The Last Division: A History of Berlin 1945-1989

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. (May)