Abstract
This chapter embarks upon a transnational account of literary censorship during the Cold War. Defining censorship as the sanctioned control of literary and print culture, it seeks a broad-reaching, global understanding of the controls over the production, distribution and consumption of literature that were characteristic of the latter half of the twentieth century. The chapter compares modelled regimes of censorship in place between 1947 and 1989 and assesses their impact on the cultural Cold War via focused case studies of the German Democratic Republic, Occupied Japan and Indonesia. The aim is to further contemporary understanding of censorship’s role in this period of profound global conflict and division.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
Rawnsley, ‘Introduction’ to Rawnsley, ed., Cold War Propaganda in the 1950s (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1999), p. 8.
- 2.
Burchett, ‘Political Racketeers Attempt to Gag Working-Class Writer’, World Trade Union Movement, 2 (1951), p. 44.
- 3.
See Jiřina Šmejkalová, Cold War Books in the ‘Other’ Europe and What Came After (Leiden: Brill, 2011), p. 82.
- 4.
Loseff, The Beneficence of Censorship: Aesopian Language in Modern Russian Literature, trans. by Jane Bobko (München: Sagner, 1984), p. x.
- 5.
Jones, ‘Cold War Censorship’, in Jones, ed., Censorship: A World Encyclopedia, new edn (2001; Abingdon: Routledge, 2015), p. 537.
- 6.
See Loren Glass, ‘Freedom to Read: Barney Rossett, Henry Miller and the End of Obscenity’, in Nicole Moore, ed., Censorship and the Limits of the Literary: A Global View (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015), pp. 177–88.
- 7.
Kennan, ‘Telegram’, 22 February 1946, Harry S. Truman Presidential Library & Museum, https://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/coldwar/documents/index.php?documentid=6-6& pagenumber=1 (accessed 26 January 2019).
- 8.
See Matthew P. Valdespino, ‘American Communism and Cold War Censorship: The Creation of a New American Citizen’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2013), pp. 61–2; and Tyne Daile Sumner, ‘“Wild Spiders Crying Together”: Confessional Poetry, Censorship and the Cold War’, in Moore, ed., Censorship, pp. 161–76.
- 9.
Heonik Kwon, The Other Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), p. 7.
- 10.
See Hammond, ‘On the Frontlines of Writing: Introducing the Literary Cold War’, in Hammond, ed., Global Cold War Literature: Western, Eastern and Postcolonial Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2011), pp. 1–16.
- 11.
See Nicole Moore, ‘Introduction’ to Moore, ed., Censorship, pp. 1–10; and Matthew Bunn, ‘Reimagining Repression: New Censorship Theory and After’, History and Theory, 54: 1 (2015), pp. 25–44.
- 12.
See Müller, ‘Censorship and Cultural Regulation: Mapping the Territory’, in Müller, ed., Censorship and Cultural Regulation in the Modern Age (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004), pp. 1–32; and Freshwater, ‘Towards a Redefinition of Censorship’, in Müller, ed., Censorship, pp. 225–45.
- 13.
See Müller, ‘Censorship’, pp. 1–32.
- 14.
See Laura Bradley, Cooperation and Conflict: GDR Theatre Censorship, 1961–1989 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 9–10; and Nicole Moore, ‘Censorship Is’, Australian Humanities Review, 54 (2013), pp. 53–4.
- 15.
Catherine O’Leary and Alberto Lázaro, ‘Introduction’ to O’Leary and Lázaro, eds, Censorship across Borders: The Reception of English Literature in Twentieth-Century Europe (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2011), p. 3.
- 16.
See Herman Ermolaev, Censorship in Soviet Literature 1917–1991 (1997), Valeria D. Stelmakh, ‘Reading in the Context of Censorship in the Soviet Union’ (2001) and Samantha Sherry, Discourses of Regulation and Resistance: Censoring Translation in the Stalin and Khrushchev Era Soviet Union (2015).
- 17.
O’Leary and Lázaro, ‘Introduction’, p. 3.
- 18.
See Nicole Moore, The Censor’s Library: Uncovering the Lost History of Australia’s Banned Books (2013) and Peter D. McDonald, The Literature Police: Apartheid Censorship and its Cultural Consequences (2009).
- 19.
Moore, ‘Introduction’, p. 4.
- 20.
Duara, ‘The Cold War as an Historical Period: An Interpretative Essay’, Journal of Global History, 6: 3 (2011), p. 469.
- 21.
Ermolaev, Censorship in Soviet Literature 1917–1991 (Lanham and New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997), pp. 8–9.
- 22.
Siegfried Lokatis, ‘Vom Amt für Literatur und Verlagswesen zur Hauptverwaltung Verlagswesen im Ministerium für Kultur’, in Simone Barck, Martina Langermann and Siegfried Lokatis, ‘Jedes Buch ein Abenteuer’: Zensursystem und literarische Öffentlichkeit in der DDR bis Ende der sechziger Jahre (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1998), p. 21.
- 23.
Ibid., p. 21.
- 24.
Zipser, ‘The Many Faces of Censorship in the German Democratic Republic 1949–1989’, The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory, 65: 3 (1990), p. 111.
- 25.
See Simone Barck, Martina Langerman and Siegfried Lokatis, ‘The German Democratic Republic as a “Reading Nation”: Utopia, Planning, Reality and Ideology’, trans. by Michael Latham and Devin Pendas, in M. Geyer, ed., The Power of Intellectuals in Contemporary Germany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), pp. 88–9.
- 26.
Simone Barck, Christoph Classon and Thomas Heimann, ‘The Fettered Media: Controlling Public Debate’, in Konrad H. Jarausch, ed., Dictatorship as Experience: Towards a Socio-Cultural History of the GDR (New York: Berghahn Books, 1999), p. 20. See also Barck, Langerman and Lokatis, ‘German Democratic Republic’, p. 89.
- 27.
Quoted in Barck, Langerman and Lokatis, ‘German Democratic Republic’, p. 90.
- 28.
Quoted in ibid., p. 90. ‘The socially encompassing pursuit of art thus became an agent of democratization’, Barck and colleagues suggest (ibid., p. 90).
- 29.
Ibid., p. 90.
- 30.
Ibid., p. 99. A diagram from Robert Darnton roughly approximates the position of the Hauptverwaltung in the power hierarchy and documents its divisions (Darnton, ‘Censorship, a Comparative View: France, 1789 – East Germany, 1989’, Representations, 49 (1995), p. 48).
- 31.
Barck, Langerman and Lokatis, ‘German Democratic Republic’, p. 93.
- 32.
Costabile-Heming, ‘“Rezensur”: A Case Study of Censorship and Programmatic Reception in the GDR’, Monatshefte, 92: 1 (2000), p. 55.
- 33.
See Christina Spittel, ‘Reading the Enemy: East German Censorship Across the Wall’, in Moore, ed., Censorship, pp. 150–5.
- 34.
For an account of the grand modernist cultural festival organised in Paris in 1951 by Vladimir Nabokov for the Congress, see Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta Books, 1999), pp. 113–28. See also Greg Barnhisel’s Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature and American Cultural Diplomacy (2015).
- 35.
Susan Lever, ‘“There I’m a Nobody, Here I’m a Marxian Writer”: Australian Writers in the East’, in Nicole Moore and Christina Spittel, eds, Australian Literature in the German Democratic Republic: Reading through the Iron Curtain (London: Anthem Press, 2016), p. 212.
- 36.
See Thomas Di Napoli, ‘Thirty Years of Children’s Literature in the German Democratic Republic’, German Studies Review, 7: 2 (1984), pp. 285–6.
- 37.
Bradley, Cooperation and Conflict, p. 8.
- 38.
Barck, Langerman and Lokatis, ‘German Democratic Republic’, p. 97.
- 39.
Barck, Langerman and Lokatis cite West German Richard Albrecht’s Das Bedurfnis nach echten Geschichten (1987), which critiques East German scholarship (see ibid., p. 104).
- 40.
Šmejkalová, Cold War Books, p. 61.
- 41.
O’Leary and Lázaro, ‘Introduction’, p. 8.
- 42.
Ibid., p. 8.
- 43.
Cited in Jay Rubin, ‘From Wholesomeness to Decadence: The Censorship of Literature under the Allied Occupation’, The Journal of Japanese Studies, 11: 1 (1985), p. 75.
- 44.
Ibid., p. 71.
- 45.
Kyoko Hirano, ‘The Japanese Tragedy: Film Censorship and the American Occupation’, Radical History Review, 41 (1988), p. 67.
- 46.
Ibid., p. 67.
- 47.
Ibid., p. 67.
- 48.
Ibid., p. 68.
- 49.
Abel, Redacted: The Archives of Censorship in Transwar Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), p. 17. For the first viewpoint, see Rubin, ‘From Wholesomeness to Decadence’, p. 72.
- 50.
See Kathryn Meyer, ‘Review of Monica Braw, The Atomic Bomb Suppressed: American Censorship in Occupied Japan’, International History Review, 14: 4 (1992), p. 848.
- 51.
Cited in Rubin, ‘From Wholesomeness to Decadence’, p. 84.
- 52.
Quoted in Hirano, ‘Japanese Tragedy’, p. 71.
- 53.
Quoted in ibid., p. 71.
- 54.
Quoted in ibid., p. 71.
- 55.
Ibid., p. 68.
- 56.
Kensuke Kōno and Ann Sherif, ‘Trends in Postwar Literature 1945–1970’, in Haruo Shirane, Tomi Suzuki and David Lurie, eds, The Cambridge History of Japanese Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), p. 725.
- 57.
Rubin, ‘From Wholesomeness to Decadence’, p. 76.
- 58.
Ibid., p. 87.
- 59.
Ibid., p. 88.
- 60.
See ibid., p. 89.
- 61.
Cassandra Atherton, ‘The Atomic Landscape … Does Not Allow Me to Rest: Kurihara Sadako and the Hibakusha Poet as Public Intellectual’, Cordite Poetry Review, 1 February 2017, http://cordite.org.au/essays/sadako-hibakusha-intellectual/ (accessed 26 January 2019).
- 62.
Braw, The Atomic Bomb Suppressed: American Censorship in Occupied Japan (Armonk and London: M.E. Sharpe, 1991), pp. 94–9.
- 63.
Cited in Kirsten Cather, The Art of Censorship in Postwar Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2012), p. 6.
- 64.
Ibid., p. 6.
- 65.
Ibid., p. 6.
- 66.
Marukawa, ‘The Representation of “Asia”, “Occupational Forces” and “Women” against the Backdrop of Post-War Japanese Culture: From the System of Censorship to the Present’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 6: 2 (2005), p. 274.
- 67.
Ibid., p. 275.
- 68.
Popescu, ‘Reading through a Cold War Lens: Apartheid Era Literature and the Global Conflict’, Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa, 42: 1 (2012), p. 38.
- 69.
Duara, ‘Cold War’, p. 474.
- 70.
Ibid., p. 474.
- 71.
Sara Jones begins her case studies of complicity with the GDR’s literary production system with a survey of debate on the definition of totalitarianism, questioning its usefulness for discussions of East German censorship while refusing a position that elevated literature out of the political realm (see Jones, Complicity, Censorship and Criticism: Negotiating Space in the GDR Literary Sphere (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2011), pp. 6–8).
- 72.
See Moore, Censor’s Library, pp. 28, 73, 236–41.
- 73.
Nathan, ‘China in Change’, in Susan Whitfield, ed., After the Event: Human Rights and Their Future in China (London: Wellsweep Press, 1993), p. 15.
- 74.
See Joe Lockard and Quin Dan, ‘Jack London, Anti-Chinese Racism, and Structural Censorship in Chinese Translation’, Translation Quarterly, 69 (2013), pp. 42–5.
- 75.
Desmond A. Skeel, ‘Communist China, 1949–89’, in Jones, ed., Censorship, p. 491.
- 76.
Mini Chandran’s The Writer, the Reader and the State: Literary Censorship in India (2017) is the best example. See also Robert Darnton’s ‘Literary Surveillance in the British Raj: The Contradictions of Liberal Imperialism’ (2001), Anjali Arondekar’s For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India (2009) and Deana Heath’s Purifying Empire: Obscenity and the Politics of Moral Regulation in Britain, India and Australia (2010).
- 77.
Quoted in Paul Tickell, ‘Indonesia’, in Jones, ed., Censorship, p. 1180.
- 78.
See Tickell, ‘Controlling Ideas and Controlling People: Libel, Surveillance, Banishment and Indigenous Literary Expression in the Dutch East Indies’, in Moore, ed., Censorship, p. 89; and Hendrik M.J. Maier, ‘Flying a Kite: The Crimes of Pramoedya Ananta Toer’, in Vincent L. Raphael, ed., Figures of Criminality in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Colonial Vietnam (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), p. 247.
- 79.
Tickell, ‘Indonesia’, p. 1180.
- 80.
See ibid., p. 1180.
- 81.
See Tony Day, ‘Still Stuck in the Mud: Imagining World Literature during the Cold War in Indonesia and Vietnam’, in Day and Maya H.T. Liem, eds, Cultures at War: The Cold War and Cultural Expression in Southeast Asia (Ithaca: SEAP Publications, 2010), pp. 131–69.
- 82.
Moore, ‘Censorship Is’, p. 53.
- 83.
See ibid., pp. 61–2.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Moore, N. (2020). Print Censorship and the Cultural Cold War: Books in a Bounded World. In: Hammond, A. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Cold War Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38973-4_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38973-4_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-38972-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-38973-4
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)