Berlin: Divided City, 1945–1989, ed. Philip Broadbent and Sabine Hake

Abstract

Philip Broadbent and Sabine Hake have assembled sixteen scholars to investigate Cold War Berlin through lenses that have typically received less attention in the historiography: art, architecture, film, literature, and music. Eschewing the primacy of political history, the authors provide a nuanced picture of a city that, in many respects, was less divided than the Cold War mindset would have us believe. In keeping with a trend among modern Germanists to view the post-war history of East and West Germany as a symbiotic unit, rather than as two solitudes, this volume demonstrates the many ways in which East and West Berlin were mutually influential, and how commonalities extended beyond the division. Perhaps the best recent example of this approach is Paul Steege’s Black Market, Cold War (2007; rev. ante, cxxiv [2009], 501–03), which discusses cross-border popular interaction in nascent Cold War Berlin. Edith Scheffer’s Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain (2011) promises to offer a similar argument away from the limelight of Berlin, in a town that was divided by the German–German border.