The Iron Curtain, Berlin, and Two Alliances

At the end of World War II, the Allies divided Germany, and its capital Berlin, into four occupation zones: American, British, French, and Soviet. The Western three zones merged politically and economically, while the Soviet zone followed a separate communist path. This split hardened into two Germanys and, more broadly, two Europes. Western European states joined the United States in NATO, a military alliance built on the idea that an attack on one member was an attack on all. The Soviet Union answered in 1955 with the Warsaw Pact, binding Eastern European communist states into a mirror alliance. Winston Churchill's phrase for the border between them, the Iron Curtain, stuck because it captured something real: trade, travel, and information stopped flowing across it.

Berlin was the pressure point because it sat entirely inside Soviet-controlled East Germany, yet its western half stayed tied to the West. In 1948 the Soviets blockaded all land access to West Berlin, hoping to force the Allies out. Instead, the United States and Britain supplied the city by air for nearly a year, landing planes every few minutes, until the Soviets backed down. That standoff set the pattern for the whole Cold War: confrontation without direct combat between the superpowers.

The wall built in 1961 marked the next escalation. It connects forward to the decolonizing world covered elsewhere in the unit, where newly independent states had to choose, or refuse to choose, between these same two alliances and their competing models of development.