According to an essay published online on the CIA World Factbook, European power struggles immersed Germany in two World Wars in the first half of the 20th century. Following the Second World War, Germany was occupied in 1945 by the victorious Allied powers of the US, UK, France controlled part of Germany which came to be known as West Germany, and the Soviet Union controlled an area that came to be known as East Germany.
Two German states were formed in 1949. These were the western Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), and the eastern German Democratic Republic (GDR). The democratic FRG embedded itself in key Western economic and security organizations, while the Communist GDR was on the front line of the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact. Germany was a country divided literally as well as politically. It is not surprising in these circumstances that East and West Germany became one of the key battlegrounds of the so-called Cold War ("Europe: Germany," 2009).
According to an essay published online on the Yahoo! Education website, after the Second World War, the West felt threatened by the continued expansionist policy of the Soviet Union, and at the same time the Russians feared incursion from the West. Communists seized power in Eastern Europe with the support of the Red Army following World War 2, and the Russian occupation zones in Germany and Austria were created as a buffer between east and west. During the Cold War, the general policy of the West toward the Communist states was to contain them (i.e., keep them within their current borders). In 1948, the Soviet Union directly challenged the West by instituting a blockade of the western sectors of Berlin. In Europe, the East German government erected the Berlin Wall in 1961 to prevent the embarrassing flow of East Germans to the West. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, both European alliance systems began to weaken somewhat. However, the divided Germany remain...