This thesis examines the contribution made by twelve important and influential individuals to the development of a policy of physical and economic reconstruction, political renewal and personal reconciliation in the British Zone of occupied Germany in the first three years after the end of the Second World War. The selected individuals all possessed power, authority and influence, at different levels of the hierarchy, and collectively represent the view of the ‘governing elite’ of the occupation, including some of its internal differences. They have been categorised in three groups of four: those at the top of the hierarchy, the three Military Governors and one of their senior generals; four senior civilian diplomats and administrators responsible for promoting democracy in Germany; and four young officers with no adult experience but war, who held responsible and influential positions despite their youth. A biographical approach is a novel methodology for studying the British occupation of Germany. It highlights the diversity of aims and personal backgrounds and in so doing can explain some of the apparent contradictions in occupation policy. Personal influences were especially important in a period of transition from war to peace, when official policy guidelines appeared unclear or inappropriate and organisational structures created for the occupation were short-lived and changed rapidly. A wide range of sources has been used including memoirs and autobiographies, official documents, personal papers and oral history interviews. Although sources were created at different times for different purposes, most accounts were found to be remarkably consistent, both internally and with each other. Subjective accounts have been placed in their historical context in order to understand individuals’ perceptions, motivations and personal interests, together with the limitations and constraints on their scope for action.

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This study examines transitions from Nazism to socialism in Brandenburg between 1945 and 1952. It explores the grassroots responses and their relative implications within the context of both punitive and rehabilitative measures implemented by the Soviet Military Administration (SMAD) and the communist Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED). The present study is based on archival and oral history sources and addresses two main research questions: First, in what ways did people at the grassroots attempt to challenge the imposition of punitive measures, and did their responses have any effect on the manner in which these policies were implemented at a grassroots level? These punitive measures were designed to remove remnants of Nazism and included punitive Soviet practices, Soviet NKVD camps and denazification and sequestering. Second, to what extent did grassroots Brandenburgers participate in political organisations which were designed to integrate East Germans during the rehabilitative stage and what impact did these responses have on the post-war transition? This study focuses on the National Democratic Party and the Society for German-Soviet Friendship as well as examining wider factors which may have impeded and facilitated the processes of post-war transitions. Two main arguments are proposed. First, the imposition of wide-ranging punitive measures often posed an existential threat at a grassroots level, and therefore at times elicited grassroots actions, albeit severely restricted by practical and political constraints. In turn, these grassroots responses could occasionally have some local impact and somewhat affect the manner in which policies were implemented at a grassroots level in Brandenburg. Second, it is argued that the rehabilitative stage, despite some challenges, generally provided a favourable system for grassroots integration in which the needs of the policy makers and a significant proportion of grassroots individuals somewhat converged, eventually contributing to the partial stabilisation of the emerging East German socialist state.

This thesis offers a new interpretation of the policies that the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic implemented towards the State of Israel between 1949 and 1965 (their Israelpolitik). Previous works on German-Israeli relations in this era generally focus on the relations that one German state had with Israel. The other Germany languishes off stage, the focus of the various historiographical analyses being either on the relations between West Germany and Israel or East Germany and Israel. Instead, this thesis demonstrates that the history of both Germanys’ relations with Israel is also a history of German-German relations and of their peculiar Cold War rivalry. Both Germanys attributed pivotal importance to the dissemination of specific messages concerning their respective attitudes to the Nazi past. In turn, this aspect was central to both Germanys’ Israelpolitik and to the self-definition of each Germany within the Cold War system. Analysing the evolving Israelpolitik of the FRG and GDR thus also means engaging with the analysis of the legacy of the past on the conduct of foreign relations. Moreover, the political stance that one or the other Germany adopted towards Israel could be used to portray the German state in question as taking sides within the Arab-Israeli conflict. Thus Israelpolitik raised issues that, for both Germanys, were uniquely related to conflicts that existed independently of, but shaped and were shaped by, the Cold War.

This thesis sheds light on the ways in which Germany's 'double' National Socialist and communist past has been represented and contested since 1998, taking the Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen memorials as case studies. It pays particular attention to the intersection between discourses on the ‘double past’ and the institutionalization of remembrance in reunified Germany, signalled by the passing into law of a Federal Memorials Concept (Gedenkstättenkonzeption) in 1999 that sought to align the memorials with a present-day 'anti-totalitarian consensus'. Whilst Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen, having served as concentration camps during the Third Reich and then as Soviet internment camps from 1945-1950, have in a normative sense been co-opted into the ‘anti-totalitarian’ narrative, this thesis argues that it is necessary to at least partially uncouple the situation on the ground from the official position.

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This comparative thesis explores how museums and monuments in postwar east and west Germany commemorate the eastern territories that were lost after 1945. I focus on the concept of Heimat which spans aesthetics and politics, psychological and political identity and emerges from a condition of loss, thus it features highly in my attempt to understand the development and current state of memorialisation. The centrality of the notion of Heimat in expellee memorialisation is a field as yet little explored in research on the expulsions, particularly in east Germany. Following chapters on the historical context, Heimat, and cultural memory, Chapter Three discusses monuments erected between 1947 and 1989 by expellees who resettled in West Germany which are used to mourn, replace, reflect on and revere the old Heimat. I compare post-unification west and east German memorials, discussing key differences resulting from the former taboo on expellee commemoration in East Germany. I additionally examine changing sites of memory, memorials that illustrate a shifting integration process and investigate the use of symbolism. Chapter Four considers the interaction between eyewitnesses, historians and curators in the portrayal of history in museums and Heimatstuben at Görlitz, Greifswald, Lüneburg, Regensburg, Molfsee, Gehren, Rendsburg and Altenburg, in addition to the Altvaterturm in Thuringia. Chapter Five discusses the contentious Berlin Stiftung Flucht Vertreibung Versöhnung Centre, first mooted in 1999 by the Bund der Vertriebenen as a Centre against Expulsions. The tension between ‘German victims’ and ‘victims of the Germans’ is a recurring theme in this thesis. My conclusions highlight how memorialisation is framed clearly within the contemporary socio-political context, demonstrate the durability and flexibility of the term Heimat and illustrate the resilience of the regard for the lost territories, not only for expellees; the idea of the German East persists in German cultural memory.

The Soviet blockade of western Berlin between the 23 June 1948 and 12 May 1949 - and the airlift that was organized to defeat it - was the first major confrontation between the Soviet Bloc on the one side and the United States and its allies on the other. It was at the point where the shared cooperation arising from common interests during the Second World War finally dissolved and became the Cold War with the potential to develop into a hot war. Yet for all its acknowledged importance in the history of the Cold War, no historian has hitherto investigated the British component of the Berlin Airlift to discover how it worked in practice and if British involvement was actually necessary to the success of the Allied operation as a whole, or whether the Airlift could have been undertaken more effectively by different approach. Given its acknowledged importance, the Airlift has been poorly served by its historiography. It forms a very minor part in the post-war histories of Germany; and even in the more specialist scholarly literature on the early stages of the Cold War, it receives scant attention. Insofar as it has received any detailed scrutiny, the Airlift of 1948-9 is presented regularly as a sub-plot in the wider drama of the Berlin Blockade, and it is the US dimension of the Airlift which has produced the best historiography. The American aspect, Operation VITTLES, predominates in the current literature and there is no equivalent on the RAF side to the USAF professional historians' output. Beyond this US dimension, there is a general dearth of academic papers in journals and of scholarly monographs. Popular books exist in quantity providing narrative overviews for the general public but this literature can be based on assumptions about the British dimension to the Airlift that do not stand up when tested against the surviving evidence. This study seeks to address its principal questions - examining the scale and extent of the British participation, and gauging its utility and significance in iii relation to the broader multi-national endeavour to defeat the Blockade - by a close study of the rich and plentiful primary archival sources held in Britain, the United States and elsewhere using the combined methodologies of the historian and the logistician. The thesis evaluates British participation in the Berlin Airlift and reveals that her aircraft were demonstrably indispensable logistically. However, performance - and that of the Royal Air Force especially - was substantially lower than that of the American task force. At the time, the official explanation given to the public was that the USA operated more and larger aircraft. The thesis reveals that there were additional causes. It examines how the Americans might have replaced the British, as was feared within the Foreign Office and the RAF and as they had the French. Redistribution of the whole American task force to bases nearer to Berlin in the British Zone of Germany would have increased the tonnage delivered but the thesis finds it would not have been sufficient. Deploying more US resources is the other possibility investigated and the limitations of American capability to do so are revealed and the potential impact on the plans to continue the Airlift into 1951 identified.

L’histoire de la République démocratique allemande (RDA) est un sujet d’enseignement en Allemagne de l’Est et de l’Ouest et, avec beaucoup moins d’heures de cours, aussi en France. L’enseignement d’histoire de la RDA à l’école est la première occasion d’une transmission du savoir sur cet État disparu. Cette transmission est encadrée par une volonté politique qui se reflète dans les programmes d’éducation. En comparant l’enseignement en Allemagne de l’Ouest, de l’Est et en France, les mécanismes de mémoire collective et d’appropriation deviennent visibles : Quel contenu entre dans l’enseignement et comment ? À quel moment surgissent des conflits d’interprétations ?Afin de mieux comprendre la circulation et la transmission du savoir, l’étude suit trois chemins différents. D’abord, l’enseignement de la RDA après 1990 est étudié dans les champs de l’éducation scolaire de deux pays ainsi que dans les activités pédagogiques des musées d’histoire. Ensuite, les manuels comme médias de transmission sont objets de l’analyse. Enfin, du côté de la réception, des leçons d’histoire de trois classes de lycée ont été observées et ensuite interprétées.Les interprétations les plus d’importants de la RDA sont celle d’ « État SED » (Klaus Schroeder), de « dictature de sollicitude » (Konrad H. Jarausch), de « dictature de participation » (Mary Fulbrook) et d’« obstination » (« Eigen-Sinn ») (Alf Lüdtke). De manière générale, les représentants d’une interprétation politologique et ceux de la sociohistoire se disputent la vue « juste » de la RDA. Chez les premiers, la dominance du parti communiste SED avec ses mécanismes de pouvoir caractérise la constitution de l’État et de la société. Les socio-historiens regardent la relation complexe du pouvoir comme une pratique sociale avec les stratégies des citoyens de s’arranger avec ce pouvoir dans la vie quotidienne.En résumé, l’enseignement de l’histoire de la RDA est influencé par cinq domaines, dont un ne se démarque pas entièrement de l’autre : par la politique du passé, par l’Histoire en tant que science sociale, par la présence publique, par le marché des éditions scolaires et par la mémoire familiale. Les médiateurs du savoir qui agissent entre la politique du passé, l’Histoire et la présence publique ont le plus d’influence sur l’enseignement. Ce sont des commissaires dans les musées, des membres de comités qui préparent les programmes, mais aussi des professeurs au lycée. La réception du savoir des élèves, par contre, dépend plus des domaines du marché – du manuel et son récit de la RDA –, ainsi que de la mémoire familiale et la présence de la RDA dans les médias. Le cours d’histoire est influencé par ces trois domaines. La présence publique du discours sur la RDA y devient souvent visible lorsque les élèves et le professeur présentent des anecdotes de films et de documentaires. Moins visibles sont la mémoire familiale et la logique du marché des éditions scolaires.Comparant la transmission et la réception, l’hypothèse préalable, selon laquelle les élèves savent très peu et relativisent le caractère de dictature de l’État faute de connaissances, se modifie. L’étude montre que beaucoup de jeunes possèdent un savoir informel sur le passé socialiste de l’Allemagne de l’Est. Ce savoir informel ne peut pas forcément être représenté dans un questionnaire. De plus, une relation causale entre le manque de savoir et la banalisation de la RDA n’existe pas. Plus précisément, l’interprétation d’une RDA minimisée, défendue par les élèves à Leipzig, est basée sur la culture matérielle de l’État disparu et n’exclut pas l’interprétation de la RDA comme « État SED ». Dans la classe est-allemande, la banalisation de la RDA par les élèves n’apparait pas comme étant le résultat de leur ignorance mais plutôt comme étant, d’une part, de l’attachement à l’héritage dévalorisé de la RDA, et, d’autre part, le reflet de la loyauté exprimé par leurs parents et grands-parents / The former German Democratic Republic (GDR) is a subject of history lessons in boarding schools both in Germany and in France. As the remembrance of the GDR is a highly debated topic, history lessons on the socialist state reflect conflicts of interpretation that circulate between the spheres of academic and public discourse and political education. The study looks on interpretations of the GDR developed in history lessons and the influence of the various plots of the state’s history in mass media, academic discourse and history politics on the lessons.The teaching of GDR history is influenced by five spheres: policy, academic history, public discourse, the textbook market and the family’s communicative memory. The actors who mediate between academia, public discourse and history/educational policy show the biggest influence on contents and forms of teaching: they are curators in museums, members of curricular committees or teachers at schools. How pupils appropriate GDR history is more influenced by family, the educational market with its textbooks and by public discourse, less by academia and policy.The study showed that the agency of teachers as filters of curricular knowledge has more impact than the political control of curricula and textbook suggests. Besides their duty as knowledge filters teacher have to moderate between different sources of knowledge which become visible during the lessons.In the field of transmission of knowledge at school, the same conflicts appear as in the field of education in memorials and museums. Whereas the memory of dictatorship has become dominant since 1990 and the tandem of repression and rebellion remain the most important aspects of GDR history in curricula and public discourse, the so-called ‘memory of arrangement’ survived as the East German counter-memory. It still appears in the case of a grammar school class in Leipzig in 2014, whose pupils where born in 1997 and 1998.It has become clear that pupils do not relativize the GDR as a dictatorship due to a lack of knowledge on the former state. In fact, most adolescents know more than a questionnaire could show. Their images, stories and interpretations that did not fit into the lessons were activated in the context of focus group discussions. More than that, there is no causality between little knowledge and putting things into perspective. In the Leipzig class, this was more a sign of loyalty towards family members and an emotional connection to the devaluated material and social heritage of GDR culture. In Frankfurt and Paris, where there was more distance, family memory was far less important and the judgement was more self-reflective. Where the teacher proposes mediating concepts of the GDR, as in Frankfurt, the pupils appear to learn the most. In Leipzig, a mediating concept as ‘participatory dictatorship’ or ‘welfare dictatorship’ (Konrad Jarausch) helped to come to terms with contradictory aspects. The content learned is just one element of the successful teaching on GDR history, the other being an irritation of stereotypes: the competence to question one’s own first judgement.The transmission of GDR history in school will, in the long term, remain important, especially if the GDR is integrated in wider contexts such as the twentieth-century history of ideas. As seen in the field research, the more mediating concepts between different sources and interpretations are discussed, the more educational success to be expected, both in learning about the GDR and learning about oneself

This thesis examines the history of urban squatting in East and West Berlin from c. 1970 to c.1990. In doing so, it explores the relationship between urban space, opposition and conformity, mainstream and alternative cultures, as well as questions of identity and belonging in both halves of the formerly divided city. During Berlin’s history of division, illegal squatting was undertaken by a diverse range of actors from across the period’s political and Cold War divides. The practice emerged in both East and West Berlin during the early 1970s, continuing and intensifying during the following decade, before the traditions of squatting on both sides of the Berlin Wall converged in 1989-­‐90, as the city’s – and Germany’s – physical division was overcome. Squatting, this thesis argues, provides an important yet little studied chapter in Berlin’s – and indeed Germany’s – post-­‐war history. What is more, it provides an example of the ways in which, during the period of Cold War division, Berlin’s and Germany’s symbolic meaning was not only contested between East and West, but was, within the respective societies, also re-­‐interpreted from below. Drawing on a broad range of archival sources, this thesis compares and contrasts the experience of squatters on both sides of the Berlin Wall, and the ways in which the respective polities responded to this phenomenon. Broadly similar paradigms of urban renewal, this thesis argues, account for not only parallels in the temporality but also the geography of squatting in East and West Berlin. In both Berlins, this thesis demonstrates, the history of squatting was interconnected with that of domestic opposition and political dissidence. Moreover, squatting contributed to the emergence of alternative urban lifestyles, which sustained comparable urban sub-­‐cultures on both sides of the Cold War divide. Perhaps counter-­‐intuitively, this thesis argues that, East Germany’s apparatus of control notwithstanding, the relationship between squatters and the authorities in the GDR was generally more consensual than it was between their counterparts in West Germany and West Berlin. The thesis not only points to the limits of the totalitarian model of interpretation when applied to late Socialist society in the GDR, but also questions the dominant historiographical trend of studying the two Germanys in isolation from one another. Taking its cue from a number of influential scholars, this thesis asserts the importance of incorporating the experiences of both East and West Germany into a narrative of the nation’s divided past. Through identifying and analysing the overarching variable of urban squatting, this thesis attempts to develops a perspective that regards the post-­‐war history of East and West Germany as part of a wider whole.