Read The Year that Changed the World for Free Online

down upon the church below. “I wave, but we have not talked in twenty years. Perhaps we never shall. We are getting old.” (In fact, he would speak to them, face-to-face and against all expectation, in a matter of mere months.) The road leading to the frontier was perfectly maintained. It stopped at the fence, lost in weeds and fallen leaves. But the electric lines ran on. The owner of the local power plant had friends and relatives in the East, and he supplied them even at a loss.
    I expected people to be oppressed by such macabre proximity. But no. They accommodated themselves to it. Mainly it was outsiders who found it intrusive or malign. “The border is a fact. It’s there, and we live with it,” said Anita Geldbach, a tailor in a small shop along a cobbled street in Göttingen. Near the Czech border, to the south, a tank road cut through the forest on the East German side of the border, ending just feet from the parking lot of a local supermarket in the West. No one gave it a thought. All along the frontier, kids played soccer and adults went camping in the shadow of the watch-towers of the East. Few saw much of a threat.
    Looking through my notebooks from the trip, so many years later, I am struck by the difference in reactions between Americans and those Germans living in the immediate shadow of the Cold War. “War? You mean like an invasion?” asked Gisela Sieland, a housewife in the little town of Altenburschla, surprised that I would ask whether she worried about a Soviet invasion. She seemed baffled at my suggestion that NATO and the Warsaw Pact could come into conflict, even though she resided at ground zero. “We don’t feel the leastfear,” said Ulle Winter, a student at Göttingen University working part-time at a student pub, as she served a beer. “We have the utmost confidence in Gorbachev. The Americans might as well pack up their stuff and leave.” I encountered this virtually everywhere: the sense that the border had become something almost natural, that the Wall would, and perhaps should, endure. “After all,” Ulle added, wiping the counter clear, “we created the two Germanys. We Germans made the war.”
    It is almost impossible to comprehend the full dimension and consequence of the Cold War. For future generations, it will define the twentieth century. It dwarfs any other event, from the First and Second World Wars to the invention of the computer, modern telecommunications and the democratization of Wall Street. Since 1945, writes the author Martin Walker, “the history of the Cold War has been the history of the world.”
    It was the first truly global conflict, sucking in geographies and drawing battle lines between allies and adversaries that even World War II did not. It pitted two utterly alien political and economic systems, do or die, one against the other. There were few genuinely neutral parties, save Swiss bankers and some neolithic tribes in the remnants of the Amazon forest. Almost every nation and people were drawn in or touched by it. Americans fought in Vietnam and Korea, Laos and Cambodia. So did Turks, Algerians and Chinese. Cubans fought in Angola; Saudis battled Russians in Afghanistan. Proxy wars raged in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. We raced to close imagined “missile gaps,” beat the Russians to the moon. Weapons manufactured for World War III in Europe were sold across the world, spawning regional arms races, wars and political upheavals. Ethnic and nationalist conflicts assumed geostrategic significance: India and Pakistan, China and Taiwan, Ethiopia and Somalia. Geographies became blocs, tinted blue or red, free and unfree. A bizarre constellation of places resonated fearsomely with even the youngest schoolchildren, Russian and American, Asian as well as European: Saigon. Hanoi. Seoul. Pyongyang. Kabul. Katanga. Tehran. Phnom Penh. Budapest. Prague. Warsaw. Salvador. Santiago.