The Contest for Western Europe (1): The Berlin Crises of 1948–1949 and 1958–1962

When, in 1921, Lenin said that, ‘Whoever holds Berlin, holds Germany. Whoever holds Germany, holds Europe’, 1 he provided in advance the central key for an understanding of the form which the Cold War took in Europe. This may indeed have begun, as Caroline Kennedy-Pipes argued in 1995, with the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917. 2 It was not until after 1945 that it became a central issue in world politics, and did so primarily in the form of struggle for the domination of Western Europe.