Cold War City

A History of West Berlin

The untold story of West Berlin, the island city deep inside the Soviet bloc that withstood the decades-long confrontation between the USSR and the West

Located more than one hundred miles behind the Iron Curtain, West Berlin served as a stage on which the confrontation between nuclear-armed superpowers played out across nearly five decades. Portrayed in the West as an island of freedom in a totalitarian sea, it increasingly came to be seen by some as a bleak enclave without a future, yet the city also embodied a remarkable openness to alternative lifestyles and radical forms of cultural experimentation. Cold War City is a definitive history of West Berlin that takes readers from the end of the Second World War to the withdrawal of Allied troops in 1994.

Drawing on substantial new research in archives on both sides of the Atlantic, David Barclay vividly describes how some of the mos