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This thesis explores popular attitudes within the German Democratic Republic (GDR) towards Poland and the Poles from 1965 to 1985, and the ways in which they were shaped by official propaganda campaigns in the GDR. The German Polish relationship had been profoundly damaged by the events of the Second World War and its immediate aftermath, and the subsequent establi shment of communism served to ossify the animosity between the two peoples , while adding a variety of new grievances . The thesis focuses on the effect of two discursive projects (a nation building discourse and a discourse of German Polish reconciliation) used by the Socialist Unity Party (SED) as part of its attempt to dominate public discourse in the GDR and mould the mindset of its citizens in order to legitimize its rule. It explores the ways in which these competing discourses were continually (re)constructed, reinforced and given emotive power through a variety of discursive practices, and situates them within broader frameworks of communist memory and nationalism politics. It draws on recent work in nationalism theory (notably Billig’s concept o f ‘banal nationalism’) and memory studies (including Bell’s ‘mythscapes’) to model these discursive processes. Overall, the thesis argues that East German attitudes towards the Poles in this period, particularly as they evolved on a popular level, were largely a product of this ceaseless discursive contestation, or at least heavily influenced by it, and were marked by resentment and unresolved traumas. While this antipathy could no longer be expressed openly, the political structures and the value system of the socialist bloc offered an alternative framework in which it could be indulged, with the result that both German ethnonationalism and anti-Polonism were sustained under communism.

In the two decades following its demise, the GDR—in both historical and popular representation—was largely depicted as an isolated, autarchic entity. A recent wave of research into the global Cold War has begun to challenge this assertion, highlighting the GDR’s links to the extra-European world. Such perspectives nevertheless retain some of the older tropes of the isolationist narrative, viewing the GDR’s engagement with these countries through the narrow lens of a search for legitimacy among its own population. This thesis seeks to expand the scope, viewing the GDR’s relations with what was viewed as a “proto-socialist” world in Africa, Asia and Latin America not a simplistic, historically-fixed policy directed toward a domestic audience, but rather as part of an active political project to reshape global relations. GDR elites viewed their state as fundamentally unviable without international integration: once the project for a united Germany was abandoned in the 1960s, the GDR’s global ambitions took on paramount importance. Rather than an attempt to build legitimacy, this turn was rather imagined through the lens of sovereignty; legitimacy was not a concept in GDR elite’s political arsenal, but they did worry about their nation’s sovereignty, and sought to buttress it through engagement with the proto-socialist world. This thesis examines such engagement from five different vantage-points: looking at how the ideological basis for the project was constructed by foreign policy elites; how the GDR sought to create foreign adherents to the project through educational exchange; how the proto-socialist world—specifically Cuba—became a site for socialist leisure; how citizens engaged with domestic solidarity campaigns which sought to turn them into active participants in the project; and how the proto-socialist world was depicted on television. In doing so, it will show how early hopes for a global socialist world in the 1960s metamorphized as the Cold War progressed, fragmenting into an archipelagic network of increasingly isolated states by the 1980s.

The Allied Occupation of Germany, 1945-49, was intended to transform the war-torn Third Reich into a peaceable nation through a series of far-reaching political, economic, and social reforms. But amid the growing tensions between East and West these radical plans would be significantly altered, culminating in the formation of two German states in 1949. Historians have tended to view the occupation as a backdrop to the nascent Cold War or a transitional period in the history of modern Germany. Yet this thesis suggests that British participation in the Allied occupation was, in fact, much more than simply an exercise in political pragmatism or a contribution to the rebuilding of war-torn Europe. Rather, this undertaking catalysed Britain's political and public confrontation with Nazism, laying some of the most significant and durable foundations of the postwar Anglo-German relationship. This research utilises contemporary mass media sources and official records to explore British images and perceptions of Germany under occupation, scrutinising the interactions of decision-makers, the media, and the public. It begins with an examination of the pervasive culture war that emerged in wartime Britain over the precise interpretation and resolution of the so-called 'German problem'. The thesis then goes on to consider public portrayals of the occupation vis-à-vis the evolution of official policy, beginning in the summer of 1945 when British policymakers responded to popular demands for a 'hard peace' and approved a rigorous programme of denazification, re-education, and demilitarisation. In the coming years, scandals engulfed the public image of the British occupiers, threatening to undermine Britain's claims on 'winning the peace' and even prompting an official public relations campaign. The mass market press led calls for an abrupt end to the occupation, fearing it was undermining the nation's prestige while failing to adequately address the threat still posed by Germany. At around the same time, Britain's political and military leaders reassessed their position in the face of the Cold War, turning towards the reconstruction and rehabilitation of western Germany. By 1949, a clear dichotomy had emerged, with implications reaching far beyond the immediate postwar period: while anxieties over the 'German problem' remained largely intact amongst substantial sections of the British press and public, with many regarding the occupation as an abject failure, policymakers were firmly set on the path towards Anglo-German reconciliation and alliance.

The aim of this thesis is to present a rounded picture of British efforts to obtain information on German science and technology, both military and civilian, after the Second World War. This endeavour was conducted for numerous reasons - to secure some form of reparations, to improve defence capabilities for any future conflict, and to ensure that Germany possessed no lasting scientific war potential - and in various ways - the examination of laboratories and factories, the confiscation of equipment and documents, and the interrogation of experts. In some cases, these same experts were detained, brought to Britain, and occasionally offered work at government research establishments or private companies, in order to exact long-term benefit for Britain from the occupation of Germany. Unsurprisingly, an endeavour of this nature encountered difficulty from multiple quarters, including public opposition in Britain, conflict with other initiatives, such as reconstruction, in Germany, and competition with foreign powers, most notably the Soviet Union. As a result, this thesis sits at the intersection between various fields of historical inquiry. It incorporates elements from the history of intelligence, such as the necessarily secretive nature of many of the exploitation operations and the involvement of high-level intelligence bodies in the direction of the programme; from diplomatic history, not least how exploitation was affected by the reconfiguration of Britain's status on the world stage as it was steadily eclipsed by the United States and the Soviet Union; from the history of science, as the programme encompassed some of the most significant technological developments of the period, including the atomic bomb, the jet engine and guided missiles; and from military history, both because the first units and individuals concerned with the initiative were military and because many of the most valuable spoils removed from Germany were of a warlike nature. Ultimately, though, the narrative presented in this thesis is primarily concerned with British policy - policy towards occupied Germany, science and technology, and the nascent Cold War - and how this evolved throughout, and was shaped by, the deeply transformative period surrounding the end of the Second World War. The story of the British exploitation of German science and technology is, therefore, a crucial, but thus far understudied, facet of Britain's adjustment to the new post-war era in 1945.

This thesis examines the history of urban squatting in East and West Berlin from c. 1970 to c.1990. In doing so, it explores the relationship between urban space, opposition and conformity, mainstream and alternative cultures, as well as questions of identity and belonging in both halves of the formerly divided city. During Berlin’s history of division, illegal squatting was undertaken by a diverse range of actors from across the period’s political and Cold War divides. The practice emerged in both East and West Berlin during the early 1970s, continuing and intensifying during the following decade, before the traditions of squatting on both sides of the Berlin Wall converged in 1989-­‐90, as the city’s – and Germany’s – physical division was overcome. Squatting, this thesis argues, provides an important yet little studied chapter in Berlin’s – and indeed Germany’s – post-­‐war history. What is more, it provides an example of the ways in which, during the period of Cold War division, Berlin’s and Germany’s symbolic meaning was not only contested between East and West, but was, within the respective societies, also re-­‐interpreted from below. Drawing on a broad range of archival sources, this thesis compares and contrasts the experience of squatters on both sides of the Berlin Wall, and the ways in which the respective polities responded to this phenomenon. Broadly similar paradigms of urban renewal, this thesis argues, account for not only parallels in the temporality but also the geography of squatting in East and West Berlin. In both Berlins, this thesis demonstrates, the history of squatting was interconnected with that of domestic opposition and political dissidence. Moreover, squatting contributed to the emergence of alternative urban lifestyles, which sustained comparable urban sub-­‐cultures on both sides of the Cold War divide. Perhaps counter-­‐intuitively, this thesis argues that, East Germany’s apparatus of control notwithstanding, the relationship between squatters and the authorities in the GDR was generally more consensual than it was between their counterparts in West Germany and West Berlin. The thesis not only points to the limits of the totalitarian model of interpretation when applied to late Socialist society in the GDR, but also questions the dominant historiographical trend of studying the two Germanys in isolation from one another. Taking its cue from a number of influential scholars, this thesis asserts the importance of incorporating the experiences of both East and West Germany into a narrative of the nation’s divided past. Through identifying and analysing the overarching variable of urban squatting, this thesis attempts to develops a perspective that regards the post-­‐war history of East and West Germany as part of a wider whole.

This thesis examines strategies of rule deployed during the British occupation of north-western Germany from 1945 to 1949 and explores instances of cooperation and conflict between the occupiers and the occupied population. While the literature has primarily looked at the occupation through the lens of big political projects, this study analyses the application of quotidian ruling strategies and the making of stability on the ground. Techniques for controlling the German population were devised during the war and transmitted to officials through extensive training. Lessons from previous occupations and imperial experiences also entered the Military Government’s ruling philosophy by way of the biographical composition of its top cadre. Once in Germany, the British instituted a system of ‘indirect rule’ which relied on focal points of visibility as embodied by their local officials charged with cooperating with German notables, and invisible instances of supervision in the form of mass surveillance of civilian communications. To illustrate the way the occupiers dealt with conflict, the thesis analyses the dispensation of punishment for breaking Military Government laws, demonstrating that the British often issued severe punishment when their monopoly of force was contested, thus belying the notion of a particularly docile occupation. During mass popular protests, however, they sought to use moderate German trade unionists as intermediaries tasked with diffusing popular unrest, who were co-opted in exchange for material and propagandistic support. The British also used German administrators at the local and regional level, many of whom had a distinctively technocratic and conservative profile and who were appointed for their administrative experience rather than for their political inclinations. Through lobbying by British ecclesiastical figures, the occupiers also cooperated extensively with the German Churches, who were seen as effective partners in the re-Christianisation of Germany and increasingly as an essential bulwark against Communism. The thesis concludes that the long-term legacies of the British occupation lay in the effects of ‘indirect rule’, which exacerbated social inequalities by strengthening the profile of certain social elites at the expense of mass politics. The occupation is finally placed within the comparative context of occupations in Western Europe during the mid-20th century, which had the common legacy of buttressing elites who were primarily concerned with the making of stability rather than with participatory democracy, thus giving the post-war era its conservative mould.

This thesis offers a new interpretation of the policies that the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic implemented towards the State of Israel between 1949 and 1965 (their Israelpolitik). Previous works on German-Israeli relations in this era generally focus on the relations that one German state had with Israel. The other Germany languishes off stage, the focus of the various historiographical analyses being either on the relations between West Germany and Israel or East Germany and Israel. Instead, this thesis demonstrates that the history of both Germanys’ relations with Israel is also a history of German-German relations and of their peculiar Cold War rivalry. Both Germanys attributed pivotal importance to the dissemination of specific messages concerning their respective attitudes to the Nazi past. In turn, this aspect was central to both Germanys’ Israelpolitik and to the self-definition of each Germany within the Cold War system. Analysing the evolving Israelpolitik of the FRG and GDR thus also means engaging with the analysis of the legacy of the past on the conduct of foreign relations. Moreover, the political stance that one or the other Germany adopted towards Israel could be used to portray the German state in question as taking sides within the Arab-Israeli conflict. Thus Israelpolitik raised issues that, for both Germanys, were uniquely related to conflicts that existed independently of, but shaped and were shaped by, the Cold War.

This comparative thesis explores how museums and monuments in postwar east and west Germany commemorate the eastern territories that were lost after 1945. I focus on the concept of Heimat which spans aesthetics and politics, psychological and political identity and emerges from a condition of loss, thus it features highly in my attempt to understand the development and current state of memorialisation. The centrality of the notion of Heimat in expellee memorialisation is a field as yet little explored in research on the expulsions, particularly in east Germany. Following chapters on the historical context, Heimat, and cultural memory, Chapter Three discusses monuments erected between 1947 and 1989 by expellees who resettled in West Germany which are used to mourn, replace, reflect on and revere the old Heimat. I compare post-unification west and east German memorials, discussing key differences resulting from the former taboo on expellee commemoration in East Germany. I additionally examine changing sites of memory, memorials that illustrate a shifting integration process and investigate the use of symbolism. Chapter Four considers the interaction between eyewitnesses, historians and curators in the portrayal of history in museums and Heimatstuben at Görlitz, Greifswald, Lüneburg, Regensburg, Molfsee, Gehren, Rendsburg and Altenburg, in addition to the Altvaterturm in Thuringia. Chapter Five discusses the contentious Berlin Stiftung Flucht Vertreibung Versöhnung Centre, first mooted in 1999 by the Bund der Vertriebenen as a Centre against Expulsions. The tension between ‘German victims’ and ‘victims of the Germans’ is a recurring theme in this thesis. My conclusions highlight how memorialisation is framed clearly within the contemporary socio-political context, demonstrate the durability and flexibility of the term Heimat and illustrate the resilience of the regard for the lost territories, not only for expellees; the idea of the German East persists in German cultural memory.

This thesis examines the contribution made by twelve important and influential individuals to the development of a policy of physical and economic reconstruction, political renewal and personal reconciliation in the British Zone of occupied Germany in the first three years after the end of the Second World War. The selected individuals all possessed power, authority and influence, at different levels of the hierarchy, and collectively represent the view of the ‘governing elite’ of the occupation, including some of its internal differences. They have been categorised in three groups of four: those at the top of the hierarchy, the three Military Governors and one of their senior generals; four senior civilian diplomats and administrators responsible for promoting democracy in Germany; and four young officers with no adult experience but war, who held responsible and influential positions despite their youth. A biographical approach is a novel methodology for studying the British occupation of Germany. It highlights the diversity of aims and personal backgrounds and in so doing can explain some of the apparent contradictions in occupation policy. Personal influences were especially important in a period of transition from war to peace, when official policy guidelines appeared unclear or inappropriate and organisational structures created for the occupation were short-lived and changed rapidly. A wide range of sources has been used including memoirs and autobiographies, official documents, personal papers and oral history interviews. Although sources were created at different times for different purposes, most accounts were found to be remarkably consistent, both internally and with each other. Subjective accounts have been placed in their historical context in order to understand individuals’ perceptions, motivations and personal interests, together with the limitations and constraints on their scope for action.

This study examines transitions from Nazism to socialism in Brandenburg between 1945 and 1952. It explores the grassroots responses and their relative implications within the context of both punitive and rehabilitative measures implemented by the Soviet Military Administration (SMAD) and the communist Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED). The present study is based on archival and oral history sources and addresses two main research questions: First, in what ways did people at the grassroots attempt to challenge the imposition of punitive measures, and did their responses have any effect on the manner in which these policies were implemented at a grassroots level? These punitive measures were designed to remove remnants of Nazism and included punitive Soviet practices, Soviet NKVD camps and denazification and sequestering. Second, to what extent did grassroots Brandenburgers participate in political organisations which were designed to integrate East Germans during the rehabilitative stage and what impact did these responses have on the post-war transition? This study focuses on the National Democratic Party and the Society for German-Soviet Friendship as well as examining wider factors which may have impeded and facilitated the processes of post-war transitions. Two main arguments are proposed. First, the imposition of wide-ranging punitive measures often posed an existential threat at a grassroots level, and therefore at times elicited grassroots actions, albeit severely restricted by practical and political constraints. In turn, these grassroots responses could occasionally have some local impact and somewhat affect the manner in which policies were implemented at a grassroots level in Brandenburg. Second, it is argued that the rehabilitative stage, despite some challenges, generally provided a favourable system for grassroots integration in which the needs of the policy makers and a significant proportion of grassroots individuals somewhat converged, eventually contributing to the partial stabilisation of the emerging East German socialist state.

This thesis sheds light on the ways in which Germany's 'double' National Socialist and communist past has been represented and contested since 1998, taking the Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen memorials as case studies. It pays particular attention to the intersection between discourses on the ‘double past’ and the institutionalization of remembrance in reunified Germany, signalled by the passing into law of a Federal Memorials Concept (Gedenkstättenkonzeption) in 1999 that sought to align the memorials with a present-day 'anti-totalitarian consensus'. Whilst Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen, having served as concentration camps during the Third Reich and then as Soviet internment camps from 1945-1950, have in a normative sense been co-opted into the ‘anti-totalitarian’ narrative, this thesis argues that it is necessary to at least partially uncouple the situation on the ground from the official position.

This thesis analyzes the published commentary of editorial journalists regarding the division of Germany in twelve major newspapers of the Federal Republic of Germany in a period spanning from the final years of division to the immediate aftermath of the unification of the two German states. The study tracks editorial advocacy in response to East German leader Erich Honecker's Bonn visit in 1987 coupled with the intra-German policy efforts of the Social Democratic Party in opposition, which seemed to edge towards two-state neutralism; the wave of repression in the German Democratic Republic from late 1987 onward in the wake of Mikhail Gorbachev's reform programme, and the June 1989 visit of Mikhail Gorbachev to Bonn. Journalistic commentators' propagation of a form of constitutional patriotism as a Federal Republican identity will be examined. Responses to the East German Revolution as it developed in late 1989 are analyzed in detail, followed by an account of journalistic efforts to define the political-cultural parameters of united Germany between March 1990 and June 1991. After four decades, the post-war division of Germany had acquired a degree of normalcy. Journalistic commentators argued against any acceptance of division that also accepted the existence of the party-state dictatorship in the German Democratic Republic, insisting that the German Question was 'open' until self-determination for East Germans was realized. Nevertheless, throughout the period journalistic commentators argued in unison against solutions to division which would alienate the Federal Republic from its western alliance or put its established socio-political order at risk. Contemporary journalism propagated an image of the Federal Republic that was thoroughly defined by its post-war internalization of 'Western' value norms. This was most evident during the East German Revolution and the immediate aftermath, ostensibly the moment of greatest uncertainty about Germany's future path, when commentators became champions of continuity within the western alliance.

The Soviet blockade of western Berlin between the 23 June 1948 and 12 May 1949 - and the airlift that was organized to defeat it - was the first major confrontation between the Soviet Bloc on the one side and the United States and its allies on the other. It was at the point where the shared cooperation arising from common interests during the Second World War finally dissolved and became the Cold War with the potential to develop into a hot war. Yet for all its acknowledged importance in the history of the Cold War, no historian has hitherto investigated the British component of the Berlin Airlift to discover how it worked in practice and if British involvement was actually necessary to the success of the Allied operation as a whole, or whether the Airlift could have been undertaken more effectively by different approach. Given its acknowledged importance, the Airlift has been poorly served by its historiography. It forms a very minor part in the post-war histories of Germany; and even in the more specialist scholarly literature on the early stages of the Cold War, it receives scant attention. Insofar as it has received any detailed scrutiny, the Airlift of 1948-9 is presented regularly as a sub-plot in the wider drama of the Berlin Blockade, and it is the US dimension of the Airlift which has produced the best historiography. The American aspect, Operation VITTLES, predominates in the current literature and there is no equivalent on the RAF side to the USAF professional historians' output. Beyond this US dimension, there is a general dearth of academic papers in journals and of scholarly monographs. Popular books exist in quantity providing narrative overviews for the general public but this literature can be based on assumptions about the British dimension to the Airlift that do not stand up when tested against the surviving evidence. This study seeks to address its principal questions - examining the scale and extent of the British participation, and gauging its utility and significance in iii relation to the broader multi-national endeavour to defeat the Blockade - by a close study of the rich and plentiful primary archival sources held in Britain, the United States and elsewhere using the combined methodologies of the historian and the logistician. The thesis evaluates British participation in the Berlin Airlift and reveals that her aircraft were demonstrably indispensable logistically. However, performance - and that of the Royal Air Force especially - was substantially lower than that of the American task force. At the time, the official explanation given to the public was that the USA operated more and larger aircraft. The thesis reveals that there were additional causes. It examines how the Americans might have replaced the British, as was feared within the Foreign Office and the RAF and as they had the French. Redistribution of the whole American task force to bases nearer to Berlin in the British Zone of Germany would have increased the tonnage delivered but the thesis finds it would not have been sufficient. Deploying more US resources is the other possibility investigated and the limitations of American capability to do so are revealed and the potential impact on the plans to continue the Airlift into 1951 identified.

Hannah Arendt, Eva G. Reichmann, Eleonore Sterling and Selma Stern are important female scholars throughout the course of twentieth-century German-Jewish scholarship. Their prominence is rooted in the juxtaposition of their study of German-Jewish history and personal experience. This thesis considers their self-assertion within the German-Jewish scholarly community as it changed in shape and focus from the 1920s to the 1960s. Three distinct periods in their intellectual careers are addressed as well as their repeated transition from the margins to the centre: as female intellectuals within male-centred intellectual spheres and as Jewish scholars in the German public domain. Arendt, Reichmann and Stern mediated contemporary experience and gendered interests alongside their contribution to German-Jewish historical studies during the 1920s and 1930s. Following dispersion to new locations, their scholarship and employment contributed to the post-war reconstruction of diasporic German-Jewish life during the 1940s and 1950s, salvaging and reasserting its cultural heritage. Concerned for the post-war reconstruction of their former homeland, they forged reconnections with German society, academic life and intellectuals. Through their writings and international networking they laid the foundations for the institutionalisation of German-Jewish historiography. By exploring their contribution to the early work of the Leo Baeck Institute, the limitations of this institution for the intellectual questions and societal issues they championed are brought into focus. The third phase of their careers during the 1960s shows new examples of continuity with German-Jewish scholarship of the Weimar period. As subject-specialist advisors they promoted the integration of German-Jewish history into West German academia. In parallel with their German-Jewish studies, they led discussion of Germany's recent history among ecumenical and academic audiences. Reichmann and Sterling reframed the narratives of Vergangenheitsbewältigung away from secular sites of interaction, to encompass the impact of religious encounters and gender dynamics of Jewish/non-Jewish dialogue, thus offering further insight into the nuanced role of former Jews from Germany in these processes.