Ost-Probleme
Problems of the East

"Ost-Probleme" was founded in 1948 as a biweekly newsletter and a kind of digest, offering texts, extracts or complete articles from (mostly) Eastern European newspapers and periodicals translated into German. When the content seemed to be of remarkable importance for the Western readership, other sources were used as well. During its first years of appearance, "Ost-Probleme" was published by the Embassy of the United States of America in Bonn (USIS, Press Division), the American High Commissionar for Germany. Later-on the editorship turned into the publishing house "Wissenschaft und Politik" (Bonn). It's obvious, that this newsletter in the cold war era played a very special role in the information policy about the European countries which were under communist rule, and the transition from poor information to an instrument of propaganda might be sometimes smooth. But exactly because of its role as such an instrument of information policy in the 50’s and 60’s, "Ost-Probleme" is an interesting source serving as a kind o protocol of the Western perception of the communist world. CEEOL will create digital reproductions of all the issues, which are still available to us and offer them to our library users.

Remarks:

1) in the summaries of many dossiers original titles of articles are often quoted in Latin transcription. We therefore use the transcription as we find it in the printed originals of "Ost-Probleme"

2) The Editorial Notes ("Redaktionelle Notizen") of each issue, which provide more detailed information about the special focus of can be downloaded free of charge. You find it in the list of articles always as "Cover - Content - Editorial"

3) Since the digitization of the "Ost-Prbleme" has been made based on originals, which we have received as a donantion by Prof. Iring Fetscher in Frankfurt am Main, some of the pages may contain some underscores or marks made by Prof. Fetscher. We forbeared from cleaning these notes beause, due to the quality of the paper, cleaning the original would have destroyed the pages, and cleaning the scans would need an incommensurable input of time.