Black Market, Cold War: Everyday Life in Berlin, 1946-1949 (review)

"All politics is local," House Speaker Tip O'Neill is reputed to have claimed. Following this caveat, Steege looks to the streets of Berlin rather than the corridors of power in Washington and Moscow in an effort to recast our understanding of a city that became an increasingly important site of international tensions in the aftermath of World War II. To restore a measure of agency to ordinary Berliners, Steege focuses on seemingly mundane conflicts about scarce consumer goods and the political competition for Berlin's municipal institutions. By firmly embedding international crises—such as Joseph Stalin's 1948–1949 attempt to evict the Western Allies from Berlin by blockading it—in local events, he successfully demonstrates that "the Cold War was not just imposed from above" (5).

As its title suggests, Black Market, Cold War is partly about the impromptu efforts of ordinary Berliners to "organize" food and shelter in a city marked by scarcity and the occupation powers' attempt to ration it. But the book's main focus is the intensely local contest between German social democrats and communists in Berlin—a rivalry that had its roots in World War I, played an important role in Adolf Hitler's rise to power, and erupted with renewed vigor after 1945. Steege is particularly adept at showing how this local venue in a European conflict contributed to international tensions. After its stunning loss in the 1946 Berlin municipal elections, the Socialist Unity Party (SED) sought to bolster its position through extraparliamentary tactics. As Steege demonstrates, however, the party's machinations, such as its attempt to stack the municipal police force with communist officers, ultimately contributed to the division of the city—in this case by provoking the social democrats into establishing a separate force in the western sectors.

The book's attention to local detail yields some of its best passages, at times transporting the reader back to a postwar Berlin where bombed-out buildings overshadowed bustling black markets and darkened many people's hopes for rebuilding their lives and their city. Too often, however, the book's thick description fails to make Steege's city come alive. The fact that the empirical information about the black market, for example, is not assembled in one place but strewn throughout the book diminishes the impact of Steege's considerable research. Too often, moreover, the book's detailed accounts crowd out its analysis.

Not only does thickness of description make the book a challenge to read; Steege's choice of what to describe can also be puzzling. The wealth of information that he provides about the sed is revealing about communist policy, but it comes at the expense of similar attention to social democratic strategy. Stranger still is his failure to address the legacy of Nazi rule, which hampers his ability to explain a wide range of municipal events. In his view, the sed's lack of popularity stemmed from its inept attempts to solve the existential crisis that Berliners faced. Although the party's strategy for dealing with Berlin's shortages certainly did not help its cause, the main source of the sed's disfavor with the public lay in its association with its Russian patrons, who had been demonized by Joseph Goebbels' propaganda and discredited by the Soviets' own behavior.

These reservations should not obscure the book's two main contributions, however. First, Steege's research has unearthed a gold mine of empirical information about Berlin, from municipal politics to everyday life. Second, he does an excellent job of showing how the Berlin Blockade was motivated partly by the Soviet need to reduce black-market activity in the city. The addition of this local dimension to the international story serves as a salutary reminder of the messiness of the immediate postwar period, of the Allies' incomplete control of Berlin, and of Tip O'Neill's caveat.