Abstract
“Theirs was another world”1—nineteenth-century historian Leopold von Ranke’s famous pronouncement about the incommensurability of past and present—encapsulates how many historians approach the utopian visions of an atomic future and the Manichean worldview of the early Cold War. The contradiction between the threat of total obliteration and optimistic thoughts of a better future based on nuclear technologies has been explained by some historians as resulting from mass manipulation and government propaganda, in particular in connection with the American “Atoms for Peace” program, announced in a speech given by US president Dwight D. Eisenhower on December 8, 1953.2 Historian Joachim Radkau argues that the idea of a brighter future through nuclear technologies— heralded under the banner of the “Atomic Age”—was appealing to Germans because it offered an alternative to the misbegotten and discredited world created by the Nazis.3
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Notes
Leopold von Ranke, preface to Geschichte der Romanischen und Germanischen Völker von 1494 bis 1514, 3rd edn. (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1885), VIII.
Kenneth Osgood, Total Cold War: Eisenhower’s Secret Propaganda Battle at Home and Abroad (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2006), 154–174.
Opposing views in Mara Drogan, “Atoms for Peace, U.S. Foreign Policy and the Globalization of Nuclear Technology, 1953–1960” (PhD diss., S.U.N.Y. Albany, 2011)
Richard G. Hewlett and Jack M. Holl, Atoms for Peace and War, 1953–1961: Eisenhower and the Atomic Energy Commission (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989).
Joachim Radkau, Aufstieg und Krise der Deutschen Atomwirtschaft 1945–1975. Verdrängte Alternativen in der Kerntechnik und der Ursprung der Nuklearen Kontroverse (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1983), 92. My translation here and throughout.
See Dolores Augustine, Red Prometheus: Engineering and Dictatorship in East Germany, 1945–1990 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007).
See Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 107–132.
See Mark Walker, German National Socialism and the Quest for Nuclear Power 1939–1949 (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1989)
Charles Frank, Operation Epsilon: The Farm Hall Transcripts (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993).
See Mike Reichert, Kernenergiewirtschaft in der DDR (St. Katharinen: Scripta Mercaturae Verlag, 1999), 91–130, 141–144
Burghard Weiss, “Nuclear Research and Technology in Comparative Perspective,” in Science under Socialism. East Germany in Comparative Perspective, ed. Kristie Macrakis and Dieter Hoffmann (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1999), 303.
See Heinz Barwich and Elfi Barwich, Das Rote Atom (Frankfurt am Main and Hamburg: Fischer Bücherei, 1970), 139–140.
Michael Meyen and William Hillman, “Communication Needs and Media Change. The Introduction of Television in East and West Germany,” European Journal of Communication 18/4 (2003): 465.
See Corey Ross, Media and the Making of Modern Germany: Mass Communications, Society, and Politics from the Empire to the Third Reich (Oxford, UK, and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 32, 44.
See Otto Haseloff, Stern: Strategie und Krise einer Publikumszeitschrift (Mainz: v. Hase & Koehler, 1977), 453, 893, 896
Daniela Münkel, Willy Brandt und die “Vierte Gewalt.” Politik und Massenmedien in den 50er bis 70er Jahren (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2005).
Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988), ix.
See Erica Carter, How German Is She?: Postwar West German Reconstruction and the Consuming Woman (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1997).
See Michael Meyen, Denver Clan und Neues Deutschland (Berlin: Christoph Links Verlag, 2003), 138.
See Simone Barck, Martina Langermann, and Siegfried Lokatis, “Jedes Buch ein Abenteuer” Zensur-System und Literarische Öffentlichkeiten in der DDR bis Ende der Sechziger Jahre (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1997)
Julia Martin, “Der Berufsverband der Journalisten in der DDR (VDJ),” in Journalisten und Journalismus in der DDR, ed. Jürgen Wilke (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2007).
See Clemens Heitmann, Schützen und Helfen? Luftschutz und Zivilverteidigung in der DDR 1955 bis 1989/9 (Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag, 2006), quotation on 100.
“Ein Erdteil Verändert Sein Klima,” NBI, 51/1949. On Soviet technological gigantomania, see Paul R. Josephson, “‘Projects of the Century’ in Soviet History: Large-Scale Technologies from Lenin to Gorbachev,” Technology and Culture 36/3 (July 1995), 519–559
Loren Graham, What Have We Learned about Science and Technology from the Russian Experience? (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).
See David Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007).
See Ilona Stölken-Fitschen, Atombombe und Geistesgeschichte: Eine Studie der Fünfziger Jahre aus Deutscher Sicht (Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 1995), 109–119.
Ernst Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung, vol. 2 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973; 1st edn. Berlin [GDR]: Aufbau-Verlag, 1955), 775. He wrote this three-volume work in 1938–1947 in the United States.
See Barbara Wörndl, Die Kernkraftdebatte. Eine Analyse von Risikokonflikten und Sozialem Wandel (Wiesbaden: Deutscher Universitäts Verlag, 1992), 41.
See Burghard Ciesla, “Droht der Menschheit Vernichtung? Der Schweigende Stern—First Spaceship on Venus: Ein Vergleich,” Apropos: Film 2002. Das Jahrbuch der DEFA-Stiftung (2002): 124, 132–133.
See Thomas Kramer, Micky, Marx und Manitu (Berlin: Weidler Buchverlag, 2002), 218–221.
See William Bradford Huie, The Hiroshima Pilot (New York: Putnam, 1964).
See Georg Geiger, Der Täter und der Philosoph—Der Philosoph als Täter. Die Begegnung zwischen dem Hiroshima-Piloten Claude R. Eatherly und dem Antiatomkriegphilosohen Günther Anders. Oder: Schuld und Verantwortung im Atomaren Zeitalter (Bern: Lang, 1991), and the literature cited therein; “Little Boy & Fat Man,” Time, December 19, 1960
Günther Anders, Off Limits für das Gewissen: Der Briefwechsel zwischen Claude Eatherly u. Günther Anders, trans. Günther Anders, ed. Robert Jungk (Reinbek b. Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1961); Huie, Hiroshima Pilot.
See Susan L. Carruthers, “Redeeming the Captives: Hollywood and the Brainwashing of America’s Prisoners of War in Korea,” Film History 10 (1998): 275–294. Several episodes of the BBC series, “The Avengers” fall into this category, for example, “The Fear Merchants,” written by Philip Levene, directed by Gordon Flemyng.
On the aestheticization of suffering, see Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003).
See Susanne Zantop, Colonial Fantasies. Conquest, Family and Nation in Pre-Colonial Germany, 1770–1870 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1990).
See Holger Nehring, “Cold War, Apocalypse and Peaceful Atoms. Interpretations of Nuclear Energy in the British and West German Anti-Nuclear Weapons Movements, 1955–1964,” Historical Social Research 29/3 (2004): 156.
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© 2012 Dick van Lente
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Augustine, D.L. (2012). Learning from War: Media Coverage of the Nuclear Age in the Two Germanies. In: van Lente, D. (eds) The Nuclear Age in Popular Media. Palgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137086181_4
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