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The Berlin Wall: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and a Showdown in the Heart of Europe
The Berlin Wall Kennedy Khrushchev and a Showdown in the Heart of Europe Author:Norman Gelb Grim and forbidding, the Wall snaked through the city of Berlin like the backdrop to a nightmare. Tears have been shed here, curses uttered, threats snarled, blood spilled, lives snuffed out. — The Berlin Wall was an awkward thing, outlandish and unloved, a barrier planted clear across the middle of the largest city between Paris and Moscow. It w... more »as the most dramatic example of the political architecture of modern times.
Norman Gelb, writing before the Wall came down, tells how the Wall grew from the confusions of the post-war years.
How the Soviet Union and the Western powers shared an uneasy occupation of the capital city of their humbled wartime enemy, and how the Berlin Wall set the stage for the Cold War.
He describes the grim episodes on the way towards the final division of the city -- the Berlin blockade, the bloody East Berlin workers’ uprising, and the mass migration westward of East German refugees through Berlin.
He shows how this humiliating exodus, which threatened the stability of the entire Soviet East European empire, could be stopped only by the building of the Berlin Wall.
The story is one of power politics and global brinkmanship, of hawks and doves, of brilliant calculation and an intelligence failure of dazzling proportions.
It is about the confrontation over Berlin between John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev -- two of the most exciting political personalities -- and about how the building of the Wall graduated into a nuclear showdown between the superpowers.
Norman Gelb was there on that August night when Berlin was broken in two, and his personal experiences help define the tragedy of the divided city. Though it represented failure to both sides, the Berlin Wall dissected one of the great cities of Europe, enfolding and quarantining the only island of political freedom to survive behind Communist lines.« less