Cultural Politics in the Cold War - Detailseite

For more than forty years, two political and socio-economic systems, capitalism and socialism, completed for supremacy of the world. They based their pretensions of global governance on specific ideological understandings, discourses and practices of legitimacy and persuasion. The course will explore the concept and use of culture in the context of the cold war as a product of the specific post-WW II. constellation and the politics that emanated from it. The course will discuss on the one hand, culture as a hegemonic devise for molding home societies but also as the result of cross-cultural, transnational and cosmopolitan influences across the east-west divide. Furthermore, the course is concerned with the way the politics of both blocks conditioned each other reciprocally on a world scale but also with the forms that the politics of dissent and consent were played out. Within this context we will discuss major hermeneutical models for interpreting the political and cultural program of socialism such as the totalitarianism or the individual appropriation (Eigensinn) model. Furthermore, we will take a chronological approach to cultural politics as we reflect on the dialectical connection between governance and freedom but also the changing nature and legitimatory basis of those regimes themselves. The geographical emphasis will be on East and Southeast Europe but the course will include aspects of US and global cultural politics as well.