Book Reviews

Stefan Wolle, and Ilko-Sasha Kowalczuk is equally glaring. According to this thesis, the decision to establish a separate East German state took place after the 1953 upris- ing (not in 1949 or in 1961), a point that would have had considerable bearing on Schirdewan’s views on reuniªcation. It is also unfortunate that Grieder does not dis- cuss the terms “opposition” and “resistance” to provide a better framework for analyz- ing the conºict within the SED. As it stands, readers would be forgiven for coming away with the impression that Schirdewan, Zaisser, Herrnstadt, and others were resist- ers in the same category as the men of 20 July 1944. Finally, some mention must be Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-pdf/3/1/137/695438/jcws.2001.3.1.137.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 made of the writing style, which is, to be blunt, laborious. For evidence that political history can be gripping as well as meticulous, one need look no further than the sec- ond part of Mark Kramer’s article, “The Early Post-Stalin Succession Struggle and Upheavals in East-Central Europe: Internal-External Linkages in Soviet Policy Making,” in Volume 1, Number 2 (Spring 1999) of the Journal of Cold War Studies. Despite these shortcomings, Grieder’s work is thoroughly researched, accurate, and intriguing. It is an important contribution to the history of East .

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Uta G. Poiger, Jazz, Rock, and Rebels: Cold War Politics and American Culture in a Di- vided Germany. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000. 333 pp. $50.00 (hardcover), $19.95 (softcover).

Reviewed by Sabrina P. Ramet, University of Washington

Germany was exposed to American cultural (and perhaps especially musical and cine- matic) inºuences as far back as the 1920s and 1930s, but with the Allied victory over the Third Reich in 1945 the western zones of occupation were ºooded with artifacts of American fashion and popular culture, from nylon stockings and “boogie-woogie shoes” to “bebop” and icons of ªlm rebellion such as Marlon Brando and James Dean. In this study of American cultural inºuences in Germany from 1945 to 1962, Uta Poiger argues that both West German and East German authorities were concerned about the “oversexualization” of women and “feminization” of men (p. 4) that alleg- edly resulted from American popular culture. This concern, says Poiger, linked efforts to redeªne German identity with normative gender roles and mass culture more gen- erally. In preparing this book, Poiger made use of archives in , Potsdam, Koblenz, and Urbana, Illinois, as well as the National Archives in Washington, DC. She also conducted interviews with seventeen individuals in Berlin and made use of a wide ar- ray of contemporary periodicals and newspapers, as well as appropriate secondary sources in German and English. The result is a signiªcant contribution to our understanding of the dynamics of cultural policy in the two Germanys, including perceptions of cultural threat. When we see, for example, that a West German writer described young people dancing to rock rhythms as “wild barbarians in ecstasy” (p. 8), or that the East German regime

137 Book Reviews

“conºated the consumption of American popular culture with fascism and capitalist militarism” (p. 104), we can understand that the authorities on both sides of the bor- der felt deeply threatened by this new musical language. Rock and jazz were perceived as threats because of the entire ambience associated with them, including changes in attire (such as “Texas shirts,” p. 31) and the deªant rebelliousness of German young people, which probably had more to do with the cat- astrophic failings of the older generation than with rock-and-roll in its halcyon days. But rock and jazz were not the end of it. Every bit as important as agents of cultural Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jcws/article-pdf/3/1/137/695438/jcws.2001.3.1.137.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 Americanization were the movies and the dime novels. Westerns, gangster movies, and ªlms about rebels on motorcycles all resonated with young people in West Germany. Until the East German authorities constructed the in 1961, many young East Germans were crossing over to West Berlin to watch the latest American ªlms. Throughout this study Poiger draws attention to the parallels between East and West Germany. But the essential difference between the two states, of course, lay in the fact that whereas West Germany was politically and militarily allied with the United States, which was the very source of the cultural threat, the leaders of East Ger- many viewed America as both a political foe and a cultural menace. Poiger devotes an entire chapter to the Elvis Presley phenomenon. Interestingly, RCA Victor, Presley’s American label, marketed Presley in West Germany in terms that combined gender transgression with hints of private conformity. Victor’s slogan was “He walks like Marilyn Monroe but at home he is a model son” (p. 171). Inevita- bly, the West German media and public picked up on the gender transgression and forgot about the “model son.” In the epilogue Poiger looks ahead to the late 1960s, noting the rising inºuence of British rock (the Beatles and the Rolling Stones). She urges others who undertake research on the two Germanys to pay as much attention to the similarities as to the differences.

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Vladimir A. Kozlov, Massovye Besporyadki v SSSR pri Khrushcheve i Brezhneve (Mass Disturbances in the USSR Under Khrushchev and Brezhnev). Novosibirsk: Sibirskii Khronograf, 1999. 413 pp.

Reviewed by Dmitry P. Gorenburg, CNA Corporation, Alexandria, Virginia

During the Cold War most Western scholars assumed that public protest in the Soviet Union was conªned to dissidents imprisoned in labor camps for publishing criticism of the Soviet government or for seeking to practice their religious beliefs. The only mass disturbance widely publicized in the West was the June 1962 workers’ strike in Novocherkassk. Vladimir Kozlov’s important newbook on mass protest in the Soviet Union during the 1950s and 1960s sets the record straight. Using newly declassiªed archival documents, Kozlov demonstrates that mass anti-Soviet unrest was far more common and more violent than previously believed.

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