THE VISUALISATION OF THE EAST-WEST CONFLICT: MAPS OF EUROPE AND THE WORLD IN WESTERN EUROPEAN AND NORTH AMERICAN SCHOOL ATLASSES DURING THE COLD WAR

Dr Jasper Trautsch
Otto Bennemann Fellow at the Georg Eckert Institute

After the Second World War Europe and the world were not just divided politically into two opposing military blocks; people’s geographical perception fundamentally changed as the Cold War progressed. The Federal Republic of Germany for example was increasingly viewed as a western European rather than a central European country. Italy was accepted into the “Atlantic Alliance” despite bordering the Mediterranean. The USA, which had traditionally defined itself as distinct from the “Old World” and which had seen the Atlantic Ocean as a civilising line of separation, now interpreted itself as a “Western” country, which was intrinsically linked across the Atlantic to western Europe through politics, history, culture and religion. In this talk Jasper Trautsch will trace this perceived spatial reorganisation of the Euro-Atlantic world following 1945. In the centre of his analysis is the question of how maps of the world and of Europe, particularly those printed in school atlases or on stamps, abidingly changed the spatial perception of western Europeans and North Americans.

Jasper Trautsch gained his doctorate in history from the Freie Universität Berlin in 2011. His doctoral thesis “Inventing America: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Formation of National Identity, 1789-1815” was awarded the Rolf Kentner Dissertation Prize in 2013 by the Ruprecht Karls University in Heidelberg. Since 2012 he has spent time as a research fellow at the German Historical Institutes in Washington, London, Rome and Paris, whilst working on his post-doctoral thesis, which examines the transnational history of ideas in the West.

Georg Eckert Institute, Celler Straße 3, entrance Freisestraße, conference room, 3rd floor.