“Conversation of Two Deaf-Mutes”?
The Culture of Khrushchev’s Foreign Policy and Adenauer’s Moscow Visit in 1955
Deutsche Fassung
Abstract
Foreign policy is usually treated as realpolitik in which hard facts alone play a role. Diplomacy, however, is intercultural communication. Adenauer’s visit to Moscow shows just how difficult it was for East and West to understand one another. Even Western diplomatic protocol could not serve as a common language, for the Soviet Union rejected it as a bourgeois product. Finally, Adenauer engaged in Khrushchev’s yelling and threats, and that made a decision possible.
(Osteuropa 7/2007, pp. 27–46)