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Europe-Asia Studies
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Divided Dreamworlds? The Cultural

Cold War in East and West
a
Simon Huxtable
a
Loughborough University
Published online: 29 Apr 2014.

To cite this article: Simon Huxtable (2014) Divided Dreamworlds? The Cultural Cold War in East and
West, Europe-Asia Studies, 66:4, 679-680, DOI: 10.1080/09668136.2014.897419

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09668136.2014.897419

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 REVIEWS 679

included more essays focusing on how ordinary Americans encountered Russians in everyday life, as
opposed to the current emphasis on extraordinary figures. These interactions took place on many
levels, for example through tourism, sport, or cultural exchanges, the latter a topic explored in my own
work on Soviet youth and popular culture in the Cold War.
Such minor criticisms should not detract from reader attention to this thought-provoking and high-
quality book. The editors and contributors deserve much praise for helping us acquire a greater
appreciation of how affective personal responses powerfully impacted how notable Americans
engaged with and interpreted Russia; this book has certainly made me more self-reflective about how I
understand and comment on Russia. This well-written book would have been highly suitable for class
assignments but for its cost, and we can only hope the publisher puts out a suitably-priced paperback
version soon. This book constitutes required reading for anyone interested in Soviet – American
interactions during the twentieth century, and in the complex interactions between emotional response
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and intellectual interpretation.

The Ohio State University GLEB TSIPURSKY q 2014

Peter Romijn, Giles Scott-Smith & Joes Segal (eds), Divided Dreamworlds? The Cultural Cold War in
East and West. Studies of the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation. Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press, 2012, viii þ 238pp., e39.50 p/b.

DIVIDED DREAMWORLDS? IS THE LATEST IN A NUMBER OF RECENT COLLECTIONS to reassess the thorny
terrain of Cold War encounters using new sources, approaches, and theoretical frameworks. Such
collections have shifted the terrain of discussion from the ‘cultural Cold War’ to ‘Cold War culture’ (to
use Patrick Major and Rana Mitter’s useful distinction): that is, from questions of cultural diplomacy to
the constellations of meaning that resulted from the conflict. Drawing on a conference held in Utrecht
in 2008, Divided Dreamworlds? straddles these two main scholarly trends, with contributors
examining both the terrain of scientific and artistic exchanges between East and West, and how the
‘dreamworlds’ of the Cold War translated into everyday life.
The first section comprises four chapters, and focuses on scientific and artistic exchanges. Nathan
Abrams’ chapter on Arthur Miller shows how the playwright was caught in the crossfire of Cold War
anxieties in both the United States and the Soviet Union. William deJong-Lambert similarly examines
the reception of Soviet scientist Trofim Lysenko in the US and UK, showing how Anglo-American
reactions to Lysenko were divided between an optimistic faith in Lysenko’s biological utopias and
shrill dismissals of Soviet pseudo-science. Jill Bujalski’s stimulating chapter discusses Polish artist
Tadeusz Kantor’s meetings with prominent artists in the United States, illustrating the complex issues
of appropriation, translation, and authenticity at play in East – West exchanges. Bujalski argues that,
rather than merely importing Western styles, Kantor’s work played on the distance between the art
world in New York and Warsaw, and interrogated the notion of the public sphere in these very different
social contexts. In the section’s final chapter, Marsha Siefert examines initiatives for East – West film
co-production, and suggests that political factors prevented such co-productions from achieving
widespread traction.
The book’s second section investigates how the ‘dreamworlds’ of the book’s title were constituted.
Sabina Mihelj’s chapter analyses press discourses of ‘culture’ on the border between socialist East and
capitalist West in north-western Yugoslavia. She argues that, while many of the cultural tropes put
forward by the press could be considered quintessentially ‘socialist’, the vision of culture they
advanced was similar to many Western developments. Dean Vuletic shows how Yugoslav leaders
overcame their early resistance to jazz and rock ‘n’ roll and sought to produce home-grown variants,
which became popular in both East and West. Christine Varga-Harris’s fascinating chapter examines
Khrushchev’s massive programme of housing construction. She shows how, even if the reality
 680 REVIEWS

sometimes fell short of the Soviet media’s extravagant promises of domestic bliss, the construction of
new apartments for the masses signified to many that the country was moving towards Communism.
Natalie Scholz and Milena Veenis also focus on housing, showing how in both East and West Germany
modernism was seen as a means for renouncing the Nazi past and for putting forward a compelling
vision of the future. However, designers’ prescriptions of aesthetic good taste were resisted by a public
which sought ‘bourgeois’ Gemütlichkeit rather than modernism’s ‘rational’ good taste. Annette
Vowinckel concludes the section by discussing the ‘dreamworld’ of freedom created by the growth of
commercial air travel, focusing on an unusual form of cultural exchange: plane hijacking by
individuals seeking to cross impassable Cold War borders.
The book’s final section considers the fallout of the cultural Cold War after the fall of the Berlin
Wall. Justinian Jampol’s thought-provoking chapter shows that since 1989, the German government’s
desire to impose an official, one-dimensional, narrative of life in the GDR has directly affected the
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state’s funding priorities and the acquisitions policies of museums and archives, leading to the
sidelining of material culture artefacts. Harm Langenkamp examines parallels between the Bush
administration’s sponsorship of the ‘Silk Road Folklife Festival’ and the cultural diplomacy of the
Eisenhower era, arguing that the Bush era saw the emergence of a geopolitical dreamworld which
centred around neoliberal conceptions of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’.
Divided Dreamworlds? is a valuable contribution to the scholarship on the ‘cultural Cold War’. It
demonstrates the complexity of Cold War cultural exchanges and is to be praised for combining an
emphasis on arts and literature with a focus on wider areas such as science, housing policy, and
aviation. However, while the empirical work is frequently impressive, in some chapters one might have
hoped for greater analytical depth. The book would also have benefited from a greater range, both in
terms of chronology (relatively few chapters deal with the changing climate of the 1970s and 1980s),
and geographical scope (particularly in terms of Western case studies, which largely focus on the
United States and West Germany). Indeed, while most authors challenge the notion that there existed a
unified ‘Eastern Bloc’, there is occasional recourse to reified notions of ‘the West’. Thus, the book
might be better described as an account of the cultural Cold War through the eyes of the socialist
East—not in itself a bad thing, but insufficient to answer the question posed in the introduction of
whether there existed a single Cold War culture that traversed East and West (p. 5).
In a volume featuring a number of thought-provoking chapters, the work never really coheres into a
satisfying overall argument. In part, this is because the introduction fails to provide a clear explanation
of the book’s overarching rationale. One wonders in particular whether the ‘dreamworld’ metaphor
provides a sufficiently sharp analytical tool for analysing the complexities of the cultural Cold War—
and whether it accurately encompasses the contributions contained in the volume. As a result, Divided
Dreamworlds? lags behind the unity of purpose and the conceptual sophistication of recent collections
such as György Péteri’s Imagining the West in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union (2010) and the
trilogy of edited volumes by Susan Reid and David Crowley. In spite of these criticisms, the scholar of
Cold War culture will find much of interest in Divided Dreamworlds? At its best, the contributions
contained within it advance scholarly understanding of the intricate dynamics of the cultural Cold War,
and provide a solid foundation for future research.

Loughborough University SIMON HUXTABLE q 2014

Larry E. Holmes, War, Evacuation, and the Exercise of Power. The Center, Periphery, and Kirov’s
Pedagogical Institute, 1941 –1952. Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2012, xxxiii þ 239pp., £44.95/
$75.00 h/b.

CONTINUING A LONG-HELD ASSOCIATION (EVEN FASCINATION) WITH the town of Kirov (now Vyatka),
Larry Holmes’s new book is an interesting yet rather limited study. In its bare essentials, this is a