Cloudy with a Chance of Schnitzel

Abstract

More than six decades have passed since the event, but there still seems to be no end in sight to the Berlin Blockade and the western airlift implemented in response to it. Stalin’s dramatic maneuver, between June 1948 and May 1949, of blocking land access from Germany’s western occupation zones to Berlin still fascinates (and puzzles) scholars and the general public alike. So does the logistical masterpiece of delivering essential goods by air to the American, British, and French sectors in Berlin. The airlift continues to enjoy an iconic place in popular memory and to provide a rhetorical arsenal for political leaders. The only surprise in Barack Obama’s speech at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate on June 19, 2013, would have occurred had the U.S. president not referred to this legendary chapter in the history of the early Cold War. Daniel F. Harrington, a deputy command historian at the U.S. Strategic Command, now approaches the subject with new scrutiny. For sure, quite a number of books have already provided vividly written summaries. Many publications have celebrated the heroism of the military men organizing the air transports as well as that of the West Berliners in the much-acclaimed “island of freedom.” These accounts often follow in the footsteps of the autobiographies of contemporary American actors that presented a kind of early Cold War triumphalism. And Harrington is not the only one—and not the first—who recasts the story in more sober terms and questions this heroic narrative. Yet, his kind of revisionism is admirably non-ideological, includes recent scholarship on the period, and draws on a plethora of sources from archives in the United States, England, and Canada. It also helps to reexamine critically oral history interviews of some of the dramatis personae. As a result, Berlin on the Brink succeeds in providing a political history of the blockade and the airlift that is both succinct and nuanced, emphasizing the many shades of gray in the story instead of painting a black-and-white picture of the superpowers’ confrontation over Berlin.