East German images of America during the 1950s and 1960s were at no point simply a mental construct, divorced from the realm of politics. They were firmly anchored in the shifting systemic clash between East and West, and were thus part and parcel of the ideological conflict of the Cold War. In the 1970s and 1980s, “official,” “private ” and “intellectual” conceptions of America continued to be intimately bound up with political, ideological, and cultural developments in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Nonetheless, the period following Erich Honecker's assumption of office in 1971 was more strongly marked by the tension between continuity and change than the 1960s had been.

The announcement by the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, or SED) at its eighth party conference (June 1971) that it would focus on “further increasing the people's material and cultural standard of living” seemed to suggest a move toward modernization and liberalization. But the party showed no sign of retreating from its insistence, familiar from the 1950s and 1960s, on the irreconcilability of socialism and capitalism. The SED again felt compelled to paint a picture of capitalism as politically unstable, parasitic, and degenerate and to pursue the related objective of “exposing the inhumane nature of imperialism even more completely.” Nevertheless, reestablishment of contact to West Germany helped to initiate a process of change, as did the UN's admission of both German states into its ranks, the diplomatic recognition extended to the GDR by a number of countries between 1973 and 1976, and the signing of the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE).