Picturing the Nuclear Age/Picturing Socialism: Images of Nuclear Technologies in the East German Popular Press

The promise of technological progress through atomic power and the peril of nuclear holocaust:  This was a central duality of the Cold War across the globe.  In socialist countries, utopian and dystopian visions of the atomic age were associated with a dualistic conception of  socialism as a force for peace and prosperity and capitalism as a bellicose force, inimical to the interests of the international proletariat.  This interpretive framework dominated popular depictions of nuclear technologies in the German Democratic Republic in the 1950’s and early 60’s.  In this talk, I will analyze examples of nuclear utopias and dystopias from popular publications and discuss the ways in which the black-and-white pattern of thinking implicit in the “good socialist/bad capitalist” model was enlivened, disrupted, and perhaps even subverted by other messages.  Sources for this analysis are the popular illustrated journal, Neue Berliner Illustrierte, and the comic book series, Mosaik.

This talk will place the imagery of the atomic age in East Germany in a broader ideological, political, and cultural context.  In this talk, I will analyze material collected at the Federal German Archives in Berlin:  material on the East German peace movement, the German Peace Congress (part of the Soviet-dominated World Peace Congress) and on the “Agitation” division of the East German Communist party (the SED), a division that directed and guided the East German press.  I will also place images of nuclear war and nuclear power in the context of East German visual culture, specifically the history of East German photography.   Though the SED attempted to closely control East Germans’ perceptions of nuclear technologies, in fact its control was not total, both because of a lack of firm guidelines on pictures (as opposed to text) and because of the influence of pre-Communist and Western images on East German photographers and illustrators.