Western Civilization II / Unit 18 WC2 1733 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
Reading the Berlin Map
The idea
The map shows one city cut into four, three western flags and one Soviet, and the exam asks what it depicts. The answer is Berlin during the Cold War, and each wrong answer fails on one feature. Not the Second World War: no one occupied Berlin in sectors until it fell in May forty-five. Not nineteen eighteen: no foreign army entered Berlin at all. Not the Iron Curtain: that is a line across a continent, not a division inside a city, and the city sits a hundred miles east of it. Not reunification: nineteen ninety ended the sectors. What the four sectors mean: Germany's occupation zones repeated in miniature in its capital, so that West Berlin was a western island inside the Soviet zone, which is why Stalin could blockade it in forty-eight and why the East had to wall it in sixty-one. A map with the Wall drawn is sixty-one to eighty-nine; a map with an airlift corridor is forty-eight to forty-nine. Practice by dating three Berlin maps from what they show.
In practice
Four sectors in one city: the Cold War's Berlin, an island in the Soviet zone.
Where people slip
The calibration drill; the sectors are on both witnesses, the airlift's dates corrected.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
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