ABSTRACT
With the onset of brinkmanship and the war of nerves, in early 1948, divided Berlin became the stage on which the cold war was enacted. In this new era of tension, the border became the principal zone of conflict between East and West. What had been the boundary between related administrative boroughs became a ‘meta-frontier’ between hostile, mutually exclusive ideological systems. East German anxieties about the corrosive effects of capitalism were matched by West Berliners’ fears of totalitarian communism. Poised on the cold-war knife-edge, West Berlin’s isolation from West Germany encouraged paranoia and defensive aggressivity. In the 1950s, the Soviets had no hesitation about using drugs and snatch squads to terrorize their enemies. As well as deploying ruthless physical violence and savage psychological pressure on kidnap victims, they deployed assassins with poison gas guns to deal with their opponents in West Germany and West Berlin.
