“From Yalta to Berlin: The Cold War Struggle over Germany”, by W. R. Smyser, introduction by Paul H. Nitze

 

465 pages, Palgrave Macmillan, ISBN-13: 978-0312066055

I was just graduating high school when the Berlin Wall fell and the Cold War began to thaw at last, so reading From Yalta to Berlin: The Cold War Struggle over Germany by W. R. Smyser was peculiar, as it referred to so many events that I actually lived through (usually, I read stuff about events that concluded decades before I was born; must be getting’ old…).

Anyway, Smyser has written an excellent account of the Cold War Struggle over Germany as a whole and/or parts thereof, and anyone with even the slightest interest in German history or the Cold War will find this well-written analysis of how Germany was divided, why it remained divided and how it was reunified very worthwhile. Berlin was for much of the Cold War the front line, and Smyser does an exceptional job of making sense of a crucial element of postwar Europe, balancing the influence of a few great men – Konrad Adenauer, Joseph Stalin, Harry S. Truman, Charles de Gaulle, Lucius Clay, Ronald Reagan, Willy Brandt, Helmut Kohl and Mikhail Gorbachev – with the larger political-economic influences at work during those trying years.

He also very deftly places “The German Question” with in the larger world context, demonstrating how Allied uneasiness over Communist machinations in the Korean War led to the rearmament of Germany and its acceptance as a full-fledged member of the NATO alliance, or linking TGQ to developments in other parts of Germany and even to the Cuban Missile Crisis. With the ending of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union, all of those guarded archives have been thrown open to the world, and Smyser takes full advantage of that fact, discovering new and, often, shocking information within. For example, Stalin preferred to a reunified Germany after the war, while the Western Allies opposed him because of his actions in Eastern Europe, or that Walter Ulbricht, a man I always assumed was just a dutiful Russian puppet, actually was a major player in the conflict, helping to fan it along, or that General Clay’s importance in this conflict I never truly appreciated.

And so, for anyone who lived through some of those years without knowing the full history (I’m looking in the mirror here), this book is especially enlightening, as Smyser’s style is at once lucid and persuasive, making this a joy to read.