David Tompkins

Education & Professional History

Rice University, BA; Université de Provence (France), licence; Columbia University, MA, PhD

I specialize in the history of modern Central Europe, and am particularly interested in the relationship between culture and politics during the Cold War. My book Composing the Party Line: Music and Politics in Early Cold War Poland and East Germany appeared with Purdue University Press in 2013, and I have published articles in German History, The Polish Review, and many edited volumes. My current project examines images of the other in the Soviet bloc. At Carleton, I offer a wide range of courses on the history of modern Europe, including seminars on music and politics, visual images and socialism, dictatorships, and the Holocaust.

Languages spoken: German, Polish, French (excellent), and Russian (basic).

At Carleton since 2008.

Current Courses

Fall 2024
HIST 100: Music and Politics in Europe since Wagner
HIST 141: Europe in the Twentieth Century
Winter 2025
EUST 110: The Power of Place: Memory and Counter-Memory in the European City
HIST 398: Advanced Historical Writing
Spring 2025
CCST 208: International Coffee and News
HIST 347: The Global Cold War

Current Research

The Communist Construction of Friends and Enemies: The Images of Israel, China, and Yugoslavia in the Stalinist Soviet Bloc

The decade immediately after the Second World War was a period of massive change for the countries of East-Central Europe. After several years of Nazi domination and fierce, brutal warfare, both resulting in millions of dead, the populations of the region experienced another era of wrenching transformation. Hardline communists rose to power and implemented stalinist political control over what emerged as the Soviet bloc. A relentless drive to re-fashion society and create the new socialist person gripped the region through Stalin’s death and beyond.

The construction of external friends and enemies was an essential element of both the stalinist worldview and techniques of control and mobilization. Party members and sympathizers used these images to define the notion of both the ideal citizen and society by providing models to be emulated and avoided. With a stark perspective that allowed for few grays, communists in the Soviet bloc classified other countries and their citizens, and exhorted party members and their own societies to learn from these successes and failures. These constructions saturated the public space, and their presentation and manipulation were a constant of life under socialism. This study will examine the penetration of the discourse of friends and enemies into the everyday life of the citizens of Communist East-Central Europe through the mass media of newspapers, popular magazines, television, and film, as well as through the wide distribution of informational pamphlets and booklets on related topics. Public demonstrations and parades provide another fruitful arena of investigation, as speeches and slogans accompanied the many thousands of marchers and spectators. This study will also devote particular attention to intense public campaigns like the Months of Chinese-German Friendship, the anti-Zionist demonstrations of March 1968 in Poland, or the intermittent mobilizations for peace that divided the world into opposing camps. Posters and other public visual material, especially showpiece cultural exhibitions, supply another rich field of inquiry.

This project will also look at the formulation of these images from above, and examine how officials and intellectuals used symbols and language to effect change. Party leaders conducted official policy in meetings of the Politburo and other important political forums, and regional and local authorities also added considerable input to the development and transmission of these images. Public trials, in particular the show trials of the stalinist period, were important occasions for propagating images of friends and enemies, and the behaviors associated with each. The crucial stratum of artists, writers, and scholars will also be analyzed in detail, as these intellectuals helped to formulate official positions and then translate them for public consumption; key materials here include travel literature, novels, and films. A particularly compelling source is that of delegations of artists and scientists traveling in both directions, as guests toured communist-bloc countries and left impressions open to interpretation, both official and otherwise. Groups from Soviet-bloc countries similarly traveled throughout the world and interacted with these supposed friends and enemies, and then returned home to share their experiences. Pedagogical materials will also be analyzed, including schoolbooks at the grade-school and high-school levels as well as academic works and conferences at the universities.

The language used in the construction of these images is of particular interest to this study. Through an analysis of the discursive landscape in this crucial area, it will show how language helped to bring the new socialist society into being and shape it thereafter. The rhetoric surrounding friends and enemies helped individuals to fashion their identities at a time of massive societal change by providing a language to define themselves. This framework supplied a lens through which to perceive the world as well as a set of values that delineated proper behavior.

This project will concentrate on the countries of East Germany and Poland, but will make constant reference to the imperial center of the Soviet Union as well as to the other satellite countries of the Soviet bloc. A detailed focus on these two, representative countries from the larger communist world also avoids the perils of exceptionalism that an investigation of one country presents. The view from the periphery will also illuminate the struggle of the East German and Polish parties and societies to negotiate fluctuating and sometimes contradictory signals they received from Moscow.

Instead of examining more commonly-studied enemies like the United States and West Germany, or the Soviet Union as ultimate friend, this project will focus on three notable examples of countries that fluctuated in their reception by the socialist bloc: Yugoslavia, Israel, and the People’s Republic of China. An examination of these three cases will provide multiple and rich comparative insights. In the stalinist era, after several years of favor both Israel and Yugoslavia were demonized, even as Communist China was becoming an important new friend in the socialist firmament. Yugoslavia rejoined the ranks of friends in the mid-1950s, while a few years later China began a gradual slide into disfavor. In the mid-1960s, China became a socialist enemy to the Soviet bloc, a profoundly disruptive development to bloc cohesion and the communist worldview. In 1967, nearly all socialist countries officially broke diplomatic relations with Israel, thus turning a country viewed negatively since the early 1950s into a full-fledged enemy. These three changing cases illuminate the tensions in constructing different images, and offer considerable material for documenting the strategies in the rhetorical shifts.

Historians have looked at internal enemies in the early Soviet Union as well as during the stalinist period in the USSR and throughout East-Central Europe, with the show trials of the early 1950s unsurprisingly receiving significant attention. On the international level, negative propaganda about the West and its positive counterpart about the Soviet Union have also been the focus of significant scholarly interest. The important but slightly lower-profile associations with countries like those proposed here have received less attention. These important, second-tier relationships were subject to more change given the contemporary political winds, and thus the effects on the related images reveal more about how constructed and propagated, and how society reacted.

While this project will use party and state archives as an important source base, it will not confine itself to elite formulations, but will also explore a multiplicity of sources from popular media and everyday life, including the popular press, books, film, posters, exhibitions and rallies. In assessing how these images were interpreted and received at the grass-roots, this study will contribute to the burgeoning literature on everyday life under socialism. As the historical literature moves ever further away from traditional notions of totalitarian domination, this study will look the pedagogical nature of these dictatorships and the attempt to attain legitimacy and maintain control through appeals to both reason and sentiment.

Past Research

Composing the Party Line: Music and Politics in Poland and East Germany in the Early Cold War

This project is a comparative inquiry into the relationship between music and politics in the German Democratic Republic and Poland during the years from 1948 to 1957. It examines party and state institutions responsible for music, the all-embracing Composers’ Unions, as well as the interaction of musical culture and related political developments throughout society in such areas as festivals, concerts, and other musical events.

This study advances several interrelated theses about the party, composers, and the musical activity of the population. It asserts that music, as a significant part of cultural production in these countries, was an important element in imposing and maintaining the communist regimes of East Central Europe. The communist parties in both East Germany and Poland sought to influence artistic production as part of a project of saturating the public space with ideas and symbols in an attempt to create and control the new socialist person. Music helped the parties to establish legitimacy vis-a-vis society; both extensive support for musical life, as well as the messages inscribed into the musical works themselves, encouraged musical elites and broader audiences to accept the parties’ dominant position and political mission.

Rather than absolute control over a stifled, monotonous musical landscape, this dissertation describes considerable space for intense discussion and creativity. Undeniably, and often with a heavy hand, the parties attempted to impose limits on the kind of music produced and performed, especially in the early 1950s. These boundaries, however, were set relatively expansively, and proved to be quite porous in practice. This study also discusses the surprising flexibility of the socialist-realist paradigm, especially in its actual application, as well as the numerous, differing pressure groups inside the parties and among composers. These composers, as well as musicologists, musicians, and concertgoers, presented and often achieved their aims in creating the new political and aesthetic reality in a complicated process of negotiation.

This comparison of Poland with the GDR allows the examination of the complex interaction between politics and the artistic world in two neighboring, but historically quite different countries, both of which nonetheless experienced a similar political, social, and cultural transformation in the postwar period. This study makes extensive use of the central archives for both party and state institutions, materials related to the two Composers’ Unions, the holdings of music libraries, articles in the popular and party press, and diaries and memoirs.

Although this study is structured in a top-down manner, moving as it does from the high-political, theoretical plane through the composers’ studio and on to the concert hall, this is by no means meant to suggest that party decisions manifested themselves effortlessly throughout the musical world. Indeed, the debates over the nature of socialist realism and how to influence and propagate this new music, discussed in Chapter One, are marked by considerable contestation and negotiation. Chapter Two then looks at the Party and State bodies devoted to music, and illuminates key cases where the musical and political worlds overlap. The third, centerpiece chapter turns to the producers of new music and discusses the Composers’ Unions in considerable detail in order to illuminate how the composition and performance of new music was structured, and how cultural officials attempted to influence it. The final three chapters move away from this elite level to examine how this music was brought to the rest of the population and how it was received. Chapter Four looks at a number of key musical festivals to determine their organization and the kinds of music commissioned and performed there. Finally, the fifth and sixth chapters examine the organization of concert life, both with respect to the professional orchestras as well as to the state-run concert agencies that organized smaller-scale concerts and recitals.

Teaching Philosophy and Experience

My primary goal as an instructor is to teach students to think deeply and critically about historical issues. Mastering a body of facts is of course essential, but I also challenge my students to engage with a particular event or period from multiple perspectives. In doing so, I foster such skills as critical analysis, discussion of complex issues, and effective written expression. Historical study is a necessary and rewarding end in itself, yet I also encourage students to make links to the present, and to re-examine contemporary society and their role in it after close study of exemplary documents or contentious episodes from the past.

To enhance my lectures as well as class discussion of primary sources, I have made extensive use of new technologies. For all of my courses, I teach in a wired classroom, and I employ these audio-visual possibilities through multimedia lectures, web-based resources, and analysis and discussion of paintings, photographs, and film. For example, I preface nearly every class with a piece of music, which we then discuss in light of that day’s theme. I also actively manage an expansive course website with many materials, including an interactive syllabus as well as a discussion board to which I require weekly postings. In this open discussion forum, students write on complex ideas outside the context of their regular papers. These websites are an important interactive forum that links outside study to class time and encourages shy students to participate. As one example, I asked students to justify one country’s decision to fight in World War I on the discussion board by using primary documents linked on the interactive syllabus, and in the next class we broke into groups by country for an enthusiastic debate session based on these postings.

I am currently an assistant professor at The University of Tennessee, and am teaching undergraduate and graduate courses on the history of modern Europe. During the 2004-05 academic year as the Drushal Distinguished Visiting Assistant Professor at The College of Wooster, I advised Independent Study projects with seven seniors and two juniors. These mandatory theses make up the centerpiece experience of a Wooster education; I had an intensive meeting with each student for an hour per week to shape their ideas and polish their writing. I also taught Western Civilization since 1600, the advanced courses Central Europe since 1848 and Modern Europe, 1890-1945, as well as a seminar on music and politics in modern Europe. I enjoyed the significant interaction with students that this liberal arts college provided.

I have also had a variety of other teaching opportunities in past years. At Rutgers University, I taught two advanced lecture courses with 40 students each, on 20th-century Germany, and 19th-century Europe. At Brooklyn College, I had several sections of Western Civilization after 1700, a core course for all students. I felt inspired by the challenge of motivating and speaking to the students of these very different public schools– the suburban juniors and seniors at Rutgers, and inner-city first-years from every conceivable ethnic background at Brooklyn College.

While a graduate student, I had a number of opportunities to serve as a teaching assistant. At Columbia, I worked for four semesters as a TA, both in large and small lecture courses as well as one senior seminar. During my extended research time abroad, I also taught for the Lexia International Study Abroad Program in both Berlin and Krak¢w, where I both lectured and advised students on an independent research project. Additionally, in the spring semesters of 2003 and 2004, I worked as an adjunct preceptor at New York University for a Soviet history course, part of the university’s writing-intensive core curriculum. I led two weekly recitation sections of 20 students each, with a focus on critically evaluating readings through lively discussion. I was also closely involved in formulating and evaluating three short papers and a final longer essay. A particularly successful recitation involved the revolutionary year of 1917, as I had each student “join” one of the parties and take positions on the important debates and events of that year; in another, students represented the Right or Left Oppositions and articulated their views on the problems facing the Bolsheviks in the 1920s. Through such participatory activities and in an engaged atmosphere, the students were able to flesh out relevant themes like the nature of dictatorship and the challenges of modernization.

With respect to my teaching range, I am solidly grounded in broader European and Russian/Soviet history through my graduate-level courses, graduate study in France, oral exam fields, my Master’s Thesis on 19th-century Germany, and teaching experience. I am able to offer courses on modern Europe and Western Civilization, as well as on the histories of Germany, East Central Europe, the Habsburg Monarchy, and the Russian Empire and Soviet Union.

Carleton College
Assistant Professor, 2008 – 2014; Associate Professor, 2014 – present
Teaching undergraduate seminars and lecture courses, and advising senior projects.

Courses taught:

HIST 110: Music and Politics since Wagner (student websites)
HIST 100: Visualizing Friends and Enemies in the Socialist World
EUST 110: Europe as Idea and Union
HIST 140: Modern Europe, 1789–1914
HIST 141: Europe in the Twentieth Century
HIST 248: Monuments and Memory: A Cultural History of Berlin
HIST 249: Modern Central Europe
HIST 250: Modern Germany
HIST 346: The Holocaust
HIST 395: Dictatorships in Modern Europe
HIST 395: The Global Cold War

The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN
Assistant Professor, 2005 – present
Teaching graduate seminars and advanced undergraduate lecture courses and seminars and Western Civilization, while also advising honors undergraduate, M.A., and Ph.D. students in modern European history. Served as director of Departmental Honors in 2006-07. Took a group of students to Prague, Bratislava, and Vienna in August 2007 for a summer course on Central Europe. Faculty advisor for Phi Alpha Theta.

Courses taught:

Hist 532: Dictatorships on German Soil, Nazi and GDR State and Society
Hist 335: History of Germany since 1800
Hist 532: Europe in the Cold War, East and West
Hist 475: Comparative Dictatorships: Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union
Hist 471: The Tumultuous Century: East-Central Europe, 1905–2005
Hist 242: Western Civilization, 1715–Present

Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
Instructor, Summer 2006
Taught language and history to undergraduates at China’s premier university.

The College of Wooster, Wooster, OH
John Garber Drushal Distinguished Visiting Assistant Professor of History, 2004-2005
Taught advanced courses, including Central Europe, 1848-present and Modern Europe, 1890-1945, as well as the seminar Music and Politics in Europe from Wagner to 1968 and a lecture course on Western Civilization since 1600. Made extensive use of a wired classroom to supplement lectures and class discussions, and used a Blackboard course website. Also closely advised nine junior and senior Independent Study projects relating to modern Europe and the United States.

Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ
Adjunct Lecturer, 2003-04
Taught advanced lecture courses History of Germany since 1914 and Nineteenth-Century Europe, both with discussion of historiography and primary sources, and made up of 40 juniors and seniors. Used images, film clips, and music for class discussion, as well as a WebCT course website for weekly student postings.

Brooklyn College, New York, NY
Adjunct Lecturer, 2003-2004
Taught core curriculum course Shaping of the Modern World from the Enlightenment to the Present with 40 first- and second-year students. Combined multimedia lectures with use of a Blackboard course website and discussion of primary readings.

New York University, New York, NY
Adjunct Preceptor, Spring 2003 and Spring 2004
Assisted Professor Stephen Cohen in his course, Russia since 1917. Led two discussion sections per week in this writing-intensive course, and graded student papers and exams.

Lexia International, Central European Program, Berlin and Krakow
Lecturer and Project Advisor, 3 semesters in 2000-01
For this study-abroad program, gave lectures on German and Polish history, as well as music, and advised university students on individual research projects.

Columbia University, New York, NY
Teaching Assistant, 1996-1999
Assisted in the following four courses: History of Modern Germany, 1914-1989 (with Volker Berghahn), America in Europe, 1920-1990 (Victoria de Grazia), History of Czechoslovakia, 1918-1992 (Bradley Abrams), Reforms and Revolutions in Hungary, 1848-present (Istvan Deak). Conducted weekly discussion sections, graded essays and exams, gave guest lectures, helped formulate essay and exam questions, and advised students with both research and especially writing.

Current Courses

Fall 2024
HIST 100: Music and Politics in Europe since Wagner
HIST 141: Europe in the Twentieth Century
Winter 2025
EUST 110: The Power of Place: Memory and Counter-Memory in the European City
HIST 398: Advanced Historical Writing
Spring 2025
CCST 208: International Coffee and News
HIST 347: The Global Cold War

“The Yugoslav Bomb and the Construction of Socialism in East Germany and Poland” in The Journal of Cold War History, forthcoming 2023.
“Israelbild und Antisemitismus im spätsozialistischen Polen und der DDR“ (The Image of Israel and Antisemitism in Late Socialist Poland and the GDR) in Jahrbuch für Historische Kommunismusforschung (2022). 49-68.
“Of Lightning Strikes and Bombs: The Tito-Stalin Split and its Effects on Polish and East German Society” in Tvrtko Jakovina and Martin Previšic, eds. The Tito-Stalin Split 70 Years After. Zagreb-Ljubljana: FF Press, 2020. 208-222.
“Prokofiev, Soviet Influence, and the Music World in Stalinist Central Europe” in Rita McAllister and Christina Guillaumier, eds. Rethinking Prokofiev. Oxford University Press, 2020. 405-421.
“Imagining Israel before and during the March Events, 1967-68” in Jewish History Quarterly / Kwartalnik Historii Żydów 2/270 (June 2019). 473-493.
“Lutosławski and Stalinism: Contextualizing Artistic and Political Choices around 1950” in Nicholas Reyland and Lisa Jakelski, eds. Lutosławski’s Worlds. Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, 2018. 257-271.
“Red China in Central Europe: Creating and Deploying Representations of an Ally in Poland and the GDR” in Patryk Babiracki and Austin Jersild, eds. Socialist Internationalism in the Cold War: Exploring the Second World. New York: Palgrave, 2016. 273-301.
“Divided Nations: Building and Destroying the Image of China in East Germany through the 1960s” in Joanne Cho and David Crowe, eds. Germany and China: Transnational Encounters since the Eighteenth Century. New York: Palgrave, 2014. 213-231.
“Against ‘Pop-Song Poison’ from the West: Early Cold War Attempts to Develop a Socialist Popular Music in Poland and the GDR” in William Risch, ed. Youth and Rock in the Soviet Bloc: Youth Cultures, Music, and the State in Russia and Eastern Europe. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014. 43-54.
Composing the Party Line: Music and Politics in Early Cold War Poland and East Germany. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2013.
“Israel as Friend and Foe: Shaping Society through Freund- and Feindbilder in East Germany” in Mary Fulbrook and Andrew I. Port, eds. Becoming East Germans: Socialist Structures and Sensibilities after Hitler. New York: Berghahn Books, 2013. 219-234.
“The East is Red? Images of China in East Germany and Poland through the Sino-Soviet Split” in Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung 62/3 (2013): 393-424.
“The Stalinist State as Patron: Composers and Commissioning in Early Cold War Poland” in Eva Mantzourani, ed. Polish Music since 1945. Krakow: Musica Iagellonica Publishers, 2013. 68-81.
“Instrumentalizing Entertainment and Education: Early Cold-War Music Festivals in East Germany and Poland” in Cathleen M. Giustino, Catherine J. Plum, and Alexander Vari, eds. Socialist Escapes: Breaking Away from Ideology and Everyday Routine in Eastern Europe, 1945-1989. New York: Berghahn Books, 2013. 27-47.
“Orchestrating Identity: Concerts for the Masses and the Shaping of East German Society” in German History 30/3 (September 2012): 412-427.
“Sound and a Socialist Identity: Music in the Stalinist GDR.” Florence Feiereisen and Alexandra Merley Hill, eds. Germany in the Loud Twentieth Century. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2011. 111-123.
“’Linked by Work and Song:’ Popular Music for the Masses in Early Cold War Poland” in Stefan Michael Newerkla, Fedor Poljakov, and Oliver Jens Schmitt, eds. Das politische Lied in Ost- und Südosteuropa [Political Song in Eastern and Southeastern Europe]. Vienna: LIT-Verlag, 2010. 123-133.
“Composing for and with the Party: Andrzej Panufnik and Stalinist Poland” in The Polish Review, vol. 54, no. 3 (2009): 271-288.
“Music” and “The World Congress of Intellectuals for Peace” in The Cold War Encyclopedia, 3 vols. New York: MTM Publishing, 2008.
“Mobilization and Control: Music Festivals in Poland and the GDR, 1951-1955,” in Mikuláš Bek, Geoffrey Chew and Petr Macek, eds., Socialist Realism and Music. Prague: KLP, 2004. 194-200.
“Musik zur Schaffung des neuen sozialistischen Menschen. Offizielle Musikpolitik des Zentralkommitees der SED in der DDR.” [Music for Creating the New Socialist Person: Official Musical Politics of the SED in the GDR.] in Tillmann Bendikowski, Christian Jansen, et al., eds., Die Macht der Töne: Musik als Mittel politischer Identitätsstiftung im 20. Jahrhundert [The Power of Tones: Music as a Means of Political Identity Formation in the 20th Century] Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 2003. 105-113.