Pawel Goral, Cold War Rivalry and the Perception of the American West

摘要

In his first monograph, Cold War Rivalry and the Perception of the American West, Pawel Goral, History lecturer at the University of Texas, Arlington, employs the myth of the American West as a critical lens to address the fascinating, albeit complex, theme of cultural memory and identity-building in Cold-War-divided-Germany. Goral’s thesis argues how the two spheres of political influence shaped opposing views of the Western myth, and how each block respectively deployed it to accommodate their own nationalistic needs. This contributed, the author claims, to fill the cultural void left in the aftermath of the Third Reich, as well as to the formation of a unified sense of Germanness after the fall of the Iron Curtain.