David E. Barclay

The untold story of West Berlin, the island city deep inside the Soviet bloc that withstood the decades-long confrontation between the USSR and the West Located more than one hundred miles behind the Iron Curtain, West Berlin served as a stage on which the confrontation between nuclear-armed superpowers played out across nearly five decades. It was portrayed in the West as an island of freedom in a totalitarian sea but increasingly came to be seen by some as a bleak enclave without a future, yet the city also embodied a remarkable openness to alternative lifestyles and radical forms of cultural experimentation. Cold War City is a definitive history of West Berlin that takes readers from the end of the Second World War to the withdrawal of Allied troops in 1994. Drawing on substantial new research in archives on both sides of the Atlantic, David Barclay vividly describes how some of the most dramatic events of the Cold War took place in and around West Berlin, including the perilous crises that culminated in the building of the notorious Berlin Wall in 1961. A product of the postwar division of Germany, the city was a roiling ideological battleground comprised of American, British, and French sectors. Barclay shows how it became a distinct political and cultural entity despite its connections to the West while shedding light on the Cold War as a lived experience for West Berliners and the city’s Allied occupiers. A nuanced portrait of a city that came to symbolize the divided postwar world, Cold War City locates the history of West Berlin at the flashpoint between grand geopolitics and the daily concerns of ordinary people caught up in extraordinary circumstances.

This is the first full-scale study in English of the reign of Frederick William IV, King of Prussia from 1840 to 1861, and arguably the most important German monarch in the century between the death of Frederick the Great and the accession of William II. Although Frederick William has long been criticized as a Romantic reactionary who was utterly out of touch with his times, this study reaches different conclusions, arguing that he was in fact a modern and in many ways, 'successful' monarch. The book is not a biography in the traditional sense. Rather, it focuses on the structures, institutions and transformations of the monarchial system in Prussia during a time of revolutionary change. It thus represents a contribution to our understanding of the structures of the nineteenth-century European state, and the strategies by which conservative elites were able to adjust themselves to new circumstances.