Learning from War: Media Coverage of the Nuclear Age in the Two Germanies

Abstract

“T heirs was another world” 1 —nineteenth-century historian Leopold von Ranke’s famous pronouncement about the incommensurability of past and present—encapsulates how many historians approach the utopian visions of an atomic future and the Manichean worldview of the early Cold War. The contradiction between the threat of total obliteration and optimistic thoughts of a better future based on nuclear technologies has been explained by some historians as resulting from mass manipulation and government propaganda, in particular in connection with the American “Atoms for Peace” program, announced in a speech given by US president Dwight D. Eisenhower on December 8, 1953. 2 Historian Joachim Radkau argues that the idea of a brighter future through nuclear technologies— heralded under the banner of the “Atomic Age”—was appealing to Germans because it offered an alternative to the misbegotten and discredited world created by the Nazis. 3 These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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