Berlin Blockade

The Berlin Blockade began in June 1948 after mounting disputes between the Soviet Union and the Western Allies over Germany’s political and economic reconstruction. Soviet authorities cut the main land and water routes into the American, British and French sectors of Berlin, leaving the Western powers responsible for supplying a large urban population deep inside the Soviet occupation zone.

The United States and Britain responded with the Berlin Airlift, flying food, fuel and other necessities into the city for almost a year. The blockade was lifted in May 1949, but the crisis hardened the division of Germany and Berlin and became one of the first major tests of resolve in the emerging Cold War.

S. W. Perry’s Berlin Duet returns its central characters to the ruins of post-war Berlin as the blockade tightens. The confrontation between Soviet and Western power turns a personal search for missing children into a story shaped by occupation, intelligence work and the new political boundaries forming across Europe.