The Collapse

The Collapse
Author: Mary Sarotte
Publisher: Basic Books (AZ)
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2014-10-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 0465064949

On the night of November 9, 1989, massive crowds surged toward the Berlin Wall, drawn by an announcement that caught the world by surprise: East Germans could now move freely to the West. The Wall—infamous symbol of divided Cold War Europe—seemed to be falling. But the opening of the gates that night was not planned by the East German ruling regime—nor was it the result of a bargain between either Ronald Reagan or George H.W. Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. It was an accident. In The Collapse, prize-winning historian Mary Elise Sarotte reveals how a perfect storm of decisions made by daring underground revolutionaries, disgruntled Stasi officers, and dictatorial party bosses sparked an unexpected series of events culminating in the chaotic fall of the Wall. With a novelist’s eye for character and detail, she brings to vivid life a story that sweeps across Budapest, Prague, Dresden, and Leipzig and up to the armed checkpoints in Berlin. We meet the revolutionaries Roland Jahn, Aram Radomski, and Siggi Schefke, risking it all to smuggle the truth across the Iron Curtain; the hapless Politburo member Günter Schabowski, mistakenly suggesting that the Wall is open to a press conference full of foreign journalists, including NBC’s Tom Brokaw; and Stasi officer Harald Jäger, holding the fort at the crucial border crossing that night. Soon, Brokaw starts broadcasting live from Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, where the crowds are exulting in the euphoria of newfound freedom—and the dictators are plotting to restore control. Drawing on new archival sources and dozens of interviews, The Collapse offers the definitive account of the night that brought down the Berlin Wall.

The Fall of the Berlin Wall

The Fall of the Berlin Wall
Author: Jeffrey A. Engel
Publisher: OUP USA
Total Pages: 201
Release: 2011-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199832447

More than two decades after the Wall's collapse, this book brings together leading authorities who offer a fresh look at how leaders in four vital centers of world politics--the United States, the Soviet Union, Europe, and China--viewed the world in the aftermath of this momentous event. Jeffrey Engel contributes a chronological narrative of this tumultuous period, followed by substantive essays by Melvyn Leffler on the United States, Chen Jian on China, James Sheehan on Germany and Europe, and William Taubman and Svetlana Savranskaya on the Soviet Union.

The Berlin Wall

The Berlin Wall
Author: Frederick Taylor
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 618
Release: 2012-08-02
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1408835827

The appearance of a hastily-constructed barbed wire entanglement through the heart of Berlin during the night of 12-13 August 1961 was both dramatic and unexpected. Within days, it had started to metamorphose into a structure that would come to symbolise the brutal insanity of the Cold War: the Berlin Wall. A city of almost four million was cut ruthlessly in two, unleashing a potentially catastrophic East-West crisis and plunging the entire world for the first time into the fear of imminent missile-borne apocalypse. This threat would vanish only when the very people the Wall had been built to imprison, breached it on the historic night of 9 November 1989. Frederick Taylor's eagerly awaited new book reveals the strange and chilling story of how the initial barrier system was conceived, then systematically extended, adapted and strengthened over almost thirty years. Patrolled by vicious dogs and by guards on shoot-to-kill orders, the Wall, with its more than 300 towers, became a wired and lethally booby-trapped monument to a world torn apart by fiercely antagonistic ideologies. The Wall had tragic consequences in personal and political terms, affecting the lives of Germans and non-Germans alike in a myriad of cruel, inhuman and occasionally absurd ways. The Berlin Wall is the definitive account of a divided city and its people.

The Fall of the Berlin Wall

The Fall of the Berlin Wall
Author: William F. Buckley (Jr.)
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2004-03-22
Genre: History
ISBN:

William F. Buckley Jr. reflects on the event that marked the fall of Communism in Europe The fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 was the turning point in the struggle against Communism in Eastern Europe. The culmination of popular uprisings in Hungary, Poland, and East Germany, the Wall's fall led inexorably to revolutions in Czechoslovakia and Romania, the reunification of Germany, and, ultimately, the disintegration of the Soviet Union itself. In this book, American conservative pioneer and National Review founder William F. Buckley Jr. explains how and why the Cold War ended as it did-and what lessons we can draw from the experience. Writing with his legendary wit and insight, he brings to life Communism's last gasp, showing how Reagan's hard-nosed foreign policy and Gorbachev's reforms undermined Warsaw Pact dictators, emboldened dissidents, and finally made the dream of freedom a reality in Eastern Europe. Written by one of America's most erudite and influential political thinkers and writer. Includes a new foreword by Henry Kissinger marking the 20th anniversary of the opening of the Berlin Wall Hailed as "eloquent [and] immensely readable" (Baltimore Sun), this account "celebrates the tenacity of the human spirit and the will to achieve freedom" (Publishers Weekly). Sure to delight conservatives, annoy liberals, and enlighten everyone who reads it, The Fall of the Berlin Wall is William F. Buckley Jr. at his inimitable best.

The Year that Changed the World

The Year that Changed the World
Author: Michael Meyer
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 343
Release: 2010-08-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 1849831998

'Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!' This declamation by president Ronald Reagan when visiting Berlin in 1987 is widely cited as the clarion call that brought the Cold War to an end. The West had won, so this version of events goes, because the West had stood firm. American and Western European resoluteness had brought an evil empire to its knees. Michael Meyer, in this extraordinarily compelling account of the revolutions that roiled Eastern Europe in 1989, begs to differ. Drawing together breathtakingly vivid, on-the-ground accounts of the rise of Solidarity in Poland, the stealth opening of the Hungarian border, the Velvet Revolution in Prague, and the collapse of the infamous wall in Berlin, Meyer shows that western intransigence was only one of the many factors that provoked such world-shaking change. More important, Meyer contends, were the stands taken by individuals in the thick of the struggle, leaders such as poet and playwright Vaclav Havel in Prague; Lech Walesa; the quiet and determined reform prime minister in Budapest, Miklos Nemeth; and the man who realized his empire was already lost and decided, with courage and intelligence, to let it go in peace, Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev. Michael Meyer captures these heady days in all their rich drama and unpredictability. In doing so he provides not just a thrilling chronicle of perhaps the most important year of the 20th century but also a crucial refutation of American mythology and a misunderstanding of history that was deliberately employed to lead the United States into some of the intractable conflicts it faces today.

After the Berlin Wall

After the Berlin Wall
Author: Hope M. Harrison
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 483
Release: 2019-09-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107049318

A revelatory history of the commemoration of the Berlin Wall and its significance in defining contemporary German national identity.

Berlin Now

Berlin Now
Author: Peter Schneider
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2014-08-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 0374254842

A "longtime Berliner's ... exploration of the heterogeneous allure of this vibrant city. Delving beneath the obvious answers--Berlin's club scene, bolstered by the lack of a mandatory closing time; the artistic communities that thrive due to the relatively low (for now) cost of living--Schneider takes us on an insider's tour of this rapidly metamorphosing metropolis, where high-class soirees are held at construction sites and enterprising individuals often accomplish more without public funding--assembling a makeshift club on the banks of the Spree River--than Berlin's officials do"--Provided by publisher.

Stasiland

Stasiland
Author: Anna Funder
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 350
Release: 2011-11-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 1443406090

In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell; shortly afterwards the two Germanies reunited, and East Germany ceased to exist. In a country where the headquarters of the secret police can become a museum literally overnight and in which one in fifty East Germans were informing on their fellow citizens, there are thousands of captivating stories. Anna Funder tells extraordinary tales from the underbelly of the former East Germany. She meets Miriam, who as a sixteen-year-old might have started World War III; she visits the man who painted the line that became the Berlin Wall; and she gets drunk with the legendary “Mik Jegger” of the East, once declared by the authorities to his face to “no longer exist.” Each enthralling story depicts what it’s like to live in Berlin as the city knits itself back together—or fails to. This is a history full of emotion, attitude and complexity.

Driving the Soviets up the Wall

Driving the Soviets up the Wall
Author: Hope M. Harrison
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 369
Release: 2011-06-27
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1400840724

The Berlin Wall was the symbol of the Cold War. For the first time, this path-breaking book tells the behind-the-scenes story of the communists' decision to build the Wall in 1961. Hope Harrison's use of archival sources from the former East German and Soviet regimes is unrivalled, and from these sources she builds a highly original and provocative argument: the East Germans pushed the reluctant Soviets into building the Berlin Wall. This fascinating work portrays the different approaches favored by the East Germans and the Soviets to stop the exodus of refugees to West Germany. In the wake of Stalin's death in 1953, the Soviets refused the East German request to close their border to West Berlin. The Kremlin rulers told the hard-line East German leaders to solve their refugee problem not by closing the border, but by alleviating their domestic and foreign problems. The book describes how, over the next seven years, the East German regime managed to resist Soviet pressures for liberalization and instead pressured the Soviets into allowing them to build the Berlin Wall. Driving the Soviets Up the Wall forces us to view this critical juncture in the Cold War in a different light. Harrison's work makes us rethink the nature of relations between countries of the Soviet bloc even at the height of the Cold War, while also contributing to ongoing debates over the capacity of weaker states to influence their stronger allies.