Prussia

Thursday

Daniel McCarthy

Who won the Cold War, anyway?

Thirty years ago this December 26, the impossible happened. One of the bloodiest states of the twentieth century (a horrific and highly competitive category) dissolved without violence. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics had all but ended months earlier, when Russians took to the streets to defy the communist hardliners who had seized the government from an impotent Mikhail Gorbachev. That popular countercoup was itself largely bloodless: the soldiers called upon to enforce the hardliners’ rule refused to shoot their own countrymen. The Cold War is often said to have ended with the toppling of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Had things turned out differently in Moscow two years later, the struggle might well have resumed.

Cold War

Sunday

William Cook

Prussian blues

My grandfather Werner von Biel was born in a huge white house on the Baltic coast of eastern Germany, a few years before World War One. I never met him. He died when I was a child. My grandmother didn’t like to talk about him. She’d left him for an English soldier at the end of World War Two. Growing up in England during the Cold War, I often wondered what had become of his Junker family, the Schloss (castle) they lived in and the land they farmed. When the Berlin Wall came down I went east, in search of the fatherland my grandmother had forsaken. Thirty years later, I’m still searching. I’ve found a few curios along the way. The Schloss is still there, though my grandfather’s family no longer owns it (the Communists turned it into a school).

prussia