The Sea on the Other Side: The Making of Hamburg and Rostock through the Cold War: 1945-1986
This dissertation compares and contrasts the role of seaports in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and the German Democratic Republic (GDR) between the end of the Second World War and the reunification of Germany. It does so by analyzing how the ports of Hamburg and Rostock were used to legitimize the Cold War division of Germany. This analysis shows how a particular spatial discourse enabled the City of Hamburg to reorient its port around its newfound position at the edge of Europe’s Western Bloc, and how the new overseas Port of Rostock was conceived in order to serve the needs of the socialist GDR within Europe’s Eastern Bloc. It argues that despite the outsized power of the United States on one side and the Soviet Union on the other, bloc-building in Cold War Europe took place below the level of geopolitics through the negotiation of space and territory by economic and political interests. This dissertation argues that spatial claims circulated by local and national actors did as much to divide Germany as the infrastructures of the intra-German border. Instead of in barbed-wire fences and walls, this dissertation finds the materiality of Cold War division in the networks of trade and power that ran both across and within these two Cold War states. As a technique to build legitimacy and gain buy-in for spatial projects, local and national leaders circulated imagined spatial discourses intended to have territorial effects. By using the common languages of geopolitics and economic space, local and national actors created interest in their projects. Ostensibly guided by the public good, these discourses obscured the dynamic between economics and politics in the Cold War. This process resulted in the construction of transportation infrastructures around these spatial imaginaries that served to increase the legitimacy and territoriality of their respective governments. Never intended as a lasting solution, the political imaginaries of “camps “and “blocs” took on spatial dimensions, so that by serving their own interests, East and West Germans materialized the Cold War divide and made it durable.
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