Disciples of Dispassion: Popular Science, the Cold War, and the Making of West German Identity in the 1950s

West-Germany's commitment to the West in the 1950s is usually explained by historians with regard to West-Germany's economic success, the so called 'Wirtschaftswunder.' However, the actual nature of this postwar identity-building, its driving forces, its transformations and its representations have not yet been subject of detailed empirical research, especially since, after 1989, a no longer divided Germany became the major teleological perspective of many historical studies. In contrast, this paper will address the question of how this Western orientation was actually created. By looking at the popularization of scientific knowledge during the 1950s the paper will reconstruct the ways in which a certain type of Western scientific rationality was received and propagated in West-Germany as the ultimately non-ideological form of regaining a collective identity. Scientific thinking was popularized in this era as a means to transfer traditional characteristics and demarcations of Germanness into the new democratic postwar era. In this process, popular science in West-Germany quickly turned from a carefully approached field of cultural reconstruction into a new, full-blown projection of national self-esteem within the ideological framework of the 'West'. In this perspective, the case of West-Germany in the 1950s is interpreted as but one example of how the Cold War was able to turn the artificial borderlines and political spaces it had brought about, into frameworks for a new collective belonging, precisely by embedding them within the global structures of transnational solidarities. The transnational language of science functioned in such contexts as a perfect mediator between national traditions and transnational structures, turning the notion of the 'West' from a geopolitical concept into a recreated identitarian belief-system. From here, the paper will finally suggest that early Cold War culture can be and should be read as an experimental period of what today is called globalization.