Battleground Berlin: Diaries, 1945-1948

Diary notes of the German journalist and  resistance fighter Ruth Andreas-Friedrich. Her diary covers  the first three years after the Second World War in the destroyed Berlin, from the liberation of the city by the Russians to the blockade winter of 1948/49. It describes the great hopes, with which people plunged into the fight for survival, organized the clean up, set up cabarets and gave their first concerts, but it became increasingly clear that for many reasons the chance for a real new beginning was missed. Berlin became a four-sector city and then, after the forced unification of the SPD and KPD into the SED in the eastern part, more and more a city divided into two parts: one comntrolled by the three Western allies and one by the Soviet Union.