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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2008
The last years of the Cold War have produced a bumper crop of studies of its beginnings, and the books reviewed here are a part of it. Anne Deighton's, Cyril Buffet's and Saki Dockrill's monographs are succinct and thoroughly well-written histories based on extensive archival research. Olaf Mager's book, like the former three a well-converted PhD thesis, takes more of a political science approach, looking at the historical commitment of Britain's forces to the defence of Continental Europe in the light of its continuing importance. Klaus A. Maier's and Wilhelm Meier-Dornberg's examinations of Western policies towards the European Defence Community (EDC) project form part of the ambitious multi-volume series on the beginning of West German security policy, edited by the office of military history of the Federal Republic. Hermann-Josef Rupieper's colossal monograph on US policy towards Germany, like Maier's and Meier-Dotnberg's studies of the EDC phase in the evolution of German rearmament, is based on enormously comprehensive multi-national archival research, where the first four books mentioned drew mainly on the archives of one country. The volume on Germany and the Marshall Plan edited by Charles Maier and Giinter Bischof, and the Gottinger Arbeitskreis's volume on the German question from 1953 to 1955, are both collections of multi-author articles concerned with a common theme.
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