Book Review: Between Containment and Rollback. The United States and the Cold War in Germany by Christian F. Ostermann

Abstract

how technocratic (or other) internationalism(s) works on the ground. Kristy Ironside’s chapter about American progressive writers and their struggle for royalties from the Soviet Union in the mid-to-late 1950s is a fascinating study of unreturned ‘internationalist love’ through the lens of the increasingly frustrated author Howard Fast. The last part both applies a global perspective to European imperial internationalism and provincializes Europe’s role in developmental internationalism in the postwar era. This reader is left wondering why, in a volume dedicated to internationalists in European history – the connections between internationalism and Europeanism – the international governmental and non-governmental organizations and the many European organizations are left almost completely unexplored. Grumbling about what could have been in the volume is, of course, unfair. Internationalists in European History offers a perspective on internationalism that is deeply under-appreciated: a focus on resistance, ambivalence, miscommunication, disconnects and destructive silences – both in the interwar and the Cold War era. The volume reminds us that ‘doing’ internationalism – particularly in the peripheries of Europe (see, for instance, Elidor Mëhili’s chapter on Radio Tirana) – was anything but smooth sailing. Indeed, the constant need to overcome technical, ideological, and geographical hurdles demanded a rare combination of conviction and improvisation from this volume’s protagonists. A focus on this – from below – is very welcome.