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2024-12
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History
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http://dx.doi.org/10.34944/dspace/10881
Abstract
This dissertation examines a series of West German-American transatlantic fêtes from 1948 to 1952 and places them within the context of Cold War diplomatic history, West German-American rapprochement, and the westernization of the Federal Republic of Germany. In the earliest years of the Cold War, American, West German and European officials and non-state actors gathered to commemorate the centennial of the Revolution of 1848 in Frankfurt (1948), the bicentennial of the birth of German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1949), the 900th anniversary of the city of Nuremberg (1950), cultural festivals in Berlin (1951) and Passau (1952), and the centennial of the year that Carl Schurz arrived in the United States (1952). In each of these fêtes, participants – including organizers, historians, journalists, attendees, and cultural organizations such as the Carl Schurz Memorial Foundation - engaged with carefully-selected symbols and axioms that disseminated politically- and ideologically- important narratives that were as informed by contemporary, Cold War ideological needs as they were informed by the historical past.
When viewed as a whole, these celebrations honoring German, American, German-American, and European history and culture formed a kind of fête diplomacy, whereby state and non-state actors sought to achieve a number of postwar national and international goals: West Germans hoped to use pre-Hitler history and culture as a means of demonstrating their cultural compatibility with Europeans and Americans and emerging from the long shadow of the Third Reich, and Americans sought to create an ideologically-friendly bulwark against the socialist world and embed German nationalism within a European and Atlantic framework.
Fête diplomacy also became a vehicle for the normalization of German-American and German-European cultural relations and for reifying “the ideological Atlantic,” a transnational community based on the ideology and shared heritage associated with Western civilization, and claiming a place for West Germans within that community. Fêtes were held simultaneously with and in support of international attempts to construct the Atlantic world politically, economically, culturally, and even militarily. As Western nations forged this community at the international level, they used the highly-visible nature of fêtes and festivals to undergird these efforts and give the emerging Atlantic community an ideology and purpose.
The Soviet Union and East Germany were not passive in this ideological battle, and they helped to sustain the conflict with fêtes of their own. Fêtes behind the Iron Curtain, often direct counterparts to West German-American fêtes, were a means of forging an international socialist community and embedding Germans within that community. As a result, fêtes were anchored in contemporary and competing ideological frameworks related to strict Marxist-Leninist and liberal democratic orthodoxies. These fêtes helped to foster a Cold War mindset among the superpowers while priming their respective German audiences for an ideological bifurcation at a time where emerging East and West German governments were consolidating their own authority and searching for international legitimacy.
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