Frohn, Axel [WorldCat Identities]
In the late s and early s, these feelings were not expressed directly and publicly, but they were part and parcel of private experiences. Opinion polls reveal this privatized history of mass death and the yearnings for security. In West Germany, such feelings were especially pronounced, and it is telling that British pollsters did not even care to ask the relevant questions.
Only 7 per cent were p. These sentiments reflected the fundamental fact that most Germans saw a trade-off between social and economic reconstruction and military security. Discussions about the new army stressed that the military would not be a German organization, but integrated into either a European or a NATO force—for many, a non-German army was not worth having. Fundamentally, there existed a distrust of the state as an institution that protected personal safety and security—Germans had seen the violence a state could mete out.
The new West German state did not seem to honour their experience by trying to take a national defence force away from them; whereas the Nazi regime, according to perceptions visible in a number of opinion polls, had exposed them to unimaginable dangers. And they tried to achieve this by keeping themselves busy by pursuing material and social security. The West German debates about rearmament established some of the networks around which the campaigns against nuclear weapons would gather later on. More importantly, they also made available a new language for the politics of security—a language that stressed the rationality of the claims, emphasized the control of emotions, and argued in terms of the control of the future rather than the multitude of possibilities.
This development was especially striking for women's peace campaigners who took part in the campaigns and who had propagated programmes for peace as part and parcel of an agenda for a thorough societal transformation. They employed maternalist images of victimhood rather than active female agency from mainstream commemorations of the war years to make their case. Moreover, they articulated their claims as part of a discourse of emotional control. They voiced their wartime experiences only as long as they could be expressed with rational arguments.
This paradox behind the politics of security—playing material security out against military security—can be gleaned particularly well from local commemorative practices in West German towns and cities that had been subject to aerial bombardment. These issues were especially acute for Kassel: A similar rejection of direct involvement in armaments and the military, while still emphasizing material security, also existed in Britain.
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As in Germany, the welfare state—and the material security it provided—were used by both Labour and Conservative governments as a way of making Britain safe against communist subversion. They were content to support the state as an actor in social and welfare policy, while opposing military conscription as a sign of the kind of authoritarian statehood that Britons were fighting.
They argued for the abolition of conscription in March , and, still appealing to a socialist variant of British patriotism, they sought to establish the UK as a leader in European and international reconstruction. While we can see how the memory of war came to be connected with notions of a community of active citizens during the Blitz that elided the social, political, and racial exclusions of that community, there was no sense of injury. Interestingly, however, the connection between sovereignty and the nuclear arms race led to structurally similar interpretations of the role of the United States in the cold war.
Experiences of aerial warfare during the Second World War offered a central reference point in these debates. But both positions were carried by a more or less fundamental mistrust of the intentions and rationality of US foreign and defence policies. In West Germany, the situation was much more acute: The visible presence of US forces in occupied and semi-sovereign Germany was, together with the threat coming from the Soviet army on German soil, singled out as the source for insecurity: In , nearly half of the West German population felt that way.
These similar developments had their root in the general context of international defence policy as it emerged over the course of the early s. The consequences of warfare were no longer restricted to soldiers. Rather, the violence and destruction of a future war would be felt by societies as a whole—the trend for the socialization of violence that had already been a reality for those cities affected by the bombing raids of the Second World War would be completed in the scenario of an all-out nuclear exchange. At first, Britain had no legal arrangements in place that regulated the presence of US troops when they returned to bases in East Anglia in , and the Visiting Forces Act of granted them more extra-territorial rights than any other country, with the exception of occupied Germany.
Nonetheless, Britain maintained some direct say in policymaking by maintaining its own arsenal of nuclear weapons, precisely in order to avoid being entirely at the whim and will of US defence policy. The military, and the government in its wake, regarded society as an object of planning.
According to this scheme of thinking, it was the state as an abstract unit that endowed society with security. In West Germany, in particular, this had a special resonance: The issues of nuclear energy and nuclear weapons were uniquely suited to debates about the role of nationhood, community, and society in the post-war world that had remained under the surface since the mid- to late s: A source of cheap and enormous energy, the new energy offered a healing balm that could cover up the wounds of war and help build a new technical age on Europe's ruins.
But before the campaign for security in the nuclear age could emerge that could turn this paradox of security into a political issue, the international context had to change. The nascent anti-nuclear-weapons campaigns in both countries were connected through the same international context in which they emerged: In October , the Soviet Union successfully tested its first nuclear bomb. On 1 November , the United States performed the first test of a thermonuclear weapon that was heralded as the new superweapon.
From the end of , the United States started to deploy smaller-scale, short-range nuclear weapons in West Germany in order to support the conventional forces stationed there, while the negotiations for German rearmament continued. These years saw the first campaign against these weapons in Germany, led primarily by Protestant clergy. In response to the bungled Suez intervention, the British government sought to introduce a more cost-efficient way of guaranteeing its great power status that imposed a lighter burden on British citizens than a conventional army. Likewise, the nuclearization of West German forces was a direct response to recruitment problems as well as an attempt by the Adenauer government to become a more fully fledged and sovereign member of the Western alliance system and to prevent an American withdrawal from German territory.
Settling these issues without the outbreak of war and the construction of a post-war international order in Europe could occur only in the wake of a number of crises—the two Berlin crises of and , as well as the Cuban missile crisis of chief among them—that were fundamentally about the status of Germany and nuclear weapons in international relations and that brought the world repeatedly to the brink of nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States.
More generally, then, these concerns had their origins in the changing configurations of the cold war and, in particular, the role that governments assigned to nuclear weapons in trying to achieve peace and stability in the international system. In December , NATO shifted its strategic emphasis from conventional armaments to nuclear weapons, as its members, most importantly the United States and Great Britain, believed that only nuclear armaments could provide a financially sustainable and politically justifiable defence of Western Europe.
Yet this created the inexorable dilemma for the West European front in the cold war that the use of nuclear weapons in defence might well result in the complete destruction of Europe. The parameters of security had shifted towards a very dramatic image of future warfare and an all-embracing conflict between p. Defence planning now threatened to place political systems and societies under the shadow of planning for a devastating war. The United States, because of its geographical distance from the Soviet Union, at first remained shielded from the potential effects of these policies until intercontinental missiles had been developed in the late s and early s.
However, the nuclearization of NATO strategy had more immediate and far-reaching implications for the defence policies of all West European nations. Its impact was particularly pronounced in Britain and West Germany. American short- so-called tactical and medium-range nuclear weapons were stationed in Britain and the Federal Republic from late onwards. West Germany had hardly regained partial sovereignty after the Second World War with its admission to NATO and the remit to build up conventional forces, when, in late and early , it planned to adapt to international strategic developments by acquiring nuclear-capable launching pads, used under a dual-key arrangement with the American NATO forces.
Yet, even more than was the case for Britain, what might have been in the Federal Republic's foreign political interest, also turned central Europe into a potential nuclear battlefield. For the movement activists, the post-war period felt less and less like the order and stability they had yearned for after the ravages of the Second World War. They were essentially simulations of nuclear warfare.
During this time period, British and West Germans peace campaigners developed a growing sense of the implications of nuclear energy. The development of this awareness was itself tied to the international context. Eisenhower had launched in a speech before the United Nations General Assembly on 8 December was meant to accompany the testing of new powerful hydrogen bombs sought to promote this image of modernity. But there also developed a growing sense of the dangers of nuclear weapons.
Over the course of the s, there emerged a growing scienitific and popular knowledge of the dangers of radioactivity for human bodies. By the mids few but the most enthusiastic supporters of nuclear weapons would lack an awareness of the invisible dangers of radioactivity. The war in divided Korea that started in June and ended with the permanent division of the country in July was a turning point for perceptions in Germany, whereas it failed to have a major impact on British discussions on nuclear energy.
Landing and take-off, rehearsals of death, a hollow roar, shaking, memories in ruins. No one looked skywards. In the wake of the Korean war, this knowledge of p. Nuclear weapons tests became, for Germans much more than for Britons, projection screens for their own annihilation, as one observer put it. The mass-market cinema and newsreel as well as the new medium, television, made these experiences directly available to viewers.
The West German and British governments played a part in creating this awareness as part of their efforts to educate their societies for the threats of the nuclear age. But when they discussed these issues, civil defence planners suggested similarly everyday measures for protection, such as using a briefcase to cover one's head in the event of a nuclear strike.
From War to Post-War: Security Lost and Found
When the crew of the Japanese fishing vessel Lucky Dragon was exposed to severe radiation from a US hydrogen bomb test in , it had become clear to many peace activists that they needed to find a novel language beyond traditional patterns of liberal internationalism and non-violent pacifism to address the dangers of nuclear weapons testings as a simulation of a future nuclear war for p. The BBC's Panorama programme broadcast a special programme on the Lucky Dragon incident that involved the philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell and the scientist Joseph Rotblat.
The first of these reconfigurations of more traditional peace activism in Britain was Operation Gandhi , organized by a few activists with a PPU background. It sought to protest through sit-downs at Whitehall offices and military installations. The campaign was soon torn apart, however, by the old rifts between traditional pacifists, Labour and socialist internationalists, and UN supporters. The attention these campaigns received led to more local iniatives that campaigned for an end to testing and that further popularized knowledge on the dangers stemming from nuclear weapons through leaflets and screening of films such as Children of Hiroshima.
The combination of thermonuclear threat and hopes for a more stable international system that would control nuclear weapons effectively led to a joint venture by several Western scientists that came to be known as the Russell—Einstein Manifesto. Both statements show that Hiroshima as a reference point had almost entirely lost its importance. Instead, the debate now focused on the present dangers stemming from nuclear weapons. While these efforts received a significant level of attention in the British media as both the Lucky Dragon incident and Eisenhower's speech were still fresh in people's minds, it was in West Germany that they had a fundamental impact on the ways in which peace activists discussed the dangers of nuclear weapons.
Rather, scientists who discussed the dangers of radioactivity in the context of hydrogen bomb tests prompted a more far-reaching debate. Many of the German scientists who had been previously involved in nuclear weapons programmes published a declaration on the island of Mainau in Lake Constance after a gathering of mainly German Nobel laureates in July Images of poverty and images of economic growth and paradise of plentiful consumption came to be linked to this description.
In West Germany in particular, challenges of democratic government and planning also came to be linked to the nuclear age, as Germans discussed the nature of technology in contemporary society more generally.
The early discussions about nuclear testing, civil defence, and the role of standing armies in the context of the cold war were rehearsals for the more pronounced and explicit debates about the role of nuclear weapons in national and international politics in the late s and early s.
They involved a discussion about the fundamentals of the cold war international order in the light of experiences of the Second World War in general and aerial bombing in particular. At their core, they were one attempt of many, situated at the borderlands of the cold war in British and West German societies, to find security again after it had been lost. Inititially, peace activists trying to revive their campaigns from the interwar period had problems engaging with the new context.
Gradually, however, they found a language of security that moved away from an emphasis on nationalism as a cause for international strife towards one that incorprorated an awareness of the social structure of peace, and its ideological dimensions between East and West in the cold war.
While, in line with their efforts from the interwar years, peace activists continued to look for supranational solutions to the problem of war and peace, they rejected the particular international order that the cold war had made. In both countries, peace activists in the s lacked, however, the organizational platforms that were appropriate for communicating these ideas to a broader public.
Crucially, they also did not have an awareness of the democratic and social implications of this way of organizing military affairs: British and West German activists as well as p. Hence, while the memories of the Second World War lost their immediacy from the mids onwards, they never disappeared. They undergirded the ways in which contemporaries thought about and publicly discussed the dangers posed by nuclear weapons.
But it also contained the seeds of hope for political, social, cultural, and moral transformation that had characterized the moment. The debates of the late s and s therefore involved more than discussions about the precise shape and size of the military commitments. Its definitions were contested, and the concept had the potential to be used for the critique of defence and foreign policy, just as the British and West German governments used it for purposes of legitimation.
The protests against nuclear weapons that emerged in the late s did just that.
And they did so in a form and with a way of campaigning and with broader languages of contestations that managed to transcend the structural constraints that traditional pacifists had faced from to the late s, while still drawing, in new contexts, on the languages of popular political identifications of the immediate post-war period. Britain possessed its own nuclear weapons, while the content, if not the rhetoric, of the West German debate centred around the stationing of tactical and medium-range nuclear missiles on West German soil and on the equipment of the Federal Army with nuclear-capable equipment.
Also, Britain had already opened its first nuclear reactor—also used for producing weapons-grade plutonium—in Windscale in A research reactor was already operational at Harwell. The first research reactor opened in Garching near Munich in shortly before the foundation of the European Atomic Community in March , which allowed for research collaboration between France, Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and the Federal Republic.
For the protesters in both countries, conjuring up apocalyptic images of nuclear war meant, albeit to different degrees and in different forms, reliving their experiences of warfare and violence of the previous years. Yet, for the majority of activists, the apocalypse was no longer religious and transcendental. But it was precisely in this situation that the future appeared as something that could be influenced and moulded through clear political decisions.
Ambivalence, by contrast, had to be avoided at all costs, as this was a life-or-death matter. Activists in both countries based their assessments on the same body of information about nuclear tests and the impact of nuclear weapons when assessing the impact of nuclear war on the respective national territories.
NATO powers had used ten imaginary nuclear weapons in order to throw back a Soviet tank division on an kilometre front. Some 2, square kilometres of German soil would p. This was more than three times the number of German civilian casualties of the Second World War. And casualties from fallout had not even been computed. One commentator put it bluntly: The Easter Marches played an important role in organizing the public protests. In addition, public opinion in Britain could draw on the publication of a detailed report by the British mission in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, although the questions in the House of Commons at the time were primarily about the effects of the bombing on wildlife.
Whereas British protesters gradually moved towards assessing the problems of technological developments and faults in bureaucratic decision-making as causes for nuclear war, West German activists continued to see international politics as the main source for nuclear war. West German protesters, by contrast, had at once a more abstract and more immediate vision of catastrophe that led to a spatial conception of security: The first air combat exercise in Europe in had demonstrated that bombs, two-thirds of the total payload, had been dropped on the territory of the Federal Republic, and the scenario envisaged that 1.
Unlike in Britain, the location of the future war appeared to coincide with that of the last war. Shute had already written invasion-scare novels during the s, mainly concerned with a possible breach of British air defence by Nazi stealth bombers. Interestingly, Shute's novel did not feature in West German movement discussions at the time. Indeed, what was striking about the arguments put forward by West German protesters was the extent to which they depopulated the apocalypse.
Holger Nehring
West German activists drew on the same scientific data on the impact of nuclear weapons, and they conveyed their opinions by using similar charts. Most pictures still depicted depersonalized images of destruction; many even depicted conventional fighting. Buildings and things had become historical subjects and victims of both the National Socialist leadership and allied bombing. Not only had the German apocalypse lost its transcendence, it had also lost its actors. While apocalyptic scenarios were not absent from CND's rhetoric, the West German campaign emphasized the inevitability of destruction in much more drastic terms.
Although there were campaigns against the lack of efficient civil defence efforts, it is hard to imagine that British organizers would have chosen such a language of death to communicate their aims. For one speaker at the Easter March in Hesse and the northern Palatinate, war had burnt itself internally into the Mainz cityscape: Then, this city, Mainz, burnt for 12 hours. They [the new truths] have become even clearer through the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the tests at the Bikini Atoll and at Nowaya Semlya.
Yet the concrete location of this memory differed substantially. When West German protesters mentioned Hiroshima, they moved away from their own past. Peace protest, demonstrating with cars: Mothers think about your children. Atomic war is threatening. The perceptions of the dangers of nuclear weapons were highly gendered. Female activists in both countries made similar arguments about the nuclear threat by pointing to their responsibilities as mothers for the future of their children and by claiming that male politicians acted irresponsibly.
Because of different war experiences and the different geostrategic position in the cold war, British images of the apocalypse did not have a concrete location in Britain's geography. Increasingly, the emphasis was on accidents that might trigger catastrophe in Britain, but that so far had happened elsewhere. History appeared to provide guidance in this respect. The dangerous present that the activists faced created its own problem for the activists. As Rolf Schroers, an activist and former Wehrmacht officer who had been involved in the war against partisans in Yugoslavia and who was therefore well aware of the conditions for social bonding in wartime, pointed out: Activists still made sense of their cold war by reading the presence of the nuclear arms race through the past of the Second World War.
They were, very much in line with those of the general public at the time, directly connected to a wholehearted endorsement of technological progress in general. But it also had its source in the declining strength of cultural pessimism and in the rise of a more empirical analysis of society, which manifested itself in a veritable euphoria for democratic planning in both countries.
While the general public discourses in both countries came, from the early s onwards, to be increasingly euphoric about the peaceful uses of nuclear energy, the sceptical and euphoric interpretations continued to sit side by side within the British and West German movements against nuclear weapons. The proponents of this view did not regard arms and military developments as the most important area of battle between East and West, but emphasized the areas of technology and culture instead.
Peace Politics in 20th Century Britain London, Technik und Zeitgeist im Jahrhundert Stuttgart, , — John Collins, Faith under Fire London, In Front of your Nose, — London, , 6. Deutsche Geschichte — Bonn, November Hanover, Contentious Politics in Europe since New York, , 15— Die Deutsche Friedensgesellschaft — 2 vols; Aachen, Political Activism and the Popular Front London, Zivile Kriegsvorbereitungen als Ausdruck der staats- und gesellschaftspolitischen Grundlagen von Demokratie und Diktatur Munich, Morgan, The People's Peace: British History — Oxford, Forging Democracy.
Britain — London, , — American policy and the reconstruction of West Germany, Book 15 editions published between and in English and held by WorldCat member libraries worldwide This volume of essays by German and American historians deals with the most important issues of U. All contributions to this volume are based on recent research in German and American archives, including two comprehensive essays on archival sources in the Federal Republic and the United States for the Occupation period and the era of the Allied High Commission.
While a substantial body of historical literature deals with the policies of the U. Relevant records are not easily accessible to historians. The essays in this volume therefore represent one of the first efforts to expand our knowledge of both periods of German history and of American policy toward Germany in the first postwar decade. Genoa, Rapallo, and European reconstruction in by Carole Fink Book 17 editions published between and in English and Italian and held by WorldCat member libraries worldwide One of the largest twentieth-century summit meetings, the Genoa Conference of , was a notable failure, due to the gulf between the Allies and Germany, between the West and Soviet Russia, and among the World War I victors and their small allies.
This book, a unique international collaboration, presents various perspectives on the Genoa Conference: The authors present new findings on such questions as the sensational Rapallo Treaty between Germany and Russia; the strategy of the small neutral powers; and the policy of the United States toward European debts.
Readers will find contrasting as well as complementary views in this volume. Neutralisierung als Alternative zur Westintegration: