Immediately after the war, Berlin was divided into sectors controlled by the four victorious Allied powers. Hoping to choke off the irksome democratic island consisting of the American, British and French zones, the Soviet Union imposed a blockade on the western half of the city in 1948. The response – the Berlin Airlift – was an unprecedented display of airborne supply logistics led by the US, which forced the Soviets to back down in 1949. But once the US, Britain and France merged their territory into West Berlin and the Soviet part became the capital of Communist East Germany, the divided city had become ground zero for the Cold War.

In 1953, a workers’ strike in East Berlin escalated into protests against the Communist regime. Soviet troops brutally put down the uprising on 17 June, leaving hundreds dead. Discontent in the following years grew to such an extent that the East German leadership was eventually forced to build the Berlin Wall in August 1961 to halt an increasing number of people from fleeing to the west. The barrier quickly became synonymous with the Iron Curtain, leading US president John F Kennedy to declare in the city in 1963: ‘Ich bin ein Berliner.’ In 1987, Ronald Reagan demanded his Soviet counterpart Mikhail Gorbachev ‘tear down this wall!’ Only two years later, East Germans would do the job for him: a growing number of peaceful protests for greater freedom culminated in the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989.