Take a review of the Berlin crisis.
Answers
The second Berlin crisis of 1958–61 has traditionally been viewed from the top down, as a showdown between the Whitehouse and the Kremlin. Such international relations accounts begin with the Khrushchev ultimatum of 1958, taking in the various summit talks at Geneva and Paris, and end with the impasse at Vienna between Kennedy and Khrushchev in 1961. (1) This is perhaps typical of Cold War history more generally, which tends to focus on diplomatic and military history, and the decision-making elites. Admittedly, more recently, as part of the 'post-revisionist synthesis', historians unhappy with the bipolarity of such approaches have 'decentred' the Whitehouse-Kremlin axis to focus on their junior partners, for instance the British in the western case, (2) or the East Germans for the East. (3) Yet, even these diplomatic histories often treat the Berlin crisis as the proxy resolution of other issues, be it the removal of atomic weaponry from the Federal Republic, or the Soviet Union's attempts to prove to the Chinese that it was no paper tiger. (4) Nor should it be forgotten that the overt bones of contention – issues which spilled so much ink in so many diplomatic notes, such as evacuation of West Berlin or a post-war peace treaty – were never actually resolved. We encounter many what if's and contingency plans, but little about what was happening on the ground. The 'elephant in the room' in such diplomatic and military histories, at least for any historian of the internal development of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), is the East German population's massive exodus westwards through the open border. This was the prime cause of the crisis, and it was the border's closure which effectively ended it.