This working paper is intended as an overview of the Soviet Union’s and Eastern Europe’s aid to and cooperation with Africa in the field of higher and professional-technical education during the Cold War. For a long time, both this and other important chapters of the Eastern bloc’s relations with Africa and more broadly with the Third World had been either neglected or completely dismissed. In post-Cold War scholarship, the prevalent notion was that the Soviet-style political and economic model “was responsible for many grievous economic ills in the Third World in the second half of the twentieth century” and that it “shattered all possibilities of democratic rule, prosperity, and social stability”. The overall contribution of the Eastern bloc in the development of the Third World was considered as either negative or insignificant. Even a radical political economist like Andre Gunder Frank could affirm in 1989 that “much Third Worldist socialist rhetoric is just that, and no more”, and add that “the East has supported superstructural change in the South with words and sometimes arms”.

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This paper aims to analyze the philosophical implications of the atomic bomb in the thinking of three German post-war philosophers: Günther Anders, Hannah Arendt, and Karl Jaspers. Although they differ greatly in interest and philosophical perspective, the atomic bomb can be discerned as a problem of humanity's technological, ethical, and political conditions in the intersection of their authorships. In the examination of their ideas, they are situated within a diachronic tradition of philosophy of technology. Their common entanglement with phenomenological-hermeneutic philosophy is also considered, most notably in the form of the influence of Martin Heidegger. For Anders, the atomic bomb is the defining feature of the ethical and political conditions of post-war humanity, yet humans are unable to grasp its reality. In the thinking of Jaspers, the bomb necessitates a supra-political principle grounded in the faculty of reason. For him, politics in the nuclear age must rest upon the responsibility of the many individuals, in an ethical re-birth of humanity. Arendt primarily understands the bomb as a product of the increasing power of the thoughtless instrumentality of science. The destructive potential of atomic weapons solidifies to her a crisis in the meaning of politics, in which brute force has undermined political power. All three thinkers share the view that the atomic bomb must be understood in conjunction with a certain thought- and meaninglessness in the science and politics of their contemporary. The bomb also signifies to them a technological obscuring of human agency, the implications of which are exacerbated by the fact that it has also immensely improved the ability of one individual to commit heinous acts. In impairing the conditions for ethical action and meaningful politics for lasting peace, the bomb necessitates these very same principles. By threatening to make humanity as mortal as only individuals had been before, the bomb has made radical change in human thinking and activity urgent. However, to what extent sufficient adaptations are probable, or even possible, is a question in which the philosophers discussed in this paper diverge.

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The present study is an attempt to bring into focus one of the many bases of party power over Soviet citizens. It is no great revelation that the Soviet government has long indulged in anti-American propanda, but the continuity, elaboratness and virulence of ths "crusade of hatred" demands further study. It is essential that such study be undertaken parallel with an appraisal of Soviet-American relations since 1917. In outlining the chronological development of anti-American libel campaign, some space will be devoted to methodology, technology and apparent purposes of the Soviet propagandists. Space limitations preclude an elaborate study of Soviet propaganda as a whole; however, the selected theme--graphic propaganda--includes within its scope many aspects of the whole and thus is representative of the broader subject.

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Studies of postwar Germany, from 1945-1955, have concentrated on the American influence as a military occupier, the development of German reconstruction and national identity, and memory of this period from the German perspective. Within the memory analyses, firsthand accounts have been analyzed to understand the perspectives of Germans living through the postwar period. Absent from this historiography is an account of American memories and firsthand perspectives of the occupation, particularly during the 1950-1955 period. This thesis employs oral histories of American veterans stationed in postwar Germany, American propaganda and popular cultural mediums during the early 1950s, and modern historiographical trends to provide an understanding of how Americans remember the German postwar decade. American veterans remembered this period, and their encounters with local Germans, as a positive experience. These positive memories were mediated by 1950s Cold War rhetoric and propaganda and were subsequently predicated upon the men's perspective as occupying soldiers. Their recollections align with American popular memory delineating the military occupation as ending in 1949 upon the creation of the Federal Republic of Germany, therefore overshadowing the 1950-1955 period of occupation. The ways in which Americans remember the postwar occupation in Germany, particularly from 1950-1955, inform broader memory and historical narrative trends of this era.

The end of the Second World War brought many questions to the United States. One of the greatest among these was what to do with defeated Germany. Many clamored for the dissolution of the former Nazi State and the shameful humbling of its people while others recognized the value of a revitalized Germany as an ally against the looming threat of an emboldened and empowered postwar Soviet Union. Though retribution held sway immediately following the war, the Cold War consensus of an alliance with West Germany and a reimagining of the German people as victims rather than perpetrators won out as the years progressed. This work examines this evolving shift in perception by the United States and its people and how it can be tracked through several prominent films of the day.

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