Trojanische Pferde

For more than three decades, the Hamburg political scientist and author Klaus Körner has been investigating the role of publishing houses in the sharp political disputes between the two German states in the period after the Second World War. While the occupying powers initially attached great importance to books for the re-education of the Germans, they soon also gained great significance in the Cold War between East and West. Especially in the form of political pamphlets, books were supposed to serve the "enlightenment" of the respective enemy, but in fact they all too often functioned only as a means of sophisticated or crude propaganda. The fact that in the West the special skills of old Nazis were unabashedly used, who continued the fight against "Jewish Bolshevism" under new auspices as a fight against communism, was deliberately tolerated for a long time. Both Western and Eastern agitators were firmly integrated into state support structures, and in both cases the secret services pulled the strings from behind the scenes. This volume brings together some 20 essays in which Klaus Körner brings the actors of the former system struggle, who are largely forgotten today, out of the darkness of history and into the light of day.