ABSTRACT
For most of the 1950s, West Germany heavily subsidized West Berlin with the aim of giving it political and cultural as well as economic superiority over the East. However, West Berlin remained constitutionally separate because the four victorious Allies continued to insist on and exercise certain of their rights. While West Berlin possessed exclaves in the German Democratic Republic, the Soviets occupied a couple of key, strategically placed enclaves within the western sectors. Even when they abandoned the western sectors to the Western Allies, in the summer of 1945, the Soviets had retained control of certain buildings. British officials called them ‘Russian toe-holds in the British Sector’ rather than enclaves. In the light of the cold-war division of Berlin, the 12 ‘subnational’ exclaves became ‘international’ exclaves, with corresponding problems in relation to the movement of goods, ideas and people. These anomalies became important because they occurred on what was one of the most critical frontiers in the world.
