COLD WAR CITY

Urban battleground.

In this vivid history, Barclay, professor emeritus of international studies at Kalamazoo College, sensibly argues that Berlin’s post-World War II experience was a microcosm of Cold War geopolitics. The U.S., Britain, France, and the Soviet Union had divided up Germany and Berlin, but these were different matters: Berlin was more than a hundred miles inside the Soviet zone, and the Soviets insisted that the entire city belonged to the USSR. The other powers disagreed; the controversy began the Cold War, and its resolution marked its end. The Western allies had little sympathy for the city’s plight in the years after 1945 but opposed the USSR’s insistence that the West didn’t belong in Berlin. When Soviet harassment verged on a blockade and produced the 1948-49 Berlin airlift, “Cold War” entered the lexicon, along with the image of West Berlin as an isolated “outpost of freedom” and an “island in a communist sea.” Hundreds of thousands of East Germans crossed into West Berlin every year until 1961, when East Germany built a wall surrounding the entire city. There was universal outrage throughout the West, but officials behind the scenes realized that this solved the “Berlin problem.” Cold warriors turned their attention elsewhere, and West Germany began dealing with East Germany as a sovereign nation. Barclay delivers a fine account of West Berlin, giving equal weight to city politics, culture, and international affairs. He chronicles fierce student uprisings in 1968, the easing of relations between East and West Germany in the 1970s, and, finally, the spectacular collapse of the USSR in 1989.

An authoritative work on the legacy of a divided city.