Into the Cosmos Page 49
11. Weber, Geschichte der DDR, 164.
12. Although new passport laws restricted the number, legal trips across the border were increasingly restricted after 1956, allowing the number of cross-border trips to drop from 2.5 million in 1956 to just 700,000 in 1958. Christoph Klessmann, Zwei Staaten, eine Nation: Deutsche Geschichte, 1955–1970 (Bonn: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, 1997), 320.
13. Weber, Geschichte der DDR, 201. Klessmann, Zwei Staaten, 321.
14. Klessmann, Zwei Staaten, 309. Then the government lifted postwar rationing in 1958, before reinstating it for a time in the early 1960s because of continuing supply crises.
Ulrich Mählert, Kleine Geschichte der DDR (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1999), 103.
15. Weber, Geschichte der DDR, 201. Klessmann, Zwei Staaten, 309.
16. Weber, Geschichte der DDR, 196.
17. Ibid., 198.
18. Ibid., 211.
19. Andreas Malycha, “Von der Gründung bis zur Mauerbau,” in Die SED. Geschichte, Organisation, Politik. Ein Handbuch, edited by Andreas Herbst (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1997), 3.
20. This according to a contemporary periodical, Neuer Weg, cited in Weber, Geschichte der DDR, 209. Also (uncited) in Jürgen Winkler, “Kulturpolitik” in Herbst, Die SED, 396.
21. Bundesarchiv (BArch), DR 6 280, Staatliches Rundfunkkomitee, “Für ein interes-santes, massenwirksames Fernsehprogramm,” [1958], 8.
22. Cited in Mählert, Kleine Geschichte der DDR, 88. Translations by the author.
23. Klessmann, Zwei Staaten, 558.
24. Weber, Geschichte der DDR, 219. Harrison, Driving the Soviets up the Wall, 189.
25. Harrison, Driving the Soviets up the Wall, 189.
26. For more on this, see Heather L. Gumbert, “Constructing the Berlin Wall: East German Television Narratives and the Second Berlin Crisis,” in Propaganda and the Mass Media in the Making of the Cold War, edited by Christoph Müller and Judith Devlin (London: Palgrave, forthcoming).
27. Cited in Klessmann, Zwei Staaten, 322.
28. Excerpts from Willy Brandt, “Erklärung des Regierenden Bürgermeisters
von Berlin, Willy Brandt, auf einer Sondersitzung des Abgeordnetenhauses am
13. August 1961,” Deutsche Teilung, Deutsche Einheit: Willy Brandt zum Mauer-
bau, Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, available online at http://www.bpb.de/
themen/58KKAK,0,0,Erkl%E4rung_des_Regierenden_B%FCrgermeisters_von_
Berlin_Willy_Brandt_auf_einer_Sondersitzung_des_Abgeordnetenhauses_am_13_
August_1961.html.
Notes to pages 248–252 313
29. Klessmann, Zwei Staaten, 322.
30. See transcript: “Es war ein ganz normaler Tag . . . normal auch deswegen, weil sich etwas vollzog, was sich seit Gründung unserer Republik zu vollziehen pflegt. . . . ”
Deutsches Rundfunkarchiv (DRA) Babelsberg, Ostaufzeichnung, “Die aktuelle Kamera: Hauptausgabe,” August 13, 1961.
31. Gumbert, “Constructing the Berlin Wall.”
32. Weber, Geschichte der DDR, 223.
33. “Die aktuelle Kamera,” August 3, 1961, article 5, in DRA Babelsberg, Ostaufzeichnung.
34. “Die aktuelle Kamera: Sonderbericht—Menschenhändler vor Gericht,” July 27,
1961. For example, on August 4, 1961, in DRA Babelsberg, Ostaufzeichnung; “Aktuelle ka-mera” reported a “polio epidemic” in the Federal Republic, implying a lack of basic social services. “Die aktuelle Kamera,” August 4, 1961, in DRA Babelsberg, Ostaufzeichnung.
35. Weber, Geschichte der DDR, 225–26.
36. Also noted by Peter Hoff in Knut Hickethier, Geschichte des deutschen Fernsehens (Stuttgart: Verlag J. B. Metzler, 1998), 284.
37. Consider, for example, the work of the historian Amy Nelson on dogs in the Soviet space program (see her chapter in this volume).
38. Asif Siddiqi, Sputnik and the Soviet Space Challenge (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003), 243.
39. Not, as the author William Shelton has reported, “a few months after Sputnik.” William Shelton, Soviet Space Exploration: The First Decade (New York: Washington Square Press, 1968), 107.
40. Harrison, Driving the Soviets up the Wall, 186.
41. Siddiqi, Sputnik and the Soviet Space Challenge, 292.
42. Shelton, Soviet Space Exploration, 121. Siddiqi, Sputnik and the Soviet Space Challenge, 292–93.
43. Shelton, Soviet Space Exploration, 121. Siddiqi, Sputnik and the Soviet Space Challenge, 294.
44. Shelton Soviet Space Exploration, 121. Siddiqi, Sputnik and the Soviet Space Challenge, 293.
45. Shelton, Soviet Space Exploration, 122.
46. Ibid., 120.
47. Ibid., 119.
48. Ibid., 120.
49. All excerpts cited in “World Press Reaction to Space Flight: Western Writers Cite Propaganda Value of Feat,” Los Angeles Times, August 8, 1961, 7.
50. Bernard Lovell, quoted in “Scientists See Feat as Red Triumph,” Los Angeles Times, August 7, 1961, 8.
51. The USSR Embassy in Canada, Gherman Titov in Canada (Ottawa: USSR Embassy in Canada, [1962]), 11.
52. “17 Orbit Trip Only Choice Open to Titov,” Chicago Daily Tribune, August 8, 1961.
53. Titov attributed the latter question to an article that had previously appeared in the New York Herald Tribune. “Alles was ich lernte, gab ich dem Kosmosflug” Junge Welt, September 5, 1961, in DRA Babelsberg, Pressearchiv. The latter was also the subject of a speech Titov gave in Berlin. “Unsere Erfolge beweisen: Wir sind auf dem richtigen Weg,”
Junge Welt, September 2, 1961, in DRA Babelsberg, Pressearchiv.
54. Tara Gray, “Alan B. Shepard, Jr.,” NASA 40th Anniversary of the Mercury 7, available online at http://history.nasa.gov/40thmerc7/shepard.htm.
314 Notes to pages 253–256
55. Pravda article cited in Berliner Zeitung. “Er kann überall landen,” Berliner Zeitung, September 9, 1961, in DRA Babelsberg, Pressearchiv.
56. Audience participants at “The Cultural Impact of the Cold War Cosmonaut” panel of the 2006 convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies emphasized that the disconnect between the image of prominent Soviets and their real-life personalities sometimes caused awkward situations when they traveled abroad.
A favored example was Gagarin, who had already begun to tarnish his own reputation by jumping from a hotel window, possibly drunk, to prevent his wife from catching him in flagrante with another woman.
57. Rainer Gries and Silke Satjukow, “Von Menschen und Übermenschen: Der ‘Alltag’
und das ‘Ausseralltägliche’ der ‘socialist heroes,’” Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 17 (2002): 43.
58. Tamara Titova played her own role in this narrative: that of the supportive young wife. Whether she was in the West or the GDR, reporters questioned her on a limited range of topics, including how she felt when Titov was in space and especially what she thought of the current fashions. In the GDR she praised the selection of fabrics: “There are so many pretty things to see here, that it would be hard for any woman to choose. I find the many new textiles especially lovely.” East Germans may have been surprised to hear this, given the problems of provisioning the population with consumer goods the government had at the time. “Tamara Titowa bei Frau Mode zu Gast,” Junge Welt, September 5, 1961, in DRA Babelsberg, Pressearchiv.
59. “Die aktuelle Kamera,” August 6, 1961, in DRA Babelsberg, Ostaufzeichnungen.
Unfortunately no audio-visual record of this particular program remains, only a partial written transcript that was created by West German authorities. In the period before it was possible to record programs for broadcast, and East Germany did not acquire the technology to do so before 1964, the television service had to broadcast programs live, sometimes including slides (still images) or filmed excerpts. The fragments of film that remain from this early period were collected by the West German authorities, who created and preserved kinescopes of certain
(but certainly not all!) programs, filming televised images from the television screen. They did this in part to learn something about the current state of the GDR and in part to find material that they could rebroadcast in anticommunist commentary programs, such as Rote Optik (Red spectacles). They were not alone; the GDR did the same thing. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the respective broadcasting authorities each “returned” these audio-visual archives to their rightful owners. For the television researcher this is a serendipitous product of the Cold War, making available sources that otherwise would no longer exist. It is an incomplete record, however, and subject to whatever the transcribers felt was important to preserve at the time. The scribes of this particular transcript did not see fit to record the comments of East German bathers on the subject of Titov, only that such comments appeared in the broadcast. Similarly, the last item of this transcript recorded only that the broadcast informed viewers of a Khrushchev television speech, but not what that speech was about. The next transcript, though, from August 8, 1961, suggests that it was a television speech about the conclusion of a peace treaty.
60. Ernst Lehnhardt, quoted in “Doctor Tells Why He Fled East Berlin: Wants to Live Under Freedom, Not Reds,” Chicago Daily Tribune, August 26, 1961, 4.
61. “Wostok II,” Unser Rundfunk, August 20, 1961.
62. This was a special broadcast for the affiliated national broadcasters of the International Radio and Television Organization (OIRT).
63. “Das hat Berlin noch nicht erlebt,” Berliner Zeitung, September 2, 1961, in DRA Babelsberg, Pressearchiv.
Notes to pages 256–259 315
64. “Unsere Erfolge beweisen: Wir sind auf dem richtigen Weg,” Junge Welt, September 2, 1961, in DRA Babelsberg, Pressearchiv.
65. “Titows Tat kündet alle Völker: Der Sozialismus ist die stärkste Macht der Welt,”
Neues Deutschland, September 3, 1961, in DRA Babelsberg, Pressearchiv.
66. “Die Ursache unserer Erfolge: Sozialistische Planwirtschaft,” Tribüne, September 5, 1961, in DRA Babelsberg, Pressearchiv.
67. “Walter Ulbricht: Kosmonauten künden von der grossen Zukunft des Kommunis-
mus,” Neues Deutschland, September 6, 1961, in DRA Babelsberg, Pressearchiv.
68. “Er kann überall landen,” Berliner Zeitung, September 9, 1961, in DRA Babelsberg, Pressearchiv. Media reports persistently mobilized the language of space and place.
Titov claimed that the GDR was the first place he had wanted to visit after his spaceflight, iterating this point several times. The press also reported repeatedly that Titov could have landed anywhere he wanted. (Unlike Gagarin’s flight six months earlier, Titov had manual control of the spacecraft for a short time at the end of the flight, and the spacecraft itself was more advanced.) Questioned on this point by the press, Titov replied: “Why not? Of course it would have been possible. But it was not a part of the plan.” “Alles was ich lernte, gab ich dem Kosmosflug.”
69. “Titows Tat kündet alle Völker.” The Berliner Zeitung similarly wrote: “You have shown the world the ability of the socialist people and the certain victory of the great cause of Communism. Your spaceship and the scientific instruments of highest precision were as good as your social order” (“Karl-Marx Orden für Titow,” Berliner Zeitung, September 2, 1961, in DRA Babelsberg, Pressearchiv). And, as Titov left the GDR, Ulbricht iterated that Titov was for East Germans “an emissary of freedom, a harbinger of the victorious nature of the great program of the Soviet Communist Party.” “Walter Ulbricht.”
70. According to Unser Rundfunk, “bourgeois statistics” were a good example that there were three kinds of lies: “useful lies, necessary lies and statistical conclusions.” See “Lü-
gen-Vorsprung” (Taking the lead in lies), Unser Rundfunk, August 20, 1961.
71. The cartoon, from an unnamed West German publication, was reproduced in its entirety in the East German Volksstimme, May 5, 1961, alongside an article from the April 23, 1961 issue of Pravda, in German translation.
72. GDR coverage asserted repeatedly that the Soviet space program could have achieved this already five years earlier, in 1956. “Alles was ich lernte, gab ich dem Kosmosflug.”
73. “Kosmos-Moskau-Berlin,” September 1, 1961, in DRA Babelsberg, Ostaufzeich-
nung.
74. Indeed, Neues Deutschland reported that the GDR government had effected three blows against the West. The first was the border closure, struck by the working people of the GDR and the armed forces against “German militarism and their agents.” Then, on August 31, the Soviet government “came down like a ton of bricks on the nuclear warmon-gers of NATO.” (The paper did not spell it out here, but it was referring to Khrushchev’s repeal of the moratorium on nuclear testing.) The final blow exacted was the arrival of Gherman Titov in Berlin, received by crowds of Berliners at a massive rally for German-Soviet friendship. These quotations are all from Neues Deutschland. “Titows Tat kündet alle Völker,” in DRA Babelsberg, Pressearchiv.
75. “Triumphfahrt des Kommunisten Titow,” Neues Deutschland, September 4, 1961, DRA Babelsberg, Pressearchiv.
76. “Walter Ulbricht,” DRA Babelsberg, Pressearchiv.
77. “Titows Tat kündet alle Völker.”
78. “Walter Ulbricht.”
79. The latter is from “Walter Ulbricht.” Also “Triumphfahrt des Kommunisten Titow.”
316 Notes to pages 259–261
80. “Alles was ich lernte, gab ich dem Kosmosflug.”
81. “Triumphfahrt des Kommunisten Titow.”
82. Quotations from “Titows Tat kündet alle Völker.”
83. And lest we suspect that the press simply overestimated the numbers, we must remember that television footage of Titov’s arrival indeed suggests the attendance of large, curious crowds. “Kosmos-Moskau-Berlin,” September 1, 1961, in DRA Babelsberg, Ostaufzeichnung.
84. “Triumphfahrt des Kommunisten Titow.”
Contributors
James T. Andrews is full professor of modern Russian and com-
parative EurAsian studies in the Department of History at Iowa State
University (ISU), where he is director of the University Center for Ex-
cellence in the Arts and Humanities (CEAH). At ISU he has also been
director of Eurasian Studies and director of the Center for the Historical
Studies of Technology and Science. He is the author of Red Cosmos: K. E.
Tsiolkovsksii, Grandfather of Soviet Rocketry (2009); Science for the Masses: The Bolshevik State, Public Science, and the Popular Imagination in Soviet
Russia, 1917–34 (2003); and editor of Maksim Gor’kii Revisited: Science, Academics, and Revolution (1995).
Asif A. Siddiqi is associate professor of history at Fordham Univer-
sity. He specializes in the history of science and technology and mod-
ern Russian history. He is the author, most recently, of The Red Rockets’
Glare: Spaceflight and the Soviet Imagination, 1857– 1957 (2010). He has published numerous books, articles, and edited volumes on Soviet history and the history of technology. He is also serving as series editor of
317
318 Contributors
the four-volume English-language memoirs of academician B. E. Cher-
tok, entitled Rockets and People (2005–).
Slava Gerovitch is a lecturer in the Science, Technology and Society
Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He specializes in
the history of Soviet cosmonautics, computing, and cybernetics with a
particular interest in the politics, language, and culture of Cold War sci-
ence. He is the author of From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: A History of Soviet
Cybernetics (2002), numerous articles in journals, and book chapters in Science and Ideology, Universities and Empire, Cultures of Control, and Critical Issues in the History of Spaceflight. Gerovitch is currently working on a book on the technopolit
ics of automation in the Soviet space program.
Heather L. Gumbert is an assistant professor of history at Virginia
Tech. She is the author of “Split Screens: Television in East Germany,”
in Screening the Media: Mass Media, Culture and Society in Twentieth-
century Germany, edited by Corey Ross (2006). She has also written on
debates surrounding the placement and construction of the iconic Berlin
television tower. She is currently writing a book, Envisioning Socialism,
which examines the ways in which the emergence and growth of televi-
sion shaped the lives and worldviews of Germans living in the German
Democratic Republic (GDR) in the postwar period.
Andrew Jenks is associate professor in the department of history at
California State University, Long Beach. He is the author of Russia in a
Box: Art and Identity in an Age of Revolution (2005) and Perils of Progress: Environmental Disasters in the Twentieth Century (2010). He has published articles on a variety of topics in Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, Environmental History, Technology, and Culture, and Cahiers du Monde Russe. Jenks is now completing a study of the cosmonaut Yuri
Gagarin entitled The Cosmonaut Who Couldn’t Stop Smiling: The Life and
Legend of Yuri Gagarin.
Alexei Kojevnikov is associate professor of history of science and
Russian/Soviet history at the University of British Columbia in Vancou-
ver, Canada. His publications in English and Russian include Stalin’s
Great Science: The Times and Adventures of Soviet Physicists (2004); Rock-efeller Philanthropies and Soviet Science (1993) as well as articles in Isis,
Contributors 319
Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences, Osiris, Russian Review, VIET, and other journals. Kojevnikov also edited Science in Russian Context (a special issue of Science in Context, 2002) and co-edited (with Michael Gordin and Karl Hall) Intelligentsia Science: The Russian
Century, 1860–1960 (a special issue of Osiris, vol. 23, 2008).
Cathleen S. Lewis is a curator of International Space Programs and
Spacesuits at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Muse-