̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Cold War

Opinion: Skinnydipping, spies and shortages: Deutschland 83 brilliantly evokes life in East Germany

Anonymous — Thu, 21 Jan 2016 16:29:02 +0000

SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers for early episodes of Deutschland 83

One of the first things that happens in the first episode of Deutschland 83, the riveting German Cold War spy drama on Channel 4, is that Lenora Rauch – the brilliant, manipulative and obviously high-ranking Stasi officer stationed in West Germany – rushes home to East Berlin. After watching Reagan’s “Evil Empire” speech on West German television, she is convinced that NATO is preparing for an imminent nuclear attack. She calls her boss, switches off the telly and leaves her apartment.

But why on earth would she take a jar of freeze-dried coffee with her? Here is a bit of realism: many consumer goods, especially “luxury” items such as coffee, chocolate, trainers and VCRs were in desperately short supply in the East, available only at huge expense in the specialised “Intershop”, “Delikat” or “Exquisit” outlets.

This control of supply in turn reflected another desperate shortage: hard currency. ̽��ֱ��GDR, while well off in the context of the Eastern bloc, was perennially skinned for convertible (Western) currency and resorted to all manner of tricks and blackmail to get its hands on it.

West Germans could purchase gifts, for example, from cassette recorders to prefab houses, for relatives in the East or friends using the Genex catalogue, a state monopoly operating through a Swiss intermediary. In Deutschland 83, it is poignant that Lenora takes the precious coffee not to her boss (as per usual), but to her sister. She needs it to soften the blow of poaching her border guard son Martin for a crucial Stasi mission in the West.

̽��ֱ��theme of consumer goods shortage is carried through consistently, with an eye for historical detail and a tongue in cheek. Martin Rauch infiltrates the FRG as an army officer called Moritz Stamm and is overwhelmed by the choice of fresh produce in a West German supermarket and nonplussed in an upmarket restaurant when the waitress asks him what kind of steak he would like – “From the cow”, he replies. So full points for realism on consumer goods and their potential leverage.

Less realistic is the scene in which Martin, working as a border guard prior to his recruitment by the Stasi, accosts two would-be smugglers. Together with a colleague, he taunts them for their individualism, greed, and naivety: did they really think they’d get away with it? So far, so plausible – but then he lets them go, squirrels away the contraband, winks at his colleague and they share a laugh.

In reality, a border guard conscript such as Martin would scarcely have taken such risks. Who is to say that his colleague, for all the playful elbow-jabbing, is not reporting back to their superior, or worse, the Stasi? In a country of 16m people there were over 90,000 permanent Ministry of State Security employees (admittedly including spies in foreign lands, cleaners, clerical staff etc – but still a large number) and a staggering 180,000 Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter – unofficial collaborators or informants, such as the unfortunate actress wife of the dissident author in Das Leben der Anderen ( ̽��ֱ��Lives of Others)

In any case, the playfulness, complicity and laxity of the two border guards in letting off the two “parasites” is deeply misleading. In reality the smugglers would probably have faced prison, possibly re-education and certainly official ostracism – even though all they carried was an edition of Shakespeare and one of Marx.

Trabants and tatty clothes

In terms of sets and props, production values trump the likely reality of the clothes, fittings, dwellings etc. Sure, the shape of the beer bottles, the cut of clothes and the penchant for skinnydipping are all well researched, but in the TV series, it all looks rather stylish. Clothes fit and interiors are well put together – if occasionally odd or austere. ̽��ֱ��GDR, however, was a place where everything from nails to shirts, paint to nappies, curtains to cars could be hard to come by.

There was an 18-year waiting list for a Trabant in East Germany. Fsopolonezcaro via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

̽��ֱ��waiting list for a Trabant, a two-stroke, minuscule car produced virtually unchanged from the 1950s to the 1980s, was 18 years; the price prohibitive. People wore horrible spectacles (there were only a handful of models to choose from), ill-fitting clothes – and many appeared in Christmas and wedding photographs wearing the same outfit year after year.

But if the GDR of Deutschland 83 appears less run-down and shabby than it really was, the same is true of Mad Men’s 1960s Manhattan – and if the Elastoplast glossiness makes us more likely to take in this engrossing Cold War spyfest, who cares? For while the plot takes some liberties, it faithfully sticks to the overall facts, the poetic truth, of GDR life.

That Martin has no idea of his father’s identity or whereabouts is realistic – single parenthood was normal, carried no stigma and could count on comparatively generous state support. That Martin would know the score of the West German football cup final is also realistic – most GDR citizens had access to West German TV and watched it despite official strictures not to do so. ̽��ֱ��protocol of a regional committee of the ruling Socialist Unity Party that we teach as part of our course on the reconstruction of Germany notes that moving the regular meeting slot is all but inevitable, as otherwise members would leave “in order to catch the seven o’clock news on West German television”.

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Other examples of realism abound. That advanced medication like the immunosuppressant crucial to Martin’s mother’s kidney transplant would be hard to get by (partly because its purchase diminished hard currency reserves)? Realistic. That such treatment was de facto the privilege of the elites in the “state of the workers and peasants”? Realistic. That, partly as a consequence of such perks, the Stasi attracted some of the best and brightest? Realistic. Stasi officers such as Lenora or her boss, the awesomely named Schweppenstette, could well have been razor sharp, flexible, if necessary charming and generally very good at their jobs.

Young East German border guard Martin Rauch is coerced into spying for the Stasi. Channel 4

That they rode roughshod over the private lives of citizens? Realistic, too. In an understated but chilling scene, Lenora, Schweppenstette and a sidekick come to the Rauch family home to interview and recruit Martin. They don’t so much as knock. Martin is not awake, but summoned to the kitchen in his pyjamas. ̽��ֱ��nonchalance of this invasion and its air of brusque, unquestioning and unquestioned power conveys a GDR reality, just as the fact that Lenora will exploit family ties for her political ends does. Of course the TV series presents a condensed, dramatised account. But ideology did trump family loyalty, in official policy and often enough in the reality of GDR citizens.

Fond memories

It is less paradoxical than it may seem that, nonetheless, most people were happy in the GDR, most of the time. This, too, Deutschland 83 gets right. It was not just the stability and social security, nor the fact that the state provided public goods free of charge that inspired such identification and for some even patriotism.

As long as you heeded the rules, which for the majority of Germans under Communist rule meant no conscious blinkering, more a routine of moving within the parameters set by the state, there was no particular reason not to be happy. In the GDR, people made friends, fell in love, argued with their parents, fretted about wedding arrangements, moved to a different city to study, had favourite movies and songs.

That much of this normalcy was questioned and to an extent invalidated by reunification inspired a good deal of the longing that Germans call “Ostalgie”. And that Westerners frowned upon such regrets – “But … it was a dictatorship!” – only cemented it. Ossis didn’t hanker after the Stasi – how could they? – but they did mourn the loss of the everyday GDR that framed their lives and which reunification had swept away, from the layout of traffic signs to the old brands of chocolate and gherkin.

Even after the decommissioning, to all intents and purposes, of the Sonderweg thesis, the Third Reich remains the reference point of German history, implicitly or explicitly. While that is warranted, it has some problematic side effects, not least that in comparison to the Holocaust and Hitler, almost any other kind of state crime looks relatively benign and explicable.

It is here that Deutschland 83 seems to me particularly successful: it is even-handed and almost sympathetic in suggesting that the GDR’s intrusive and cynical policies, vis-à-vis the West and its own citizens, were motivated by the perceived threat of nuclear annihilation.

At the same time, it makes crystal clear that the operation of a successful secret intelligence network of the kind that places and directs Martin Rauch depends on exploiting precisely the kind of liberties and legal safeguards that the GDR denied its own citizens, or routinely flaunted. There are many lessons in that, not least concerning our own attitudes to the reach of security organisations that we rely on, but whose remit we should not renege on monitoring.

Henning Grunwald, Lecturer in History, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

This article was originally published on ̽��ֱ��Conversation. Read the original article.

̽��ֱ��opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author(s) and do not represent the views of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

Henning Grunwald (Faculty of History) discusses how accurate the representation of life in Cold War era East Germany is in Channel 4 drama Deutschland 83.

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̽��ֱ��Wall behind the Reichstag, (East) Berlin, Germany (1989/312)

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Inside the landslide: Thatcher's personal papers for 1983 opened to the public

sjr81 — Thu, 10 Oct 2013 14:28:49 +0000

More than 50,000 papers relating to Thatcher’s re-election, arguments with the Bank of England over interest rates, and her scuppered plans to position Cecil Parkinson as her heir apparent, have been opened by the Churchill Archives Centre and the Margaret Thatcher Foundation (http://www.margaretthatcher.org/).

̽��ֱ��papers also reveal surprising overtures to the USSR and the evolution of Thatcher’s thinking towards the Soviet Union in a series of speeches made during the autumn of 1983 as she sought to act on intelligence about Russia’s growing paranoia of a Western ‘first strike’ doctrine.

̽��ֱ��early months of 1983 were characterised by uncertainty over when the Prime Minister, who privately favoured an October election date, might call for a General Election.

As history shows, the nation went to the polls on June 9, returning Thatcher and the Conservatives with a gargantuan 144-seat majority. This signalled their best performance since 1935 by some measures and made Thatcher the first Conservative PM since Salisbury to win two elections in a row.

Despite Conservative attempts to downplay success in the Falklands for fear of being seen to ‘cash in’ on the victory, the South Atlantic war loomed large over the election campaign as Labour’s Denis Healey made it a central issue.

He accused Thatcher of ‘glorying in slaughter’ which led to almost the worst possible outcome for Labour, as they were now seen to be playing politics with the Falklands conflict.

In an election press conference on June 2, Thatcher said: “It’s gone beyond all bounds of public or political decency.” She also wrote a letter to St John-Stevas saying: “I agree with you about the Healeyism. It went too far – even for him.”

However, despite the bad feeling that may have caused between the parties, the archive papers opened at Churchill this week also show that the Prime Minister dismissed out of hand personal attacks on Michael Foot and other members of the Opposition, a marked difference to today’s frequent attacks by politicians of all persuasions across the despatch boxes in the Commons.

In a note to Iain Spoat, Conservative MP for Aberdeen South, she said: “Please leave out all references to Labour personalities. We fight on policies.”

When Michael Foot retired in October 1983, following the summer’s heavy election defeat, she sent him a warm letter saying she had ‘greatly valued the frankness and confidence with which we have been able to conduct our personal business as Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition’.

Despite the overwhelming size of the election win, both the PM and her closest circle of advisors exchanged cautionary messages both before and after June 9.

One such example in the files for 1983 comes from her press secretary Bernard Ingham who wrote on June 7, just before the election, to say: “Nor should you under-estimate the British capacity to reject success. ̽��ֱ��more successful you are – i.e., the bigger your majority – the more the media will seek to bring you down to earth and humble you.” His note is marked with not just one of Thatcher’s distinctive ticks next to it, but two.

Following the election, congratulations arrived in Downing Street in vast numbers from across the world. President Reagan wrote twice as well as calling. Former US President Nixon also wrote and almost every head of government across the world put pen to paper, producing an international Who’s Who of cards, letters and telegrams in the files opened this year.

̽��ֱ��scale of the victory and the peculiarly personal element of it following the Falklands campaign left Thatcher a freer hand at the post-election reshuffle than at any other time as Prime Minister.

But as the archive reveals, her plans to promote Cecil Parkinson to Foreign Secretary, a move which might have paved the way for a future leadership bid as her heir apparent, unravelled in chaos when he informed Thatcher, on election day itself, of his affair with his former Commons Secretary Sara Keays.

Following the news, Thatcher hurriedly redesigned the reshuffle, placing Parkinson as Minister for Trade and Industry and making Geoffrey Howe Foreign Secretary. Nigel Lawson took over Howe’s former job as Chancellor of the Exchequer. In any event, Parkinson only held the Trade and Industry Ministership until October when revelations of his affair appeared in the press.

Elsewhere, 1983’s papers also show Thatcher voicing her grave discontent at the Governor of the Bank of England who raised interest rates from ten to 11 per cent while she was on an unannounced trip to the Falkland Islands. Thatcher endured a difficult relationship with Governor Gordon Richardson whom she believed to be a barrier to her plans for the economy.

‘If I had been here, you would not have put up rates’ Thatcher told Richardson on her return – according to the diary of her economic advisor Alan Walters. Walters later wrote in the margins of one of the released documents ‘Governor got a bollocking’.

̽��ֱ��archives also show her discontent with Barclays Bank at the interest rate decision; Thatcher feeling the bank, which wanted to raise its own mortgage rates by two percentage points, was profiteering.

Chris Collins, of the Margaret Thatcher Foundation, said: “ ̽��ֱ��1983 files show Margaret Thatcher reaching her political prime, winning her biggest election victory and laying the foundations of a new political consensus at home and even abroad, a prospect beyond her grasp and possibly her imagining a few years before. But it is fascinating that the private papers show she had a sense of how quickly it could change, of how a landslide victory could create problems for her. And in fact she first learned of the Parkinson affair on the day she won the election, rubbing in the point that power contains an element of illusion.”

Margaret Thatcher’s personal papers for 1983 – the year of her landslide election victory over Michael Foot’s Labour Party – have been opened to the public for the first time.

̽��ֱ��private papers show she had a sense of how quickly a landslide victory could create problems for her.

Chris Collins

Bernard Ingham's note of warning to Margaret Thatcher two days before the 1983 General Election

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Thatcher Archive reveals deep divisions on the road to Falklands War

lw355 — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 00:01:01 +0000

Government tensions and widespread reluctance to wage war with Argentina over the Falkland Islands, even as the conflict unfolded, are laid bare among the thousands of pages of Thatcher’s papers being opened to the public and made available online by the Margaret Thatcher Foundation at http://www.margaretthatcher.org/

Among the 40,000 pages of documents being released is Thatcher’s own copy of the note confirming the Argentine invasion of the Islands, and an emotionally-charged draft letter to President Reagan, eventually toned down, where she resolutely refuses American overtures to concede ground to Argentina’s military dictatorship.

A previously unseen 12-page record made by Ian Gow, Thatcher’s Parliamentary Private Secretary, following the appearance of Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington and Defence Secretary John Nott at the backbench 1922 committee, describes how the tenor of that tense exchange informed Carrington’s much-lamented decision to resign.

Thatcher’s attempts to dissuade him came to nought and the archive contains a warm letter of explanation from Carrington to Thatcher, and a touching letter by return from the Prime Minister on May 4, 1982, relating how much she and the Cabinet missed his presence.

But the papers released this year also contain evidence of less cordial relations and weak support at best from large sections of the Conservative Parliamentary Party in the build-up to war.

Critics of Government policy could be found inside Downing Street as well as outside. Some of Thatcher’s closest advisors were sceptical that the islands were worth the fight with John Hoskyns, David Wolfson and Alan Waters, all staunch Thatcherites, persistently lobbying her to strike for a diplomatic deal with Argentina.

Outside Number 10, junior ministers Tim Raison and Ken Clarke as well as Stephen Dorrell and Chris Patten were also expressing alarm; Dorrell for one saying he would only support the Task Force as a negotiating measure - and advocating a withdrawal if the military Junta in Argentina refused to negotiate.

All this only accentuated an important effect of the war, driving the Prime Minister ever deeper into the heart of the government machine where only a handful of her most senior ministers and officials could follow.

On Tuesday, April 6, four days after the Argentine invasion, Thatcher met with former Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, seeking his advice on handling the looming conflict. While there was no official minute of the meeting, Thatcher’s own note survives. It references the now famous advice from Macmillan not to have Chancellor Geoffrey Howe in her War Cabinet so that money would not be an issue in making military decisions, and also details his counsel on handling war correspondents – essentially to restrict, if not censor them, as much as possible.

However, as the situation in the South Atlantic worsened in the face of Argentine intransigence and fighting began, wider Conservative and opposition support eventually began to fall in place behind the Prime Minister.

Critics remained, however, and the archive for 1982 contains sharp exchanges with Archbishop of Westminster Cardinal Hume, who challenged the morality of the Government’s action, and even Astronomer Royal Martin Ryle, who described the occupation as a ‘relatively minor event’ – a view tersely rebutted by Thatcher.

̽��ֱ��personal sadness she felt at the loss of life during the Falklands War is reflected in the keeping of notes such as the slip of paper handed to her on June 12, relaying that HMS Glamorgan had been hit by an Exocet missile, with casualties at that point unknown. Elsewhere, the archive records instances of the Prime Minister anxiously awaiting news and reading long into the early hours of the morning as losses mounted and the British and Argentine forces traded heavy blows.

News that the Argentinians had surrendered came in a call from Fleet Command at Northwood at 9pm on Monday, June 14. ̽��ֱ��Thatcher Archives has her notes on the call, as well as her annotated copy of John Nott’s celebrated earlier statement announcing the recapture of South Georgia, nearly two months earlier on April 25.

̽��ֱ��‘Falklands Factor’ famously led to a huge post-war boost in the Prime Minister’s own popularity rating, as well as the Government’s. She connected the conflict to domestic issues, asking in a famous speech ‘why does it need a war to bring out our qualities and assert our pride?’.

Despite looming large over much of 1982, the Falklands were not the only overseas challenge to the Prime Minister. Thatcher’s first big visit after the Falklands War was to Japan, China and Hong Kong. ̽��ֱ��Chinese leg of the trop was particularly significant as it kicked off the long negotiation on the return of Hong Kong to China.

̽��ֱ��archives reveal something of the vast preparation she personally undertook for the visit to the Far East, especially China. She felt obliged to examine every detail of the trip, wary of the symbolism of each visit and determined to make a powerful impression at every point.

Among the papers at Churchill are a list of clothes she was planning to wear, meeting by meeting (all the outfits were given names such as Smoky, Fuchsia and Plum Stars), and the archive also contains details of her outright refusal to lay at wreath at the Monument to Revolutionary Martyrs in Tiananmen Square, despite being advised that many Western heads of government had recently done so. She simply scrawls ‘NO’ in capped letters next to the suggestion.

She also spent an astonishing amount of time planning the British return banquet (held in the Great Hall of the People) where she oversaw cutlery arrangements and the silver table settings supplied by the Royal Navy. Ever keen to cut costs, whether in the British economy or domestically, Thatcher also waded in on a ridiculous argument about the cost of the banquet; the PM favouring the cheaper 50 Yuan option but eventually being persuaded to accept the 75 Yuan menu which contained shark’s fin and sea slugs.

She also became embroiled in a heated dispute about the possibility of serving jam sandwiches for dessert (considered a treat for foreign visitors). Meriting official discussion with the Foreign Office, Thatcher opted for a fruit salad dessert instead.

Despite the care and attention put into seemingly every aspect of the Far East trip, the archive confirms her meetings with the Chinese leadership did not run smoothly. Papers released this year relate for the first time that Communist Party Chairman Deng Xiaoping threatened to move into Hong Kong before the expiry of the lease in 1997 if there were ‘very large and serious disturbances in the next fifteen years’, even going so far as to mention HSBC by name as a potential agent of such disturbances.

Away from the seriousness of war and international political wrangling, Thatcher also spent one evening in 1982 in the company of the man behind the world’s most famous drag queen – Dame Edna Everage. While not attending in full and glittering regalia, Barry Humphries did give Mrs Thatcher a Dame Edna cooking apron for ‘informal lunches at Chequers’. ̽��ֱ��archive also contains record of an amazing literary dinner at the home of Hugh Thomas where she sat down with Larkin, Spender, Stoppard, Berlin and the like. However, records note that Iris Murdoch and John Le Carre, a grudging admirer, were unable to attend.

For Christmas 1982, the archive also reveals she was sent tapes of Yes, Minister, by the Director-General of the BBC, Alisdair Milne.

̽��ֱ��Falklands War – the conflict that defined much of Margaret Thatcher’s political career and legacy – dominates the release of her personal papers for 1982 at the Churchill Archives Centre from Monday (March 25).

Among the 40,000 pages of documents being released is Thatcher’s own copy of the note confirming the Argentine invasion of the Islands

British Army official photographer Sgt Ronald Hudson

After landing at San Carlos, a heavily laden paratrooper of 2 Parachute Regiment heads south for Sussex Mountain on 21 May 1982. From there the Battalion attacked Goose Green.

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Totalitarianism, violence and the silent majority

sjr81 — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 15:07:52 +0000

Her lecture ‘True Believers: Collaboration and Opposition under Totalitarian Regimes’ takes place at the Umney Theatre, Robinson College, tonight at 5pm.

Applebaum won the Pulitzer Prize for her 2004 book Gulag: A History, and is also the author of Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe, and Gulag Voices: An Anthology. Her most recent book is Iron Curtain: ̽��ֱ��Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956.

She said: “ ̽��ֱ��horrifying genius of Soviet communism - as conceived in the 1920s, perfected in the 1930s and then spread by force to Soviet-occupied Europe was the system's ability to get the silent majority in so many countries to play along without much protest.

“A small proportion of people protested and small proportion collaborated. But carefully targeted violence, propaganda and state's monopoly on economic and civic institutions persuaded the rest to go along. These techniques were used to great effect in Eastern Europe after 1945.”

Applebaum, who is currently Philip Roman Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics, a columnist for the Washington Post and Slate, is also a former Editor of ̽��ֱ��Economist, where she provided in-depth coverage of Eastern Europe before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

Dr Rachel Polonsky, a lecturer at the Department of Slavonic Studies and organiser of tonight’s event, said: “We are proud to be hosting Anne Applebaum, whose work and life centre on the areas we study in the Department.

“As a historian of the twentieth century, Anne reminds us how intricately interwoven the political destinies and cultures of Russia, Ukraine and Poland have been, and how important it is to study them together. She is one of a series of high-profile lecturers (including the Polish intellectual Adam Michnik and the British historian Norman Davies) whose visits to Cambridge demonstrate the commitment of the ̽��ֱ�� to securing a future for Polish studies within the Slavonic Department, and the hope that this commitment will resonate outward to a wider public, both within and beyond the ̽��ֱ��.”

Head of Slavonic Studies, Dr Emma Widdis, said: “Our research and teaching in Ukrainian, Russian and in future, as we hope, Polish, reflect our sense of the importance of understanding this complex European 'neighbourhood', in which historical legacies remain politically contested. We are all very much looking forward to Anne’s talk this evening.”

Tonight’s talk at Robinson College is part of the CamCREES 2013 public lecture series, which also runs alongside a series of public lectures on Resistance in Russia and Eastern Europe.

Upcoming events in this series include:

'Resistance and Rights' on Thursday 7 March 2013, given by Professor Benjamins Nathans, ̽��ֱ�� of Pennsylvania
How and with what effects was the rhetoric of rights - the lingua franca of liberalism - deployed in an avowedly illiberal society like the Soviet Union? How do activists invoke rights in today's Russia? This lecture will analyse continuities and ruptures in the career of civil and human rights as a mode of resistance from the period of "developed socialism" to the Putin era.

'Resistance and Performance' on Thursday 25 April 2013, given by Dr John Freedman (writer, translator, critic, and scholar of Russian theatre)
Political resistance and social commentary are deeply ingrained in the Russian theatre tradition. Rarely, however, have they been as open and obvious as in recent years. Throughout the Soviet period (and Imperial era) theatre artists "spoke the truth" by way of metaphor and implication. This tended to remain true even after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when artists, who achieved new freedoms, were more intent on creating new kinds of art than on speaking about social ills. But in one of the biggest breaks with tradition in the history of Russian theatre, some writers, directors and actors are currently becoming extremely outspoken in their works. This discussion will focus on current developments, putting them into a historical context.

'Resistance and Gender' on Thursday 2 May 2013, given by Dr Olesya Khomeychuk, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

̽��ֱ��‘horrifying genius’ of Soviet totalitarianism and its ability to control and quell protest will be examined tonight by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Anne Applebaum.

̽��ֱ��horrifying genius of Soviet communism - as conceived in the 1920s, perfected in the 1930s and then spread by force to Soviet-occupied Europe was the system's ability to get the silent majority in so many countries to play along without much protest.

Anne Applebaum

Newhouse Design

Russian Poster 38

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PsyWar during the Malayan Emergency

tdk25 — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 12:34:00 +0000

̽��ֱ��Malayan Emergency of 1948-1960 is widely regarded as having involved the most successful British counter-insurgency (COIN) campaign in history. Similarly, it also included one of the most successful British psychological warfare operations ever undertaken. This important aspect of the COIN campaign, however, has only been examined in a handful of studies – something which remains true more broadly of British psychological warfare efforts throughout the period of imperial decolonisation and the Cold War.

In this seminar paper (originally given on Friday, 22 February, 2013), Thomas J. Maguire provides an insight into how psychological warfare played an increasingly important part in the largest British counter-insurgency operation of the decolonisation era.

Psychological warfare was conceived as a potential “force multiplier” which would reinforce other counter-insurgency strategies and tactics employed against the communist Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA). It targeted the insurgents’ morale and sought to induce surrenders and defections, while creating dissent, division and instability in their ranks. It was, therefore, intended to both remove insurgents from the battlefield and hasten a greater supply of intelligence.

Maguire explains how, after a relatively ineffective start, the Federation Government psychological warfare strategy became more systematic and refined from about 1950 onwards, eventually playing an important part in the insurgents’ defeat. ̽��ֱ��talk shows how ‘psychological intelligence’ was collected, analysed and disseminated – in particular through the careful interrogation of surrendering enemy personnel. Using this intelligence, the Government information services constructed a number of influential propaganda themes and utilised a variety of techniques to disseminate finished productions, most notably by dropping over 400 million leaflets over the jungle during the course of the conflict.

̽��ֱ��paper also highlights the broader political and cultural context in which psychological operations took place, showing how they influenced British strategy and contributed to the Emergency’s outcome.

̽��ֱ��seminar is part of the regular Cambridge Intelligence Seminar organised through the Faculty of History and the Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS) at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge. It is chaired by Prof. Christopher Andrew (Corpus Christi), an expert in the international relations sub-field of intelligence and security studies. Prof. Andrew’s extensive list of publications include the recent and much-vaunted ̽��ֱ��Defence of the Realm: the Authorized History of MI5 (2009).

Thomas J. Maguire (Gonville & Caius) is a PhD candidate in POLIS. This paper forms part of a chapter on interrogation and psychological warfare in the forthcoming publication, Simona Tobia & Christopher Andrew (eds), Interrogation in War and Conflict. ̽��ֱ��principal focus of his research is British and American psychological warfare and counter-subversion in early Cold War Southeast Asia. His broader research interests lie within the fields of intelligence and security studies, psychological warfare, and the Cold War.

As part of the Intelligence seminars run by the Faculty of History, Thomas J. Maguire examines how psychological warfare contributed to Britain's counter-insurgency campaign in Malaya from 1948 to 1960.

Intelligence on kills would be supplied for follow-up operations publicising insurgent losses

Thomas Maguire

Credit: UK Department of Information.

Leaflet dropped on Malayan insurgents, urging them to come forward with a Bren gun and receive a $1,000 reward.

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̽��ֱ��End Of Honecker

bjb42 — Thu, 17 May 2012 16:47:11 +0000

̽��ֱ��Fall: ̽��ֱ��End Of Honecker, follows the story of the man who led the German Democratic Republic from 1971 until its collapse in 1989, before escaping judicial prosecution for human rights abuses and his alleged involvement in the deaths of 192 East Germans who were trying to escape to a new life in the West.

It will be shown at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge on Monday, 21 May, and will be followed by a discussion with the director, Eric Friedler.

Although Honecker himself died in 1994, the documentary has created a sensation in Germany, because of an interview it features with his widow, Margot. Now 84, the former first lady of the GDR broke a 20-year silence when she consented to an interview with Friedler. What she had to say has stupefied many Germans. Honecker is shown remorselessly defending the regime, idealising the “lost nation” and describing its demise as “a tragedy”.

Of those who were killed trying to reach the West, she comments: “There was no need for them to climb over the wall, to pay for this stupidity with their lives.” As the GDR’s former education minister, she also denies that a forced adoption policy, in which children of political prisoners were taken from their parents and given to Communist families, ever existed.

̽��ֱ��Fall combines archival footage with first-hand accounts from many of those who were at the heart of the collapse of both the GDR, and Communism as a whole. Friedler spoke to the former head of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev and Eduard Shevardnadze, his Minister of Foreign Affairs. There are also interviews with the former West German Chancellor, Helmut Schmidt; Honecker’s successor, Egon Krenz; and the prominent East German Socialist politican, Gregor Gysi.

Dr Bernhard Fulda, a Cambridge historian who has co-organised the UK premiere, described the film as a landmark of German documentary in the 21st century. “It is the closest we are likely to get to having an insider’s view of the GDR,” he said. “Usually we get the perspective of victims, but here we meet the people who were at its centre.”

“ ̽��ֱ��film is effectively a glimpse of what happens inside a dictatorship. We may look at Syria now, for example, and wonder how the al-Assads cannot be disturbed by what is happening. Here we see that in the GDR, there was a stark contrast between the internal view of the system, and the perceptions of ordinary people at the time.”

That insider’s perspective goes on to reveal the tensions that beset the GDR in its final days. Reformers, such as Gysi, who sympathised with Gorbachev’s attempts to liberalise Communism and wanted to do the same thing in Germany, found themselves at odds with hard-liners like the Honeckers, who advocated ideological separation from the West.

Erich Honecker’s inflexibility on Glasnost-style restructuring was to play a key role in his downfall. When at the end of the 1980s, other parts of the Eastern Bloc started to relax their border controls, he refused to do the same and only reluctantly allowed passage to East Germans who were trying to flee to the West via countries such as Hungary and Czechoslovakia.

Protests began to break out in the GDR and a Tiananmen Square-style bloodbath nearly ensued in Leipzig, when paratroopers were called in to deal with demonstrators calling for reform. ̽��ֱ��order to send them almost certainly came from Honecker and disaster was only averted by party officials. By then, however, other members of the party realised that Honecker could not go on and he was ousted in October, 1989, just a few weeks before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

More than two decades later, little of Margot Honecker’s attitude seems to have softened. She was interviewed in Chile, to where she and her husband emigrated in 1993. She describes victims of the regime’s repression as “criminals, who today make out that they were political victims.” Asked about any lingering sense of guilt, she reflects: “It didn’t touch me at all. I have a thick skin”.

̽��ֱ��film is also unusual because, rather than concluding with the fall of the Berlin Wall and German unification, it shows what happened to the Honeckers next. Both effectively became refugees in their own country. Unsurprisingly, there was also a lynch-mob mentality among Germans, who felt that they should stand trial. Erich was already ill with the cancer that would kill him. ̽��ֱ��state found itself unable to give them a home.

Remarkably, the German Protestant Church, which had been the subject of repression under Honecker’s stewardship of the GDR, stepped in. ̽��ֱ��couple were housed for two months with a Lutheran Pastor, Uwe Holmer, who appears in the film, while more permanent arrangements could be made. Holmer’s own children had been prevented from going to university because of the anti-Church stance of Honecker’s leadership, yet for weeks, these ideological opponents co-existed.

Fulda believes that the Church may have seen this as a type of “subtle revenge”. “There may have been a desire to demonstrate that actually, they had been persecuted for the wrong reasons,” he said. “By practising the Christian principle of turning the other cheek, they were making a point.”

“For us, this makes the film a more valuable historical document still. ̽��ֱ��film is striking because it engages with the question of what happens to the dictators after a dictatorship collapses. There is a dramatic epilogue to the story of the GDR, where the two sides of the ideological divide had to come to terms with the fact that they were basically also human contemporaries. That aspect - the what happened next - is an amazing story which has not really been told before.”

̽��ֱ��Fall: ̽��ֱ��End Of Honecker, directed by Eric Friedler, will be shown at the Bateman Auditorium, Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, on 21 May at 4.30pm. All are welcome to attend. ̽��ֱ��film is 90 minutes long and is subtitled in English.

A film about the downfall of the East German head of state, Erich Honecker, which includes an astonishing interview with his apparently unrepentant widow, will receive its UK premiere next week.

There is a dramatic epilogue to the story of the GDR, where the two sides of the ideological divide had to come to terms with the fact that they were basically also human contemporaries.

Bernhard Fulda

Wikimedia Commons.

Erich Honecker, leader of the German Democratic Republic from 1971 until 1989. ̽��ֱ��film follows not only his demise as head of state, but the story of what happened next.

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Cold War PR - spinning the ideological battlefront

sjr81 — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 12:56:45 +0000

Public Relations of the Cold War, organised by CRASSH (Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities) sought to examine the ‘selling’ of ideologically motivated policies to domestic audiences during the Cold War – outside of the more commonly studied area of public diplomacy, which concerns a government reaching out to foreign audiences.

̽��ֱ��conference, which drew experts from the UK, Europe, and North America and featured keynote addresses from Professor Christopher Andrew, Official Historian of the Security Service, and Professor Odd Arne Westad, a leading expert in Cold War history, aimed to demonstrate how pervasive the battle to influence domestic public opinion became – on both sides of the Cold War divide.

̽��ֱ��scope of influence was massive, whether it was Executive Branch infighting about how to best present casualty reports to the public during the Vietnam War to models of Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) on sale in children’s toyshops. ̽��ֱ��conference also examined the under-recognized and -examined nuance in various means of disseminating PR.

American historian Hannah Higgin, one of the conference organisers, said: “In today’s PR-laden world, there are very important lessons to be learned by looking at how public relations influenced opinion, occupied governments and seeped into daily life and popular culture.

“And this wasn’t just practised by the USSR and USA. ̽��ֱ��conference has speakers discussing just how neutral Switzerland actually was, how Maoist thought and even the singing of ‘ ̽��ֱ��East is Red’ were among surgeon’s tools in China after the Sino-Soviet split, West Germany’s ‘reptile fund’ and how the work of George Orwell, via the medium of radio, was possibly as potent, if not a more potent, a weapon in the battle against Soviet totalitarianism as any CIA-funded or covertly-backed Cold War cultural enterprise abroad.

“This conference spurred a vital conversation about the channels and means by which governments ‘sold’ the Cold War to their own people - and how journalists, movie-makers, academics, researchers and the general public took up the ideological battle of their own volition.”

̽��ֱ��conference considered a range of controversial issues, including the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan and the USA’s reporting of combat casualties in both the Vietnam and Korean Wars, and dissected how official policy was transmitted through the mass media.

In the latter case, the media often challenged official casualty statistics, charging that they underreported the actual total. In response, the Pentagon increasingly provided more detailed figures, to the consternation of Truman and particularly Johnson.

In the Soviet Union, the Brezhnev-era of tightly controlled reporting of the 'events' in Afghanistan gave way to the gradual liberalisation of media policy. Under glasnost, the dynamics of public debate could not be controlled by official institutions anymore and contributed to the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union.

Also up for discussion was the selling of the Cold War via the media by America’s ‘Crusade for Freedom’. Developed by the CIA, the Crusade was one of the longest-running and most intensive campaigns which saturated the American media with anti-communist sentiment for two decades.

̽��ֱ��paper, presented by Dr Ken Osgood from the Colorado School of Mines, looked at how such sentiment seeped effortlessly into art, literature, movies, music and politics. ̽��ֱ��Crusade had a particularly wide reach because of the extensive support it received from public relations professionals and the Advertising Council, as well celebrities—including, in one advert, a young Ronald Reagan, corporations and the mass media.

Added Higgin: “America’s battle against Communism touched everyday life through overt and covert means. Whether it was through ‘duck and cover’ (the famous public safety campaign) or Edward R Murrow, one of America’s most respected journalists, becoming the Director of the United States Information Agency in 1961, American culture was filled with subtle and not so subtle messages about how high the ideological stakes were.

“ ̽��ֱ��PR aspect of the Cold War has not been discussed in great depth before. Often domestic and foreign realms of history are studied in relative isolation. Further, people were living with Cold War PR until relatively recently. Now there is some historical distance. We need to understand more about what constitutes domestic PR, how it was—and is—disseminated, and how it was used as means of uniting—or trying to unite—the masses to a common purpose, and when and whether it is good, bad, or something else, for society.”

̽��ֱ��conference was funded by CRASSH as well as by the International History Dept at LSE and the History Faculty at Cambridge. ̽��ֱ��conveners of the conference were PhD students Hannah Higgin (History, Cambridge), Martin Albers (History, Cambridge), Mark Miller (History, Cambridge), and Zhong Zhong Chen (LSE).

̽��ֱ��persuasive powers of Cold War PR, until now little recognised or discussed, was the subject of a three-day conference at Cambridge ̽��ֱ��.

This conference spurred a vital conversation about the channels and means by which governments ‘sold’ the Cold War to their own people - and how journalists, movie-makers, academics, researchers and the general public took up the ideological battle of their own volition.

Hannah Higgin

Image courtesy of X-Ray Delta One via Flickr

American toys for American boys and girls

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