punished as crimes against humanity, since many Nazi misdeeds had not been criminal under the laws of the Third Reich (e.g. the denunciation of individuals to the Gestapo). The American decision not to grant German courts jurisdiction over crimes against humanity came in large part out of a desire to avoid a similar controversy in their own occupation zone. Many of those critical of prosecuting Nazi atrocities as crimes against humanity wanted to help Nazi criminals and make it harder to prosecute Nazi crimes. Yet, because they made their arguments in the language of liberal legalism and the principles of legality, these critics helped to deradicalize the German legal profession, which had previously been deeply anti-liberal and anti-democratic.

With the founding of the two German states in 1949, the period of political transition in postwar Germany came to an end. Nazi trials, however, continued in both West and East Germany. The Epilogue examines how policy toward Nazi prosecutions changed with independence in both the Federal Republic and German Democratic Republic. West Germany pursued a policy of rehabilitation for most former Nazis, coupled with the further prosecution of small numbers of ‘intolerable” Nazi atrocities. This was part of a strategy of “democratization via integration.” Meanwhile, East German continued a more robust prosecution program, even if the number of trials was still substantially smaller than during the occupation period. The epilogue also recapitulates the argument of the book. Worse trials in the West helped inadvertently to democratize the emerging Federal Republic of Germany, while better trials in the East contributed to the consolidation of a new, Stalinist dictatorship. Transitional justice in Germany thus produced counter-intuitive results at odds with the prevailing wisdom among scholars and activists.

At the turn of the 1970s/1980s, the two halves of divided Europe overcame their parallel economic crises. Ballooning Eastern European debt to the non-socialist world, the Polish Crisis in 1980-81, and the economic impact of the Afghanistan War and the Iraq-Iran War permanently undermined Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe. By late 1981, the USSR had neither the economic means nor the military stomach to maintain its influence by brute force. As a consequence, Hungary, Poland, and East Germany turned to the western world for credit and economic advice, which in turn accelerated the erosion of Soviet dominance. At the same time, western countries underwent a conservative transformation that partially helped to overcome the economic crises of the late 1970s that had emerged in the aftermath of the American abolition of the Bretton Woods system and the two Middle East oil shocks. In the 1980s, they emerged strengthened in economy terms and unified against the final Soviet attempt to seek supremacy in all of Europe through the stationing of intermediate-range nuclear missiles in East Europe. The structures for the end of the regional Cold War were in place.