"...wie's damals war"                                          "... and that's how it was"

 New on 18 Jan 99, revised on 9 Nov 09

This website is a place to find some of those answers... and perhaps to raise questions.

This is not a comprehensive history of Berlin.  It tries to give readers the feel of what things were like at the point where the Cold War situation could have gone either way.  As a reader noted, it tries to capture that zeitgeist.  Links to other fine websites offer other perspectives.

During this era, the German Democratic Republic, East Germany, concentrated on consolidating its control of what we called officially the "Soviet Zone".  It spent millions of precious marks on building the "modern wall" that more completely bottled up its own population than the original wire and brick contraption had.  It formed plans, now known publicly, to invade West Berlin and remove it as an obstacle to the development of socialism... their brand of socialism.  Yet, during the same period, diplomatic initiatives began to recognize and formalize the situation that had been created in Middle Europe.  By the time that I left, in 1971, a chain of agreements had been formed that lowered the level of tension and undermined the Communist bloc governments by allowing more normal relations to develop between their people and the people of the Western democracies.

West Berliners and the Allied soldiers with them lived under several kinds of threats.  At the same time, life continued-- perhaps lived a bit more vibrantly just because of the circumstances.  Berlin was the place where the adolescent GDR government launched its own provocations, without advance approval by the USSR.  It was the place where flowers bloomed in garden plots adjacent to the Wall.  And it was a place where we grew up. As the old Berlin song might be paraphrased, that was my milieu.