In July, 1955, the leaders of the Soviet Union, the United States, Britain and France gathered in Geneva ten years after they last met each other in Potsdam. The German problem loomed large over all the other issues of post-war reconstruction. Before that, the German Democratic Republic was the only newly established European nation to have diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. In 1955 the Soviet government decided to repatriate all its Nazi POWs. Still, more than 9,000 condemned war criminals remained behind bars. The issue was vigorously taken up by the Western media. Even the East German authorities pleaded for clemency and, during his September visit to Moscow, West German Chancellor Conrad Adenauer made prisoner return a high point of his very complicated talks. The Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev insisted on East Germany's recognition by the Federal Republic. Only a partial compromise was reached though, with diplomatic relations established between the USSR and the German Federal Republic. The POW repatriation issue was discussed on the sidelines of the Soviet-German summit.
In 1955 the great powers managed to break the protracted stalemate over the US and Soviet-occupied Austria. They took a whole decade to reach agreement on troop pullout in exchange for strict neutrality for the small Alpine republic. The Allies signed a treaty on restoring Austria as an independent democratic state. The short-lived "thaw" in East-West relations gave people everywhere a chance to take a different look at each other…
1955 is the birth year of the great French race driver Alain Prost - a four times world champion in the Formula 1 event and the proud winner of 51 Grand Prix awards won in 199 races. Alain Prost is also the first Frenchman to win the world motor racing title. The popular American film actor Kevin Costner was born in the same year with Prost. Costner shot to prominence on the strength of his appearance as Elliot Ness in the TV version of The Untouchables, but his real coup de force was the Oscar-winning Dancing with the Wolves where he won accolades as a director and the film's main character.
In 1955 Vladimir Nabokov published his famous novel Lolita where a middle-aged man falls in love with a 12 year old girl. Lolita, with its nymphoplectic antihero Humbert Humbert, is yet another of Nabokov's subtle and sophisticated allegories: love examined in the light of its seeming opposite, lechery. Despite all the controversy surrounding the novel, Lolita has enjoyed tremendous popularity around the world.
In the same year, the famous American film producer and animated cartoonist Walt Disney launched Disneyland - the world's first theme park in southern California. The first copy of the Guinness Book of World Records also came out in 1955.
1955 was the last in the life of the Scottish bacteriologist Alexander Fleming whose discovery of penicillin in 1929 revolutionized the entire method of treating terminal diseases. In 1945 Sir Alexander Fleming was awarded the Nobel Prize.
The other sad departure of the year was the 20th century's greatest scholar, Albert Einstein. At the age of 26, he formulated the special and the general theory of relativity and made great contributions to nuclear physics and thermodynamics. After Einstein's death in Princeton, pathologist Thomas Harvey obtained permission from Einstein's son to preserve the scientist's brain. Doctor Harvey carefully measured and photographed the brain, sliced it into 240 sections and, placing them in a special solution, kept the brain in his office for more than 40 years. 41 years after Einstein's death, Doctor Harvey made the brain available to McMaster University in Ontario, Canada. When the university experts compared Einstein's brain with dozens of other equally preserved ones, they came across many unique features some of which they surmised, could have been the reason for Einstein's outstanding mathematical talent. By the way, Einstein's mother feared that her son could be mentally deranged. Indeed, Einstein was born with a disproportionately big and irregular-shaped head. He could not speak until the age of three and even after that he often had problems putting sentences together. Experts believe that modern scanning methods may shed light on a theory which links great talent to brain abnormalities .

THE 20th CENTURY:YEAR AFTER YEAR series of historical programs is prepared by Vladimir Zhamkin.


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