Paul Steege has written a book about everyday agency. He asserts that human beings who are squeezed by large forces have quite a lot of it—so much, in fact, that they are the ones who truly construct how those forces operate. A concluding analogy helps to bring home the point: if we “grant to ‘ordinary people’ in the streets of Prague, Berlin, and Budapest the power to end the Cold War,” then perhaps it is reasonable to think that they also “made it” (p. 297, emphasis original).

What does it mean to “have made” the Cold War? To Steege, it means having created a world defined by a combination of tensions and limits. Working out the boundary between the reign and the limitation of tension was how—or rather, where—the Cold War was “forged” (p. 295). According to the heroic Cold War narrative, that boundary was forged in Berlin. The questions “when” and “how” were answered long ago: through blockade and airlift, through building and tearing down a Wall. But according to Steege, the salient fact about Berlin and its boundaries was not their seminal construction and destruction, but their ongoing fluidity. This fluidity pressed up against all the constructs fashioned from above. It was thus complicit in what form they could take. And it came, as it had to come, not from heroic resistance or cowardly cooptation, but from ordinary living; not from adjusting, but from finding ways around. This sort of everyday crafting came from below.

The Cold War, says Steege, was misunderstood by those—particularly the Communists—who tried to shape it from above. Ideological paradigms were poorly equipped to teach them how to understand the ways in which everyday people made sense of and managed the situation in which they believed they found themselves. What Steege is decidedly not saying is that material conditions trumped ideas or ideals. Instead, material conditions and “everydayness” were a reality whose negotiation involved people in developing their own interpretive frameworks, access to which the Communist authorities seemed never able to master. Politics was rarely about who offered people the most goods, or who was best positioned to relieve material privation (in which case Berlin's economic dependence on the Soviet zone should have benefited the Communists). Rather, politics was often about notions of opportunistic and distributive fairness; and here, ideological claims, explanations, and even power prospects could not compete with everyday interpretive frameworks that set the real rules and practices of acquisition, barter, provision, and entitlement.

Steege's is a continuity thesis. If things were porous and crafted from below, then what is most important is to follow the consistencies of that process, even when the river encounters boulders and embankments. It befits this interpretation that the authorities—again, especially the Communist authorities—come off as insecure, unsure, and ambivalent about their own decisions and actions. Blockade-policemen (for example) fired in the air rather than at the blockade-runners. Their motives were not principally humanitarian. In a situation where economies were interlinked and where winning hearts and minds was a genuine concern, misfiring policemen both facilitated and tried to stop the movement of supplies. The black market thus was both the metaphor and the reality of not only the peoples' but also the authorities' dilemma.

There is much here that rings true. Everyday Berliners become not heroes but people, and we learn a great deal from Steege's sources—municipal and party records, police reports, ration cards, advertisements, newspaper accounts, magazines, letters, photographs, songs, diaries, oral reminiscences—about Berliners' practices of provision and expectations of entitlement. But as usual with histories of everyday life, the somewhat anthropological methodology is not free of its unsettling aspects. One concerns the selection and use of striking bits of anecdotal evidence, and how to decide what is representative and illuminating. While statistics sometimes help, it is the thickly descriptive anecdote that necessarily provides the opportunity for interpretive depth. To the extent that this is a problem, it lies not with Steege, but with the genre itself. Yet Steege is on the whole quite judicious, and his keen eye for the telling detail must be counted among the book's strengths. A related concern has to do with conceptual exposition. Most of the time, Steege's is engrossing and lively. Still, the occasional instance of belaboring the obvious can leave one briefly unsure what point was just made. Then there is the crucial intersection between the everyday vignettes (frequently fascinating) and the bureaucratic processing (sometimes tedious). But negotiating this intersection is inherent in this sort of turf, so maybe larger forces, not Steege's authorial agency, are responsible for any shortfall.

Two other issues are more substantive. One concerns the extent to which Berlin represents (as Steege powerfully argues) a window that reveals the zonal-wide shakiness of the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands' (SED's) control, as opposed to being (due to its four-power status) a special case. The other is whether some of Steege's conclusions about the eastern authorities' inability to master the interpretive framework of the everyday Cold War might apply, albeit in entirely distinctive ways, to the western authorities. Neither point has eluded Steege, but both will continue to raise discussion.

While Steege may not have entirely found the real Cold War in the streets of Berlin, he has certainly found part of it there. Quite literally, human agency was all over this place, in its cellars and in its skies, as well as in distant capitals. This highly stimulating and original book will spark further reflection on how to assess the balance, and its significance.