Drill 6: Reading the Berlin Map

The idea

The sixth question shows a map of a city divided into four sectors, three marked with the French, British and American flags in the west and one with the Soviet flag in the east, and asks what it portrays: Europe in the Second World War, Berlin during the Cold War, occupied Germany in nineteen eighteen, the Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe, or German reunification in nineteen ninety. The course owns the map at entries 1705 and 1733. The feature to read is scale and division: one city, four occupiers. Europe in the war is a continent and had no four-power sectors. Nineteen eighteen saw no occupation of Berlin at all. The Iron Curtain is a line across a continent, and Berlin sits a hundred miles behind it. Reunification in nineteen ninety ended the sectors. Only Berlin between nineteen forty-five and eighty-nine was a city cut in four, its western sectors an island inside the Soviet zone, blockaded in forty-eight and walled in sixty-one. The answer is Berlin during the Cold War.