Stefanie Eisenhuth's Die Schutzmacht is based on a dissertation defended in 2018 at the Humboldt University of Berlin. At almost 500 pages, the book is intended for a specialist audience interested in the manifold interactions between the population of West Berlin and the US military forces stationed in the city. Eisenhuth specifically focuses on the symbolic quality of West Berlin as a bastion of freedom in the Cold War and uses a number of case studies to examine how the day-to-day relations between the US military and West Berliners shaped the city as an imagined community and how this community was remembered after the end of the Cold War. Die Schutzmacht is based on an impressive array of primary and secondary sources from the United States and Germany, including the records of the US military government in Berlin.

Eisenhuth first takes a detailed look at the arrival of American forces in Berlin and uses mainly American sources to reconstruct how, over the course of just three years, US officials changed from worrying about fraternization to regarding the people of Berlin as potential allies in the emerging Cold War. The Berlin blockade and the ensuing airlift provided the crucial turning point and the start of what Eisenhuth calls “Gründungsmythos West-Berlin” (142). In the second case study, she examines how anti-communism and fear formed the basis for the institutionalized friendship between the United States and West Berlin, which took shape during the 1950s. In part, this friendship was based on the lived experience of American soldiers, journalists, and diplomats traveling to and living in the city they called an outpost of freedom; in part, it was the result of a conscious effort by the US military and government to foster friendly civilian-military relations through the German-American Relations program, military parades, and the German-American Volksfest.

American officials kept close track of shifting opinions among the people of West Berlin—the many public opinion polls used by Eisenhuth show clearly how Berlin's frontline position made it different from the rest of the Federal Republic of Germany. Starting with John F. Kennedy, four US presidents recognized West Berlin's symbolic importance and visited the divided city. Eisenhuth takes a close look at two of the lesser-known visits by President Richard Nixon in 1969 and by President Jimmy Carter in 1978. However, the author pays surprisingly little attention to the Second Berlin Crisis, the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961, and the different responses from Washington to these events, including sending back General Lucius D. Clay, the hero of the airlift, or Kennedy's visit to the city in 1963.

West Berlin's strong support for the United States’ role as protector started to give way to a more critical attitude on the part of a younger generation of Berliners during the second half of the 1960s. In the third section of her book, Eisenhuth shifts attention to a number of protest and countercultural movements engaged in anti–Vietnam War and civil rights organizing. By the 1980s, American officials worried that the institutionalized friendship of the early Cold War was being replaced by increasing tensions and animosity. Thus, it comes as no surprise that the final part of Die Schutzmacht, which deals with the public memory of the West Berlin era, shows that officials and museums prefer to focus only on the story of the Berlin blockade, the wall, and Berlin's symbolic role in the Cold War.

Overall, Stefanie Eisenhuth's book is a welcome addition to the literature on relations between the United States and Berlin, based on important new archival work. Despite the somewhat eclectic nature of the different case studies presented, anyone interested in transatlantic relations and Berlin during and immediately after the Cold War will find much to learn from this study.