Lauren Richman

This dissertation analyzes the visual language of American cultural propaganda disseminated in Cold War–divided West Berlin, and investigates how lens-based media played a role in the city’s redevelopment of its visual arts community. Existing studies in Cold War–era visual propaganda emphasize the prototypical East/West, capitalism/communism dichotomies but often do not focus on the impact of the United States as Germany’s most prolific western occupier. With the leveling of German culture in a post–National Socialist landscape, imported visual materials played a crucial role in the country’s cultural redevelopment.

Across three chapters, this dissertation focuses specifically on lens-based media—photographic exhibitions, Hollywood films, and paintings that feature photographic content from advertisements, magazines, newspapers—by artists including Konrad Lueg (Konrad Fischer), Sigmar Polke, and Gerhard Richter. Through this visual material, I investigate the complex processes of internalization and externalization of American culture abroad and address two major issues: the scope and methodology of advocating for democracy and capitalism through culture, and how the consumption of such material featured in the reappraisal of post-dictatorship German national identity. By addressing the notion of the institutional lens, visual models of democracy, and the affective capacity of lens-based media, this dissertation both questions and expands definitions of “Germanness” and “Americanness” during Cold War conflict.