The era of cold wars and the two divisions – of Europe and of Germany – ran parallel: ‘The Cold War began with a deliberate Soviet decision to cut Europe in two, and in reacting the Western powers took a deliberate decision to cut Germany in two.’

The conflict between East and West had its origins in diverging views of how society should be organised which emerged in the course of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century industrialisation: the contrast between the pluralism of ‘Western’ civilisation, which in principle permitted a multiplicity of ways of life and patterns of power, and the centralised all-powerful state with its ‘Asiatic’ imprint; the contrast between capitalist means of production and socialist planning; the contrast between a parliamentary state under the rule of law and a totalitarian state. Such contrasting attitudes appeared to be irreconcilable, but they were indissolubly linked, at the latest, from the time of the Bolshevik victory in the October Revolution of 1917. Furthermore, the Bolshevik's seizure of power in Russia turned these conflicting views into an international political problem. By claiming to be the vanguard of an historically necessary world revolutionary movement the leadership of the Soviet Union tied a particular combination of socialist and anti-Western attitudes to the advancement of Soviet national interests, thus introducing into the international system a specific conflict between ‘Western’ industrialised nations and the Soviet state.

A survey of the economic problems in East–West relations during the era of the Cold War is of particular interest from the German perspective. First, no other Western industrial country played a comparable role in the economic relations with East European countries; and secondly, East–West trade, especially the economic contacts with the German Democratic Republic (GDR), became an outstanding feature of German Ostpolitik under the conditions of the divided country. It appears to be an acceptable proposition to say that this form of West Germany economic and trade policy was the equivalent of the militarily defined US policy towards the Soviet Union, in so far as the famous dictum of the former Federal Chancellor Willy Brandt, that the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) was ‘an economic giant and a political dwarf only partly corresponded to reality. It therefore seems appropriate to discuss the economic dimension of the East–West conflict in the context of German interests and policies – not to the exclusion of all else, but with a certain priority.

In February 1990 a major conference dedicated to the recent history of the East of Europe was organised at Rutgers University in Camden, New Jersey. The revised papers, edited by Joseph Held, comprise The Columbia History of Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century. It is the first major Western-language compendium discussing a broad region of Europe which brings together the talents of prominent specialists and exhibits thorough familiarity with the latest scholarship. Such an undertaking was predestined to yield a volume of significance. The kaleidoscopic developments over the last few years make this work extraordinarily timely and important beyond its obvious scholarly merits.

The first volume under review is the outcome of a five-day conference held in Italy in July 1989. It was the first gathering of representatives of national historians’ associations affiliated to the International Federation for Research in Women's History/Federation International pour la Recherche de l'Histoire des Femmes (IFR WH/FIRHF), or rather of those associations which could afford to send representatives. IFR WH/FIRHF is an Internal Commission of the International Committee of the Historical Sciences. Its purpose, obviously, is to promote the serious study of women in history and the role of women within the profession.