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  • Cold War Kitchen: Americanization, Technology, and European Users ed. by Ruth Oldenziel and Karin Zachmann
  • Ai Hisano
Ruth Oldenziel and Karin Zachmann, eds., Cold War Kitchen: Americanization, Technology, and European Users. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009. 415 pp. $36.00.

Kitchens are not only places for cooking. In the Cold War era, the American kitchen signified the "modern" lifestyle for many European consumers. Because the global political economy was deeply tied to technological advancement, the kitchen served as a significant arena in which politicians sought to "domesticate" nuclear technology in familiar terms. Cold War Kitchen illuminates how different social actors and institutions constructed the modern kitchen in twentieth-century Europe. The essays particularly focus on technological and political aspects of kitchens by situating the 1959 Richard Nixon-Nikita Khrushchev "kitchen debate" as a framing subject.

Over the last decade, historians of the Cold War have increasingly explored government-private networks, the role of culture as a diplomatic weapon, and cultural conflicts in various countries besides the United States and the Soviet Union. Cold War Kitchen brings a new perspective to the field by exploring the relations between Cold War politics and multifaceted dimensions of kitchens, including design, use, and trajectory. The contributors to the book employ an array of primary sources such as newspapers, government documents, and official reports on international expositions in both American and European archives. The book deserves scholarly attention from a wide range of academic communities: scholars specializing not only in the Cold War but also in the history of technology, material culture, and gender studies.

The contributors delineate the kitchen both as a technological system and ideological construct. As the editors insist in the introductory chapter, the modern kitchen was a "complex, technological artifact" (p. 2), imbued with political, cultural, economic, and ecological discourses. The book's fourteen chapters explore the making and using of kitchens in East and West Germany, Finland, Great Britain, the Netherlands, the Soviet Union, Turkey, and Yugoslavia. This wide geographical scope complicates the bipolar narrative of ideological conflicts between the two superpowers.

The first part of the book focuses on historiographic issues of the 1959 kitchen debate and analyzes the Nixon-Khrushchev encounter. Greg Castillo argues that the kitchen debate in Moscow was the culmination of a series of campaigns that had been launched over a decade earlier in various European countries. In late 1940s West Germany, for instance, after the introduction of the Marshall Plan, the U.S. government [End Page 166] began to introduce the American kitchen as "a major metaphor of technological prowess and of consumer society's abundance" in women's magazines, radio programs, and international fairs (p. 17). Susan E. Reid's chapter shows Russian women's ambivalent, even negative, reactions to the American kitchen by examining the visitors' books from the 1959 exhibition.

Part II contextualizes the European tradition of modernizing housing projects from the 1890s to the 1970s, asserting that the American kitchen had much less impact on Europe's building practices than scholars have argued. These chapters provide a counternarrative to the American triumphalist representation of the kitchen at the exhibitions in Moscow and other European cities. Part III, drawing on the history of technology scholarship, explores European users' appropriation and rejection of the American kitchen. The fourth and last part assesses the overarching themes and discussions of the other articles. Building on the work of other contributors, Ruth Oldenziel insists on the intricacy of Americanization. Europeans did not just passively import the "American way of life." Rather, Americanization was a contested process in which European social actors appropriated the American kitchen.

Cold War Kitchen builds upon what Ruth Schwartz Cowan calls the "consumption junction," which illuminated the role of consumers as well as producers in developing new technologies. Cold War Kitchen adds to Cowan's thesis the concept of the "mediation junction," where different social actors—such as government agencies, businesses, modernist designers, and user groups—participated in making the modern kitchen while negotiating with one another. The contributors argue that these actors from political circles, the market, and civil society domesticated, appropriated, and subverted new technology, including electricity and kitchen equipment. This is neither the first nor the...

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