Born in the former East Germany, I was caught between two systems. But it’s a mistake to think of the ‘in-between’ as life’s waiting room

In the 1970s, the German novelist Christa Wolf wrote a letter to her friend and fellow author Lew Kopelew, which included these lines: “One stands quite comfortably between all fronts, and must come to understand that this is, in fact, the only possible place to be.” The fronts Wolf was referring to were the Soviet Union and the west, the GDR and West Germany, the politics of the cold war – but I believe the idea resonated with her personally, as she was then too, in the middle of her life.

There is a certain irony and wit in those lines. Standing between all fronts can mean you don’t have to choose – a relief, for some. Or it can mean you never arrive anywhere, neither here nor there. At worst, it marks a person with no standpoint, no stable position. Lost in foggy ground.

Dancer, dog owner, bank robber. Germany’s most wanted woman, Daniela Klette, has been sentenced to 13 years in prison after decades on the run. Deborah Cole and Jason Burke report

To her friends and neighbours, there was nothing extraordinary about Claudia Ivone.

As our Berlin correspondent, Deborah Cole, explains, the silver-haired 67-year-old had spent years living in the same apartment in a bohemian neighbourhood of west Berlin. She led an ordinary life: she owned a dog, went shopping and pursued an unusual hobby as an active member of a local capoeira dance group.

‘All of Kirkby turned out for the premiere – many of them had been extras. And 500 people crammed into my mum’s council house for a party. It’s still talked about’

I started banging out the script for this on a typewriter in my scruffy flat in Toxteth, Liverpool, in 1981. Four years later, the film had its British premiere. My idea was for a working-class romance between a couple of girls from my native Kirkby and two Russian sailors on leave around the port of Liverpool, with a subtle political message at a time when the Thatcher premiership and the cold war were at their heights. There was a lot of anti-Russian propaganda in the press, but I was not prepared to hate a whole nation just because they had been demonised by the likes of press baron Robert Maxwell.

Since the end of the second world war, all eyes have been on Russia. Yet Trump’s increasingly erratic, hostile presidency is shattering old assumptions

One of the things that the depleted, often denigrated British state is still pretty good at is persuading the public that another country is a threat. As a small, warlike island next to a much larger land mass, Britain has had centuries of practice at cultivating its own sense of foreboding. Arguably, preparing for conflict with some part of the outside world is our natural mindset.

Warnings about potential enemy countries are spread by our prime ministers and major political parties, intelligence services and civil servants, serving and retired military officers, defence and foreign affairs thinktanks, and journalists from the right and the left. Sometimes, the process is relatively subtle and covert: reporters or MPs are given off-the-record briefings about our “national security” – a potently imprecise term – facing a new threat.

Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist

Intimate correspondence between John Cairncross and Gloria Barraclough features in National Archives exhibition

It was a love letter written by one of the more important British spies of the cold war that made Tom Brass realise he had never fully known his mother.

The spy in question was John Cairncross, the alleged fifth man in the Cambridge spy ring, whose spycraft also helped the Soviets win the Battle of Kursk and turn the tide of the second world war.

As I write my last regular column for the Guardian, my thoughts turn to the lessons and hope we can take from history

From Greenland’s icy mountains, from India’s coral strand, as the old hymn has it, we seem to inhabit a world that is more seriously troubled in more places than many can ever remember. In the UK, national morale feels all but shot. Politics commands little faith. Ditto the media. The idea that, as a country, we still have enough in common to carry us through – the idea embedded in Britain’s once potent Churchillian myth – feels increasingly threadbare.

Welcome, in short, to the Britain of the mid-1980s. That Britain often felt like a broken nation in a broken world, very much as Britain often does in the mid-2020s. The breakages were of course very different. And on one important level, misery is the river of the world. But, for those who can still recall them, the 1980s moods of crisis and uncertainty have things in common with those of today.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

Soviet invasions of allies helped destroy the Warsaw Pact – Trump’s dangerous rhetoric risks repeating the mistake inside Nato

Donald Trump’s echoing of Russia’s talking points in its war against Ukraine has long been a cause for alarm and dismay in the west.

Now an even more disturbing Kremlin precedent dating from the cold war is being evoked by the US president’s fixation on taking over Greenland – that of carrying out attacks on military allies.

I worried about nuclear war throughout my childhood, partly because it was the 80s, and partly because we were always demonstrating against it. On this important day, I knew where I needed to be ...

It would have been my late mother’s birthday last Monday, and because I am either astronomically stupid or fathomlessly wise, I elected to spend it at a public meeting about nuclear disarmament. I’d call it a blast from the past, except I feel superstitious about introducing explode-y words too near the nuclear topic.

I spent my entire childhood worrying about nuclear war, partly because it was the 80s, and everyone did, and partly because we spent our lives demonstrating against it. We had “Protest and Survive” stickers everywhere, in droll parody of the public information booklet “Protect and Survive”, along with “Nuclear Power? No Thanks”. We were also early adopters of climate change anxiety, while fiercely against the closure of coalmines. If you’re wondering where we expected to get our power from, well, obviously we didn’t need central heating: the combination of political fervour and long johns was very warming. When I say we, of course I mean “my mother”; my sister and I had very little agency in this quest for peace.