Endings?

Approaching a quarter-century since the end of eastern European communism and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, several places around the world still have the Cold War woven into the fabric of their contemporary identities in such a way that makes it virtually impossible for residents and visitors alike not to remember this era. As this study has shown, these places range from small towns and remote settlements such as Vint Hill, Rocky Flats, Greenham Common, and Semipalatinsk to major cities including Prague, Budapest, Hanoi, and Hiroshima; and even islands through Asia’s Cold War archipelago stretching from Okinawa to Kinmen. There are further places, too, which have not been covered in this work but nonetheless boast their own unique ties to the Cold War whether it be due to fleeting moments or more enduring legacies. Lake Placid, for instance, has been involved in hosting the Winter Olympics twice (1932 and 1980). It took only a couple of hours, however, for this small village in the state of New York to become forever linked to Cold War lore through the so-called ‘Miracle on Ice’ hockey match in which Team USA – mostly comprised of college students – defied the odds to somehow defeat the hitherto seemingly invincible Soviet national team.1 The enigmatic case of Panmunjom, where the 1953 armistice between North and South Korea was signed, sits at the other end of the continuum. Dislocated from normalcy and located in the DMZ, Panmunjom now is an abandoned village that straddles the ‘frontline’ where communism and democracy continue to glare at each other six decades after the ceasefire. It remains to be seen if the future holds anything for Panmunjom other than hosting periodic North-South discussions and daily busloads of curious tourists. Whereas some of the above places have slipped comfortably into an ‘aftermath period’ or ‘reflecting phase’, for others the Cold War quite clearly has not yet ended. On the one hand, this may be due to Cold War tensions remaining unresolved, or, on the other hand, it can be the result of memory work ensuring that the past stays very much ‘alive’ in the present. Accordingly, this short concluding chapter eschews the conventional notion that the Cold War ‘ended’ abruptly in the early 1990s, to be consigned to history more or less overnight. Instead, it mounts an argument for embracing the idea that in many ways the Cold War lingers

on. Given that the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the Soviet Union are the conventional touchstones of the ‘end of an era’ thesis, to illuminate our position that the Cold War past continues to permeate the present there are no two more challenging yet apposite cities to explore than Berlin and Moscow. Berlin demands special attention in Cold War memory studies. Indeed,

the German capital easily could have served as the focal point of Chapter 3 on ‘Cities and Sites’. Yet we decided against this obvious approach for two main reasons, both of which relate to the sheer enormity of the case in question. First, if Berlin were to be examined in detail as part of any such chapter then it most likely would result in one of two undesirable outcomes: either a shallow and hopelessly incomplete investigation of this iconic Cold War city if its coverage were kept restricted to the same length as the other places surveyed; or, if explored in a meaningful way, then Berlin inevitably would overshadow all other places explored in the chapter. Second, we did not feel compelled to investigate Berlin in depth because, comparatively speaking, it already has been afforded considerable treatment elsewhere, including full-length memory studies. To cite only one recent example, in 2008 Dirk Verheyen produced United City, Divided Memories? Cold War Legacies in Contemporary Berlin, an insightful and highly readable book constructed around the three key themes of Allied occupation, the Stasi, and the Wall.2 The following passages, then, are not primarily concerned with investigating how the Cold War is remembered in the German capital in the same way that previous chapters have examined other case studies. Rather, by surveying the diverse ways in which the Cold War is confronted, celebrated, commemorated, and commercialized on a mass scale in Berlin, the aim is to show how it perhaps is more accurate to talk of the Cold War lingering in this sui generis divided city.3