BOOK LAUNCH AND READING: JOSEPH PEARSON

From 1948 to 1949, airmen who had spent the war dropping bombs on Berlin now risked their lives dropping chocolate bars. Berliners, who had once looked to the skies with dread and hatred, now gazed upward with hope and admiration. Joseph Pearson’s new book, Sweet Victory: How the Berlin Airlift Divided East and West, offers a cultural history of this massive air relief operation—one that wrote the playbook for the Cold War and still influences Western thinking and diplomacy with Russia. Focusing on individual experiences during the operation, Pearson presents a series of portraits that show how monumental struggles intersect with everyday lives. Through these stories, we see how implacable foes become friends.

This event coincides with the publication of the book’s U.S. edition from Pegasus Books. It was previously published as The Airlift in the UK and excerpted in German for Lettre International.

Dr. Joseph Pearson is a writer and historian based in Berlin who teaches at the Barenboim-Said-Akademie. He has also authored Berlin (2017), a portrait of the German capital, and My Grandfather’s Knife (2022), stories of World War II witnesses told through everyday objects. He is the house essayist of the Schaubühne Theater. His book on the director Thomas Ostermeier is forthcoming in German.

Alexander Wells is an Australian critic and essayist whose writing has been published in The Guardian, History Today, Paris Review, and The Drift, among others. From 2020 to 2025, he was literary editor for the Berlin-based print monthly The Berliner. He is currently at work on his first book.

Presented in English