The Last Division
Berlin, the Wall, and the Cold War
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2.7 • 3 Ratings
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
“A brilliant paper chase—an excellent book.”—Library Journal
JFK, Khrushchev, Reagan, and a city divided.
Berlin has played a major role in world politics since the Nazi era and continues to be in the spotlight today as the once-again-great capital of Germany. Ann Tusa presents an engaging chronicle of the Cold War partitions of this historic city, from the political strife and administrative division by the victors against Hitler, through the building and eventual destruction of the Wall.
Using newly available documents, she offers by far the fullest account to date of the political, diplomatic, and military affairs of the city, with vivid characterizations of central figures like Konrad Adenauer, Nikita Khrushchev, and British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. Tusa's account also displays the full drama surrounding the building of the Wall, from its ramifications for world politics (including John F. Kennedy's famous response that “a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war” and Ronald Reagan’s iconic “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”) to the experiences of ordinary Berliners and the personal tragedies they experienced as the Wall severed a living city and sundered families for generations.
The result is a startling combination of historical detail and lucid style, a story that The Sunday Times of London has hailed as “not only painstakingly researched but eminently readable.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Though the Cold War is over, revisionist and counterrevisionist historians still snap their jaws at one another, and people still bitterly snarl over the Yalta. It is all the more welcome, then, to delve into a thorough and balanced account of one of the era's most contested episodes. Tusa (co-author of The Berlin Airlift and The Nuremberg Trial) makes clear just how precarious Berlin's independence from Soviet domination was in the years up to 1955 and how foolish were the cries for Western military responses to this situation. She vividly tells how Nikita Krushchev's power play in 1958 finally failed and left the Soviet Union's clients in East Germany not with the international recognition they coveted but with a wall they could not avoid. Tusa's perceptive analysis is complemented by shrewd assessments of the principal players in this drama and the relations among them--Dwight Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles, Konrad Adenauer and Charles de Gaulle, Krushchev and John Kennedy. . The title of the book is slightly misleading since most attention is given to the period before the building of the wall, and the history of Berlin since 1961 is relatively short. But however abbreviated, this latter part of the story is still told excellently and the tale of the wall's collapse is as gripping as a well-crafted novel. It is still difficult to describe the situation in Germany and Berlin since the collapse of the Wall, but the author's analysis is a good attempt to sort out what is continues its rapid mutation. American readers will take note of a few Briticisms (how many Americans will wonder at "chuffed" and "stroppy," for example), but this recounting of what perhaps was the defining conflict in the Cold War is an important addition to a crowded field. Illustrated.
