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GERM 255
Spring Semester 2020Professor David Pike dpike@email.unc.edu Office hours: TTh 1:00 - 2.00 and by appointment
Germany and the Cold War. From Allied Occupation to Reunification and beyond (1945-)
Though scholars have long disagreed about the earliest causes of the Cold War, and will surely continue to argue about them, no one disputes that the “German question” played a central role in the break-up of the wartime alliance and the political division of western and eastern Europe that lasted for almost half a century. Ironically, in the case of Germany, its postwar division into four separate zones of occupation, a harbinger of division, was not the result of disagreements among the allies over the question of how to treat a defeated Germany. The original “division” developed rather out of the wartime consensus that splitting the country into occupied zones was the best way of ensuring that Germany never again waged war. In effect, the original protocol on zones of occupation agreed upon by the British, American, and Soviet governments prior to the war’s end pointed toward the harshest possible treatment of Germany ever contemplated by the allies. Breaking the country into a number of separate states, with the idea that the split would be permanent, was thought by some to provide the best guarantee of security against future German aggression. As a matter of fact, after several rounds of discussion begun first during the Teheran Conference in 1943, the allies never agreed upon a policy of permanent dismemberment, though there is good reason to believe that Stalin and Roosevelt seriously considered and, at times, may have preferred it. What the allies ultimately did approve, however, the system of zones, was not something inherently different than dismemberment. Once the two main zones congealed into semi-permanence, the one occupied by the Russians, the other “jointly” by the Americans, British, and French, and by the time these two zones turned into the German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany, to all intents and purposes “dismemberment” was the result — for forty years. All this notwithstanding, it is by no means an established fact that such an outcome was either contemplated in 1945 by any of the allies or deliberately pursued from the outset by one or the other or all of them. Nonetheless, the division of Germany into two separate states, formally complete by 1949, was an historical “fact” that most observers, right up to the “end” in 1989/90, had come to regard as permanent. This course will investigate a wide range of questions associated with events that extended over half a century — developments and circumstances that dominated our lives for years during the cold war. We will attempt to understand the ways, too, in which the consequences of the cold war generally, and the division of Germany specifically, linger on — affecting generations of Europeans and Americans who are themselves too young to have any real recollection of the cold war. Against this backdrop, having asked probing questions about patterns of Soviet conduct in the early cold war then, we can transition to the present – the daily impressions of unfolding events involving Russia today, right up to and including Russian intervention in Georgia and the Russian public rationale for the invasion. We can then undertake, looking back at our course “foundation,” to place aspects of early cold war issues in the context of emerging Russian conduct now. We will talk about the nature of this behavior in relation to patterns of western outlooks and actions then and now (are “our” actions in the West needlessly provocative to the Russians?); looking at how historians are assessing and reassessing Soviet policy to this day; considering interpretations of Russia’s path in the twenty-first century; and pondering the possibility of a new, perhaps inevitable conflict with her.
This course is heavily lecture- and discussion-oriented. Readings, discussions, and written assignments are all in English; course requirements are straightforward — attendance is mandatory,* class participation, the course's general lecture approach notwithstanding, nonetheless always heavily valued, and keeping current with reading assignments a necessity. Expectations revolve less, however, around some kind of overall student absorption of wide-ranging lectures and, perhaps, discussions, which due to the nature of the subject will often tend to shift back and forth in time between “beginnings” and “ends” (to the extent that we are at an end in 2016-2017, as opposed to the beginning of some kind of cold-war reoccurrence of the past, minus - for now - past “geographic divisions”); rather, students will write two substantive papers, one due around mid-term time of 6-8 pages in length, the other, 12-15 pages, at semester’s end. These papers will be based on "Germany and the Cold War" topics freely chosen by each student (with or without consultation with the instructor). There will also be a final examination that offers you the opportunity to reflect in a more overarching manner a wide variety of the questions raised by a topic, the cold war, that is in many regards right front and center in the form of Putin's Russia and the confrontation between it and "the West": the countries of the European Union, as currently constituted, and the United States. These kinds of "... and beyond...." questions will be dealt with throughout the semester in the form of current-event analyses, commentaries, and developments that seem to be unfolding on an almost daily basis. Many of the questions these "current events" raise compel us to engage in a good dealing of rethinking about the causes and origins of the cold war. Put bluntly, was the division of Germany inevitable? Was it's reunification - hinging (?) on the dissolution of the Soviet Union - only a matter of time? And perhaps most importantly, was a Russian "resurgence" of the sort we have been observing for the last three years especially, but which goes back in time under Putin at least a full decade, also predictable? And inevitable?
German-Russian Relations Prior to Hitler: the twentiesThe War: From “Barbarossa” to Berlin by way of StalingradThe Post-War Treatment of Germany: Allied Understandings and AgreementsThe Occupation: 1945-1949Division: The Years of Stalinism and the “Thaw” — 1949 - 1961Berlin 1961“Stability”: 1961 – 1971"Permanence": 1972 – 1985The Beginning of the End: Gorbachev and Perestroika: 1985-1989DissolutionReunification“We now Know”: Looking Back at the Cold WarWhat do we know now? Looking toward the future
Our readings will be selected from the following books and articles - that is, in some cases, we will read texts in their entirety, but in most cases, I will have excerpted briefer sections from much longer texts (e.g., books) and placed them on our course website in digitized form for your convenience. The historical (and other kinds of) literature on this subject is voluminous, to put it mildly, and because so much of it, particularly when more specialist aspects are involved, is not in English, it is very difficult to locate concise texts that cover the more precise issues I consider important. This is the main reason why this list may, at first glance, strike you as daunting, but reading expectations will be appropriate to this level of course.
John Gaddis, We now Know Konrad Jarausch, The Rush to German Unity Charles S. Maier, Dissolution Lilia Shevtsova, Lost in Transition. The Yeltsin and Putin Legacies Edward Lukac, The New Cold War. Putin's Russia and the Threat to the West Lilia Shevtsova, Putin's Russia |
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