With the fall of the Berlin Wall 25 years ago, an era came to an end. Heinrich August Winkler's "History of the West" places the dramatic events of 1989 within a broader historical context and masterfully depicts the eventful decades from the end of World War II to the collapse of the Soviet Union. The volume makes it clear how close we still are to the turning point of 1989 to 1991: it was then that the foundations of our present were laid. Never before or since has the transatlantic West been so united as in the four and a half decades during which the East-West conflict shaped the axis of world politics. While the world stood on the brink of nuclear disaster more than once, colonies in the Third World broke away from their European colonial rulers and sought their own paths to political independence. The Vietnam War, 1968 with the students.