East West Germany

For nearly a century, historians have depicted Germany as a rabidly nationalist land, born in a sea of aggression. Not so, says Helmut Walser Smith, who, in this groundbreaking 500-year history, challenges traditional perceptions of Germany's conflicted past, revealing a nation far more thematically complicated than 20th-century historians have imagined. 

Germany is one of the richest and most influential countries in the world, which is amazing when you consider that the nation is only about the size of the US states of Oregon and Washington combined. It’s even more astounding when you consider that at the end of World War II, every major German city (and many minor ones) had been flattened by the Allied bombing campaign. Still more amazing is that the country has gone from international pariah and home of the Holocaust to one of the most well-regarded and humanitarian nations on Earth.

Einleitung - Die unsichtbaren Mauern. Stell dir vor, du wachst in einem Land auf, das gerade einen der monumentalsten Momente seiner Geschichte erlebt hat. Es ist der 9. November 1989, und du stehst vor der Berliner Mauer, die plötzlich ihre unüberwindbare Macht verloren hat. Menschen klettern über die Mauer, tanzen auf ihr, umarmen sich und feiern das Ende einer fast drei Jahrzehnte währenden Trennung. Doch obwohl die Mauer in dieser Nacht gefallen ist, sind die Spuren der Trennung und die Narben der Teilung in den Herzen und Köpfen der Menschen geblieben.

In the wake of World War II, the European continent was devastated, and the conflict left the Soviet Union and the United States as uncontested superpowers. This ushered in over 45 years of the Cold War, and a political alignment of Western democracies against the Communist Soviet bloc that produced conflicts pitting allies on each sides fighting, even as the American and Soviet militaries never engaged each other. Though it never got “hot”, the Cold War was a tense era until the dissolution of the USSR, and nothing symbolized the split more than the Berlin Wall.