The West German Communist Party was banned only eleven years after it had emerged from Nazi persecution. Using material available only since the end of the Cold War, Patrick Major shows how the once-powerful KPD foundered on the unrealistic aims of its East German masters, as well as the anti-communism of the Anglo-American occupiers and the Adenauer government.

This book asks the reader to reassess the Cold War not just as superpower conflict and high diplomacy, but as social and cultural history. It makes cross-cultural comparisons of the socio cultural aspects of the Cold War across the East/West bloc divide, dealing with issues including broadcasting, public opinion, and the production and consumption of popular culture.

This book asks the reader to reassess the Cold War not just as superpower conflict and high diplomacy, but as social and cultural history. It makes cross-cultural comparisons of the socio cultural aspects of the Cold War across the East/West bloc divide, dealing with issues including broadcasting, public opinion, and the production and consumption of popular culture.

Few historical changes occur literally overnight, but on August 13 1961 eighteen million East Germans awoke to find themselves walled in by an edifice which was to become synonymous with the Cold War: the Berlin Wall.
This new history rejects traditional, top-down approaches to Cold War politics, exploring instead how the border closure affected ordinary East Germans, from workers and farmers to teenagers and even party members, "caught out" by Sunday the Thirteenth. Party, police and Stasi reports reveal why one in six East Germans fled the country during the 1950s, undermining...