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programmes, such as Willis Conover with his Music USA-Jazz Hour for Voice of America (VOA), but the Eastern Bloc countries did exactly the same. Jazz thus received substantial sponsorship in both the East and the West, making the Cold War, as Ritter boldly suggests, perhaps the greatest promoter of the development of jazz in twentieth-century Europe. This basic constellation presented itself with distinct variations in the different countries in the Soviet orbit and led to jazz being imbued with a wide range of different meanings. Three of the contributions included in this volume discuss the case of Poland, one also drawing a comparison to the situation in the GDR. Both countries implemented intensive control measures against jazz musicians and supporters of the jazz scene, but neither actually proscribed the music. Despite these repressive measures, however, the jazz scene survived in both countries. In the case of the GDR this was due to a misinterpretation of the jazz scene by the Stalinist security apparatus: While this interpreted it as centralist and hierarchically organized, seeking to score 'successes' by repressing key figures like Reginald Rudorf, the jazz scene of the GDR was actually decentralized and largely non-hierarchical. Subsequently, Christian Schmidt-Rost demonstrates that 1956 was a turning point for the development of distinct jazz scenes in Poland and the GDR. Until then, they had developed along similar lines, but from 1956 until the end of state socialism a marked difference could be observed. In the GDR strict control could be maintained even after de-Stalinization, but in Poland officials fundamentally changed their position on jazz. They no longer viewed it as dangerous to the system, per se, and thus came instead to sponsor it. As a result, the conditions for jazz were considerably more favourable in Poland than in the other Eastern Bloc countries. Marta Domurat-Linde examines how, due to this exceptional situation, jazz became an integral part of Polish culture. Soon Polish jazz was no longer regarded as 'jazz in Poland', but as a stylistic phenomenon in its own right. But this also brought certain challenges, in that the tension between Translation: Uta Protz

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