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This article uses the example of a trilateral network of relationships to offer a critical and much-needed contribution to the history of town twinning across the Iron Curtain through the late 1970s and 1980s. The chosen case studies are Italy and France on the one hand, the two countries with the most influential communist parties in Western Europe – the PCI (Partito Comunista Italiano) and the PCF (Parti Communiste Français) –, and the SED (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, Socialist Unity Party of Germany) on the other, the state party of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Exploration of such transnational relationships is essential for a better understanding of the Cold War on a regional and local level, as ideological disputes arose regularly despite the supposedly neutral character of municipal ties. What characterized the networking between the French and Italian cities, mostly governed by the PCF and the PCI respectively, and the „real socialist“ Eastern German municipalities, and why or to what extent did they constitute an exception within relations among the three communist parties? The essay critically examines this issue and shows that the translocal scope of the connections potentially enabled the relevant actors to maintain and secure the transsocietal and sociocultural focus of exchange even amidst the most serious tensions of the late Cold War. Nevertheless, countering the assumption that such connections thrived almost automatically thanks to the allegedly shared ideological roots of the participants, it shows that communal ties were virtually always torn between utopian visions of the future and the interests of „Realpolitik“.

„Rote“ Städtepartnerschaften als die besseren kommunistischen Beziehungen im geteilten Europa?: Italien, Frankreich und die DDR im späten Kalten Krieg