"Matters of Taste: The Politics of Food and Hunger in Divided Germany 19451971" traces the political and cultural economy of food in East and West Germany during the first two postwar decades. By using food as its primary lens of analysis, the dissertation develops a new analytical and methodological approach to modern German and Cold War history. It does so by exploring the ways in which food concerns and hunger fantasies determined the trajectory of the two postwar German states. This approach reveals the interconnectedness of the GDR and the FRG and challenges many of the chronological and geographic divisions that have defined twentieth century German historiography. It also highlights the ways in which ideas of gender, nation and race, particularly the categories of Slavs and of Jews, were implicated in the everyday food practices of the populations of the two German states. The postwar era followed a war whose scale and impact were measured in terms of food lost and people starved. This was a time when the recognition of the global ramifications of hunger ensured that postwar reconstruction efforts centered on nutrition and food distribution. Allied attempts to resolve the food crisis in occupied Germany was one of the opening acts of the Cold War, and made the divided country a crucial stage for the development of an international food economy that incorporated issues as diverse as agricultural policy, global food aid and societal models of gender relations.

Matters of Taste: The Politics of Food and Hunger in Divided Germany 1945-1971

By the late 1960s, West Germany and Israel were moving in almost opposite diplomatic directions in a political environment dominated by the Cold War. The Federal Republic launched ambitious policies to reconcile with its Iron Curtain neighbors, expand its influence in the Arab world, and promote West European interests vis-a-vis the United States. By contrast, Israel, unable to obtain peace with the Arabs after its 1967 military victory and threatened by Palestinian terrorism, became increasingly dependent upon the United States, estranged from the USSR and Western Europe, and isolated from the Third World. Nonetheless, the two countries remained connected by shared security concerns, personal bonds, and recurrent evocations of the German-Jewish past. Drawing upon newly-available sources covering the first decade of the countries' formal diplomatic ties, Carole Fink reveals the underlying issues that shaped these two countries' fraught relationship and sets their foreign and domestic policies in a global context.

West Germany and Israel: Foreign Relations, Domestic Politics, and the Cold War, 1965–1974

Glorious, Accursed Europe

This work examines the role of private elites in addition to public actors in West German-American relations in the post-World War II era and thus joins the ranks of the “new diplomatic history” field. It studies the Atlantik Brucke and the American Council on Germany (ACG) from the early 1950s to the mid-1970s – a history that has hitherto been neglected. The focus on private elites and their contributions to fledgling public-private networks within each country and across the Atlantic helps to shed light on the ways hostilities between West Germany and the US were addressed.
Based on original archival research and applying tools of Social Network Analysis (SNA), this thesis starts from the assumption that international relations are conducted by elites. These elites are not only composed of democratically legitimized politicians and diplomats. Private actors representing business, industry, media, and academia are also involved, albeit hidden from public scrutiny. Private actors are enabled to do so because they are integral parts of dense state-private networks. The state-private network concept is innovatively transferred to the transnational level. The network term emphasises the fact that those connections are neither limited in quantitative terms nor are they confined to national boundaries.
The analysis illuminates three sustainable achievements of the ACG and Atlantik-Brucke. Firstly, they contributed to forging a bipartisan foreign policy consensus at whose core has been a strong West-German-American relationship. Key in achieving this was the redirection of West German Social Democracy away from anti-militarism, neutralism, and socialism. Secondly, in fulfilling an elite coordination function, the organisations helped to secure the transatlantic partnership consensus by conveying it into business, trade and 2 industry circles in the US as well as in West Germany. Thirdly, by utilizing their manifold links to media and academia they assisted in manifesting this consensus in public discourse.

The Quest for Atlanticism: German-American Elite Networking, the Atlantik-Brücke and the American Council on Germany, 1952-1974

For decades, collective memories of the Nazi period and the Holocaust have influenced greatly the Federal Republic of Germany. Despite fears that such progressive memories would decline after unification, the last twenty years have witnessed the institutionalisation of this memory regime. More generally, coming to terms with this past has been a constant political and cultural dynamic since 1945, even if the intensity of this process increased after the big debates of the 1980s. The last decade, however, has witnessed the development of a more pluralistic memory regime in the Berlin Republic, with collective memories of the East German dictatorship and, more importantly, the long-dormant memory of German suffering competing with memory of the Holocaust for visibility and influence. This article concludes with some speculation about the future of collective memories in Germany in light of evidence that the phase of intensive memory work may be coming to an end. The long-unmasterable past may be overcome.

Shlomo Shafir

Papers

Ambiguous Relations: The American Jewish Community and Germany since 1945

Ambiguous Relations: The American Jewish Community and Germany Since 1945

The American Jewish community's attitude to Germany: The impact of Israel