Showing results for "Berlin" in International Relations

The appearance of a hastily constructed barbed wire entanglement through the heart of Berlin during the night of 12-13 August 1961 was both dramatic and unexpected. Within days, it had started to metamorphose into a structure that would come to symbolise the brutal insanity of the Cold War: the Berlin Wall. A city of almost four million was cut ruthlessly in two, unleashing a potentially catastrophic East-West crisis and plunging the entire world for the first time into the fear of imminent missile-borne apocalypse.

Michael Thumann legt nach seinem SPIEGEL-Bestseller "Revanche" einen sehr persönlichen Reisebericht vor, in dem er die erneute Teilung Europas mit eigenen Augen erkundet. Er beschreibt in eindringlichen Reportagen und Augenzeugenberichten seinen Weg aus Moskau heraus über die schwer bewachten Außengrenzen Russlands, erst nach Osten Richtung Zentralasien, dann nach Westen über die baltischen Staaten und Polen nach Deutschland: von Moskau nach Berlin, mitten durch den neuen Eisernen Vorhang hindurch.

Eighteen years have passed since ten countries from Central & Eastern Europe joined the European Union and more than three decades since the Berlin Wall was torn down in 1989—but ignorance about what is popularly still called Eastern Europe is as widespread as ever. Slovenia still gets mixed up with Slovakia, the Slavs remain a mystery in a Europe apparently dominated by Romanic and Germanic nations and a country like the Czech Republic is labelled as Eastern European, although one needs to travel west to get from Vienna to Prague.