Suppression of the Hungarian uprising in 19561 gave Eastern Europe a harsh reminder of the ground rules operating within the Soviet bloc. First, member could leave the Warsaw Pact. Second, the states of Eastern Europe had to maintain a Communist monopoly at all times. These two principles were designed to prevent radical change within Eastern Europe. They secured Moscow’s geostrategic interests in the region by setting boundaries that could not be crossed. That did not prevent leaders from taking local initiatives should they so wish, but their willingness to do so differed markedly between countries.

The Polish leader Władysław Gomułka had been brought back to power in October 1956. One of his first external acts was to renegotiate Poland’s relations with the Soviet Union. Though the relationship remained subservient, a degree of formal sovereignty was restored. At home, he preserved the main domestic changes made during ‘October’: the return of agriculture to private hands and improved relations between Church and state. However, realising that the invasion of Hungary was a fate that Poland had missed perhaps by only a few days, he rejected any further reforms. Even modest proposals reintroduce market elements into central planning were dismissed as attempts to ‘undermine socialism’. Poland entered a decade of stagnation.

At first glance, understanding the dynamics of how nuclear weapons spread during the Cold War, and what was done to slow this proliferation, should not be difficult. Weren’t nuclear weapons a threat to international stability, inducing widespread support for efforts to hem in this menace to world peace? The real story was not so simple. As scholars have long recognized, nuclear weapons influenced international politics in complex and often contradictory ways during the Cold War. On the one hand, atomic weapons have an enormous destructive power – the capacity to kill millions of people and destroy the fabric of civilized life. On the other, this weapon of terror, may have induced caution among the states that possessed them. Many analysts believe the prospect of mutual destruction prevented World War III, serving as a foundation for what John Lewis Gaddis famously labeled “the Long Peace.”

This dilemma was just one of many that policymakers, strategists, and outside observers wrestled with as they tried to understand the military and political purposes of such fearful weapons. These issues were never resolved during the Cold War, as analysts joined government officials in devising the most intricate, sophisticated military strategies for weapons they hoped would never be employed and believed had no meaningful battle field purpose. These fears also inspired millions around the world to join grassroots, nongovernmental efforts to prevent the bomb from ever being used.

John F. Kennedy’s most basic goal as president of the United States was to reach a political understanding with the Soviet Union. That understanding would be based on a simple principle: the United States and the Soviet Union were both very great powers and therefore needed to respect each other’s most basic interests. The US government was thus prepared, for its part, to recognize the USSR’s special position in Eastern Europe. The United States would, moreover, see to it that West Germany would not become a nuclear power. In exchange, the Soviets would also have to accept the status quo in Central Europe, especially in Berlin. If a settlement of that sort could be worked out, the situation in Central Europe would be stabilized. The great problem that lay at the heart of the Cold War would be resolved.

But to reach a settlement based on those principles, Kennedy had to get both the USSR and his own allies in Europe to accept this sort of arrangement. The Soviets, however, were not particularly receptive when it became clear to them, beginning in mid-1961, what the president had in mind. The Americans, in their view, were making concessions because they were afraid the Berlin crisis would lead to war. Why not see what more they might get by keeping the crisis going?

As United States policymakers charted a more aggressive internationalism at the end of World War II, it was not immediately clear how ordinary Americans might be affected by this new course. Early Cold War blueprints mentioned a role for civilians in the emerging East–West conflict, but this amounted to fervent but still fuzzy calls for heightened public interest in current events. As US–Soviet relations grew chillier, Cold War architects such as George Kennan sermonized that morally flabby Americans would have to strengthen their civic muscles and “measure up” to earlier generations of revolutionary Americans whose courage and commitment had preserved the nation. In more muted and sterile policy parlance, other Cold Warriors grimly foretold a future of higher taxes, cuts in nondefense spending, and the restraint of civil liberties for the promise of internal security. By 1950, however, a National Security Council policy paper, NSC 68, warned more starkly that the Cold War was not merely a clash of ideologies but rather “a real war in which the survival of the free world [was] at stake.” To meet the challenge, Americans would have to summon their better selves and demonstrate their “ingenuity, sacrifice, and unity.”

Such were the stakes for mid-century Americans, but few of them readily understood their new civic burdens. National security planners talked more to one another than to their publics, and much of this early reflection about the Cold War’s domestic impact would be held closely within policy circles. And yet, to get the needed public engagement, presidents and a vast array of military and civilian administrators had to somehow translate and disseminate these plans to American citizens. From the immediate postwar years to the early 1960s, policymakers tasked the Cold War’s home-front institutions — state and local governments, schools, businesses, labor unions, civic organizations, and media — with the same objective of containment they would pursue at higher levels through military and covert means. The job was formidable: how could they popularize national security goals in a civilian vernacular? How could they reorient a nation-state around national security objectives while still maintaining the legal, economic, and cultural traditions that most citizens identified as “the American way of life”? Even NSC 68 acknowledged that the American people and American institutions would have to be mobilized through a “traditional democratic process” that respected basic values and institutions and the slower tempo of consensusbuilding.

The importance of France’s role in the Cold War is often overlooked when compared with that of both the two superpowers and the other major West European countries. Germany self-evidently occupied a central position in the East–West conflict from its inception and was a decisive actor at its end, and Britain’s role during the Cold War was much enhanced thanks to the “special” relationship with the United States. By contrast, the French contribution often comes across as less important. This may be partly explained by a comparatively modest French input in the historiography, especially in the English-speaking literature. Yet the perception of France as a lesser player in the Cold War is misleading.

To be sure, the country was in a somewhat peripheral position at the very beginning of the East–West conflict. Wartime leader Charles de Gaulle and – following his withdrawal from politics in January 1946 – his immediate successors were indeed reluctant to accept the emerging logic of the Cold War and its consequences. By the late 1940s, however, the intensification of the Cold War had led to the country’s active alignment within the West, thus making France a key protagonist in the East–West conflict. Yet France’s position in the Cold War soon provoked a number of frustrations that the country’s painful decolonization process and chronic internal instability only aggravated, and these tensions together played no small part in the demise of the Fourth Republic and General de Gaulle’s return to power in 1958.

“The future of Germany was the question of questions and had to be looked at in its own terms. It was Germany that twice in a quarter-century had generated world war,” wrote Walt W. Rostow in 1972, when he analyzed the unfolding of the Cold War in Germany. Rostow, national security adviser to President Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1960s, had been personally involved in the planning of American policies toward Germany in 1946. He was aware of the fear, the despair, and the hatred that German warfare, German occupation of Europe, and German atrocities had stirred up. But by 1947 most American decisionmakers had shifted their worries from Germany to the Soviet Union.

How did this change come about? Why did the insoluble questions of joint occupation lead directly into the Cold War in Germany? And how should we assess this historical event from the vantage point of the early twenty-first century? These are the leading questions of this chapter.

Germany is our problem

“Germany is our problem,” wrote Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau in 1945. The measures to curb German power were many and they seemed justified: military government and an unlimited period of occupation; abolition of the German armed forces and elimination of the country’s industrial war potential; de-Nazification and punishment of all Germans involved in Nazi crimes; reparations to the Soviet Union on a gigantic scale as well as to the Western countries in order to restore – at least partly – the damages caused by Germany. In addition to occupation and security controls, radical structural changes seemed necessary. All sorts of recipes were on the table: “dismemberment” of the German Reich that, since its founding by Bismarck, in 1866 and 1871, had played a semi-hegemonic role in Europe and had ruled Europe from 1940 to 1944; the annexation of large portions of eastern and western Germany; a sharp reduction in the economic potential of this industrial giant; international control of the Ruhr; deep, perhaps revolutionary, reforms in many realms of economy, society, and administration; elimination of the economic, cultural, and administrative “old” elites that had joined up with Hitler’s party; reeducation.

Most contemporary audiences know that films need stars and money; directors, producers and script writers also play some sort of a part. But how many audiences actually know or care what the 'best boy' does or even how long it takes to make a film? In late sixteenth-century and early seventeenth-century England, general or popular knowledge of how plays reached the stage may well have been just as limited. It is probably a mistake to suppose that audiences or readers had a strong sense of the processes by which plays came into existence, were licensed and realized on the stage, and under what circumstances they were transmitted to the page: these may have been matters of relative or of complete indifference to them.

Like any mass-market commercial enterprise, the pre-Civil War theatre was not static: it sprang to life in the later 1580s and continued developing and changing right up to the closing of the theatres in 1642. This makes generalizing about writing and theatrical and publishing practices particularly difficult: what happened in the 1590s, say, may well have borne no relation to what went on in the 1630s and vice versa. Similarly, the surviving evidence is very limited, and it is dangerous to draw firm conclusions about one part of it from another. For example, the entrepreneur Philip Henslowe's 'diary', an enormously important and valuable set of accounts for 1592-1603 that survives with a mass of associated documentary material at Dulwich College in south London, reveals a great deal about what went on in his theatrical empire at the Rose theatre and elsewhere.

Allegory is narrative with a shadow story of corresponding characters, events, or ideas. Allegorical interpretation establishes the meaning of this figurative relation by tracing its correspondences of actions and concepts. Such working definitions will need revision as we consider the critical traditions of hermeneutics and deconstruction. In the second half of the twentieth century, these two ways of thinking offered unique perspectives on allegory as both a mode of writing and a strategy for reading. For the purposes of this essay, we can view hermeneutics generally as theories of interpretation, the establishment of textual meaning, especially those theories associated with the writings of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur. More provisionally, we can treat deconstruction as a radical form of poststructuralism and a certain way of interpreting against the grain of a text, developed within and against phenomenology and structuralism and often identified with the critical readings of Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida. Hermeneutics and deconstruction intersect and diverge on their shared topic of allegory in its relation to rhetoric, philosophy, and literature. We begin with two very different figures who set the rhetorical stage for later developments in hermeneutics and poststructuralism. Early in the century, Martin Heidegger's ontological rereadings of Western theology and philosophy included suggestive comments on allegory in his 1930-31 lecture course on “The Essence of Truth.”

In their explicit doctrines, Plato and Aristotle express distrust and disdain for allegorical interpretation; but they do not manage to slam the door upon it altogether. Plato explicitly repudiates the allegories (hyponoiai) with which traditional tales of divine violence and immorality might be rescued for children (Republic 2.378D) and makes fun of attempts to make sense of myths by rationalizing them (Phaedrus 229C-30A). And yet the same Plato takes pains to introduce into crucial moments of various dialogues extended mythic narratives, often transparently allegorical in character, which seem designed to supply the philosophically correct forms of myth from which students will be able to learn acceptable views, once the incorrect forms transmitted to them by their traditional culture have been discarded. His independent-minded student Aristotle shares his teacher's anti-allegorical tastes: in his view of the development of human thought he disregards claims for the poets' philosophical seriousness and instead consigns their alleged cosmological views to the period before genuine philosophy began, while in his work on poetry he entirely ignores allegorical interpretations of epic, substituting for them the view that what makes Homer and other poets philosophically interesting are not any covert philosophical doctrines but the structures of human thought and action they explicitly portray.

Neither the course nor the ending of the Cold War can be understood without some reference to the impact that human rights ideas had on East–West rivalries. Whereas Communist governments regarded civil and political rights as bourgeois trappings, stating a preference instead for the collective rights appropriate to the social and economic goals they propounded, Western liberal capitalist governments gave priority precisely to those rights that the Soviet bloc derided. These divisions in interpretation were crucial because of the way they related to the broader contest. They were ’not mere preferences which outsiders could take or leave’, but were powerful emblems of success on the ideological battleground. The gaining of adherents to one interpretation over another signalled victory for one and defeat for the other – outcomes that, in turn, could strengthen or undermine the domestic legitimacy of their competing political systems.

This particular aspect of the Cold War struggle had both positive and negative results for the promotion and protection of human rights. Rhetorical arguments about the priorities to be given to certain values helped to sustain attention to the human rights idea, even as actual behaviour could prove devastating for human rights protections. Similarly, some of the seeds of the ending of the Cold War germinated as a result of the disillusion of those who experienced the double standards and the failures to promote the conditions under which those protections could advance.

Allegory flourished in premodern Islamic literatures. Remarkably, however, neither premodern nor modern literary historians devote independent discussions to the genre per se, or even include the term in their indices. Allegorical praxis is simply treated under other generic categories, such as the mystical tale, the philosophical visionary recital, the poetic romance, or scriptural and textual commentary. Discussion here therefore requires drawing together variegated strands of literary practice to portray the history and development of allegory in Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman Turkish literatures, which are the major literary traditions of Islamic culture. Other Islamic literatures exist, in Urdu, Malay, and Swahili, for example, yet neither space nor scope of personal expertise allows their treatment here. Allegory in Islamic literatures as a developed literary practice begins at the turn of the eleventh century, four centuries after the death of the Prophet Muhammad. Yet allegory draws on earlier periods for crucial constituent narrative forms, topics, themes, source materials, and interpretational frameworks. An initial overview of relevant influences will clarify later developments.

The Qur’an influences allegorical practice in Islamic literatures in three significant ways. First, it dramatically emphasizes the existential and experiential duality that informs all allegorical writing. The Qur’an finds humans immersed in the immediate pleasures of corporeal sensation and worldly ambition. It calls on them to transcend these alluring earthly attachments and return to the “rightly guided path.” Humans, it states, must reorder their lives. Through divine mercy, God sends both prophets and revelation to guide this change in human orientation, with Muhammad being the last of such prophets and the Qur’an the final revelation.

Shakespeare? Popular culture?

What sense does it make to couple Shakespeare - Bard of Avon, icon of genius, highbrow extraordinaire - with 'popular culture'? If his writings are widely valued for their complexity, timelessness and universal human truths, popular culture is for many synonymous with banality, the ephemeral and the trivial. If Shakespeare is deep and difficult, the typical products of popular culture are shallow and all too accessible. To enjoy Shakespeare, the argument might run, requires training, time and long-term investment; the consumption of popular culture, by definition, requires little or no effort. From the perspective of these stark contrasts, 'Shakespeare and popular culture' looks like a dead-end of incompatibility.

Yet Shakespeare is everywhere in contemporary culture. His presence is not confined to the 'official' locations of classrooms, universities and theatres, but permeates popular mass media such as cinema, television, tabloid journalism, computer games, pop music, comics and advertisements. Shakespeare's face sells products and is familiar to millions, many of whom may never have read or seen his work; any bald-headed, bearded man need only don a ruff and grab a quill to be instantly recognizable as 'Shakespeare'. Someone this easily impersonated is a major celebrity. Shakespeare’s words are quoted and misquoted (intentionally or otherwise) to amuse, persuade and impress. Many of Shakespeare’s characters have been plucked from their plays to become freestanding cultural stereotypes of amorousness (Romeo), indecision (Hamlet) or steely ‘un-feminine’ ambition (Lady Macbeth). Shakespeare’s plots are plundered to provide storylines for films, science fiction and soap operas. Shakespeare scholars have increasingly sought to analyse and theorize what Douglas Lanier has called ‘Shakespop’, the presence, citation and appropriation of Shakespeare across a range of popular mass media.

The work of Walter Benjamin has made a fundamental contribution to the re-assessment of allegory during the twentieth century. It not only made a powerful case for the significance of allegory as a radical art practice but also extended its reach from the aesthetic to other realms of experience. However, the precise contours of the concept of allegory are hard to trace because Benjamin lends such broad significance to the allegorical. In so far as he possessed an integrated theory of allegory, it is one made up of the intersection of several discrete lines of inquiry whose precise relations were left deliberately undefined. For Benjamin, allegory is a concept with implications that are at once philosophical, religious, aesthetic, political and historical. In many ways it is emblematic of the internal complexity of Benjamin's work, which is rooted in the attempt to bring together the approaches of philosophy, aesthetics and cultural history. While the manifold senses of allegory are never bound unequivocally together into a general theory, it is clear that they depend upon each other, often in quite astonishing and illuminating ways. It is also evident that allegory is central not only to his understanding of modernism in art and literature, but also to the shifts of religious and political experience that for Benjamin constituted modernity.

The Cold War saw deepening Soviet–American rivalry in the Middle East from the mid-1950s to the late 1970s on three levels – a geopolitical struggle to recruit allies and secure access to strategic resources (especially oil); diplomatic maneuvers to prevent the Arab–Israeli conflict from escalating into a superpower confrontation; and ideological competition for the future of the Muslim world, where secular nationalists and Islamic radicals shook the foundations of colonial empires and absolute monarchies throughout the region. On three occasions – the 1956 Suez crisis, the 1967 Six Day War, and the October 1973 War – hostilities between Israel and its Arab enemies disrupted world oil supplies, forced Washington and Moscow to contemplate military intervention, and briefly sparked fears of nuclear Armageddon. Once the shooting stopped in late 1973, American policymakers undertook “shuttle diplomacy” between Middle Eastern capitals, prompting the Arab members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to lift their oil embargo on the United States, reducing the Kremlin’s influence among Arab nationalists, and inducing Israel to be more flexible on territorial issues, all of which paved the way for the Camp David summit in September 1978. Diplomatic progress on the Arab–Israeli front, however, was undermined by the Islamic upheavals that rocked Iran and its Muslim neighbors during the late 1970s.

In 1945, Britain was an activist world power. It possessed the world’s second-largest national navy, and its Empire–Commonwealth was genuinely global. The Dominions stretched from Canada to Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa; it had colonial possessions from the north to the south of the African continent, to the east of Suez, in South and Southeast Asia, as well as many scattered, and often strategic, island outposts. The ‘jewel in the crown’ of the Empire was India.

On VE Day, 8 May 1945, Britain and its loyal Empire–Commonwealth had 4 million troops serving overseas for the Allied cause. Wartime summit meetings had reinforced both the reality and the image of a Britain as a world power as Prime Minister Winston Churchill and President Franklin D. Roosevelt of the United States parleyed with the Soviet leader, Iosif Stalin, while the tide of fighting brought them all towards victory. It was therefore inevitable that the British would have a large role in shaping the untidy transition that was to come, and that would transform the world from war to an uncertain peace.