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| collapse of the berlin wall: The Collapse Mary Sarotte, 2014-10-07 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. |
| collapse of the berlin wall: Collapse Vladislav M. Zubok, 2021-11-30 A major study of the collapse of the Soviet Union—showing how Gorbachev’s misguided reforms led to its demise “A deeply informed account of how the Soviet Union fell apart.”—Rodric Braithwaite, Financial Times “[A] masterly analysis.”—Joshua Rubenstein, Wall Street Journal In 1945 the Soviet Union controlled half of Europe and was a founding member of the United Nations. By 1991, it had an army four million strong with five thousand nuclear-tipped missiles and was the second biggest producer of oil in the world. But soon afterward the union sank into an economic crisis and was torn apart by nationalist separatism. Its collapse was one of the seismic shifts of the twentieth century. Thirty years on, Vladislav Zubok offers a major reinterpretation of the final years of the USSR, refuting the notion that the breakup of the Soviet order was inevitable. Instead, Zubok reveals how Gorbachev’s misguided reforms, intended to modernize and democratize the Soviet Union, deprived the government of resources and empowered separatism. Collapse sheds new light on Russian democratic populism, the Baltic struggle for independence, the crisis of Soviet finances—and the fragility of authoritarian state power. |
| collapse of the berlin wall: The Fall of the Berlin Wall Jeffrey A. Engel, 2011-10 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. |
| collapse of the berlin wall: The Berlin Wall Frederick Taylor, 2012-08-02 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. |
| collapse of the berlin wall: In Uncertain Times Melvyn P. Leffler, Jeffrey W. Legro, 2011-05-15 In Uncertain Times considers how policymakers react to dramatic developments on the world stage. Few expected the Berlin Wall to come down in November 1989; no one anticipated the devastating attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in September 2001. American foreign policy had to adjust quickly to an international arena that was completely transformed. Melvyn P. Leffler and Jeffrey W. Legro have assembled an illustrious roster of officials from the George H. W. Bush, Clinton, and George W. Bush administrations—Robert B. Zoellick, Paul Wolfowitz, Eric S. Edelman, Walter B. Slocombe, and Philip Zelikow. These policymakers describe how they went about making strategy for a world fraught with possibility and peril. They offer provocative reinterpretations of the economic strategy advanced by the George H. W. Bush administration, the bureaucratic clashes over policy toward the breakup of the USSR, the creation of the Defense Policy Guidance of 1992, the expansion of NATO, the writing of the National Security Strategy Statement of 2002, and the invasion of Iraq in 2003. A group of eminent scholars address these same topics. Bruce Cumings, John Mueller, Mary Elise Sarotte, Odd Arne Westad, and William C. Wohlforth probe the unstated assumptions, the cultural values, and the psychological makeup of the policymakers. They examine whether opportunities were seized and whether threats were magnified and distorted. They assess whether academicians and independent experts would have done a better job than the policymakers did. Together, policymakers and scholars impel us to rethink how our world has changed and how policy can be improved in the future. |
| collapse of the berlin wall: 30 Years since the Fall of the Berlin Wall Alexandr Akimov, Gennadi Kazakevitch, 2020-01-08 The year 2019 marks 30 years since the fall of the Berlin wall. This symbolic event led to German unification and the collapse of communist party rule in countries of the Soviet-led Eastern bloc. Since then, the post-communist countries of Central, Eastern and South-eastern Europe have tied their post-communist transition to deep integration into the West, including EU accession. Most of the states in Central and Eastern Europe have been able to relatively successfully transform their previous communist political and economic systems. In contrast, the non-Baltic post-Soviet states have generally been less successful in doing so. This book, with an internationally respected list of contributors, seeks to address and compare those diverse developments in communist and post-communist countries and their relationship with the West from various angles. The book has three parts. The first part addresses the progress of post-communist transition in comparative terms, including regional focus on Eastern and South Eastern Europe, CIS and Central Asia. The second focuses on Russia and its foreign relationship, and internal politics. The third explores in detail economies and societies in Central Asia. The final part of the book draws some historical comparisons of recent issues in post-communism with the past experiences. |
| collapse of the berlin wall: Don't Need No Thought Control Gerd Horten, 2020-06-05 The fall of the Berlin Wall is typically understood as the culmination of political-economic trends that fatally weakened the East German state. Meanwhile, comparatively little attention has been paid to the cultural dimension of these dramatic events, particularly the role played by Western mass media and consumer culture. With a focus on the 1970s and 1980s, Don’t Need No Thought Control explores the dynamic interplay of popular unrest, intensifying economic crises, and cultural policies under Erich Honecker. It shows how the widespread influence of (and public demands for) Western cultural products forced GDR leaders into a series of grudging accommodations that undermined state power to a hitherto underappreciated extent. |
| collapse of the berlin wall: 1989 Mary Elise Sarotte, 2014-10-19 How the political events of 1989 shaped Europe after the Cold War 1989 explores the momentous events following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the effects they have had on our world ever since. Based on documents, interviews, and television broadcasts from Washington, London, Paris, Bonn, Berlin, Warsaw, Moscow, and a dozen other locations, 1989 describes how Germany unified, NATO expansion began, and Russia got left on the periphery of the new Europe. This updated edition contains a new afterword with the most recent evidence on the 1990 origins of NATO's post-Cold War expansion. |
| collapse of the berlin wall: Uncivil Society Stephen Kotkin, 2010-10-12 Twenty years ago, the Berlin Wall fell. In one of modern history’s most miraculous occurrences, communism imploded–and not with a bang, but with a whimper. Now two of the foremost scholars of East European and Soviet affairs, Stephen Kotkin and Jan T. Gross, drawing upon two decades of reflection, revisit this crash. In a crisp, concise, unsentimental narrative, they employ three case studies–East Germany, Romania, and Poland–to illuminate what led Communist regimes to surrender, or to be swept away in political bank runs. This is less a story of dissidents, so-called civil society, than of the bankruptcy of a ruling class–communism’s establishment, or “uncivil society.” The Communists borrowed from the West like drunken sailors to buy mass consumer goods, then were unable to pay back the hard-currency debts and so borrowed even more. In Eastern Europe, communism came to resemble a Ponzi scheme, one whose implosion carries enduring lessons. From East Germany’s pseudotechnocracy to Romania’s megalomaniacal dystopia, from Communist Poland’s cult of Mary to the Kremlin’s surprise restraint, Kotkin and Gross pull back the curtain on the fraud and decadence that cashiered the would-be alternative to the market and democracy, an outcome that opened up to a deeper global integration that has proved destabilizing. |
| collapse of the berlin wall: Tunnel 29 Helena Merriman, 2021-08-24 He escaped from one of the world’s most brutal regimes.Then, he decided to tunnel back in. In the summer of 1962, a young student named Joachim Rudolph dug a tunnel under the Berlin Wall. Waiting on the other side in East Berlin were dozens of men, women, and children—all willing to risk everything to escape. From the award-winning creator of the acclaimed BBC Radio 4 podcast, Tunnel 29 is the true story of this most remarkable Cold War rescue mission. Drawing on interviews with the survivors and Stasi files, Helena Merriman brilliantly reveals the stranger-than-fiction story of the ingenious group of student-diggers, the glamorous red-haired messenger, the Stasi spy who threatened the whole enterprise, and the love story that became its surprising epilogue. Tunnel 29 was also the first made-for-TV event of its kind; it was funded by NBC, who wanted to film an escape in real time. Their documentary—which was nearly blocked from airing by the Kennedy administration, which wanted to control the media during the Cold War—revolutionized TV journalism. Ultimately, Tunnel 29 is a success story about freedom: the valiant citizens risking everything to win it back, and the larger world rooting for them to triumph. |
| collapse of the berlin wall: A Socialist Defector Victor Grossman, 2019-03-01 The rise and successes, the travails, and the eventual demise of the German Democratic Republic told in personal detail by activist and writer Victor Grossman The circumstances that impelled Victor Grossman, a U.S. Army draftee stationed in Europe, to flee a military prison sentence were the icy pressures of the McCarthy Era. Grossman – a.k.a. Steve Wechsler, a committed leftist since his years at Harvard and, briefly, as a factory worker – left his barracks in Bavaria one August day in 1952, and, in a panic, swam across the Danube River from the Austrian U.S. Zone to the Soviet Zone. Fate – i.e., the Soviets – landed him in East Germany, officially the German Democratic Republic. There he remained, observer and participant, husband and father, as he watched the rise and successes, the travails, and the eventual demise of the GDR socialist experiment. A Socialist Defector is the story, told in rare, personal detail, of an activist and writer who grew up in the U.S. free-market economy; spent thirty-eight years in the GDR’s nationally owned, centrally administered economy; and continues to survive, given whatever the market can bear in today’s united Germany. Having been a freelance journalist and traveling lecturer – and the only person in the world to hold diplomas from both Harvard and the Karl Marx University – Grossman is able to offer insightful, often ironic, reflections and reminiscences, comparing the good and bad sides of life in all three of the societies he has known. His account focuses especially on the socialism he saw and lived – the GDR’s goals and achievements, its repressive measures and stupidities – which, he argues, offers lessons now in our search for solutions to the grave problems facing our world. This is a fascinating and unique historical narrative; political analysis told with jokes, personal anecdotes, and without bombast. |
| collapse of the berlin wall: The Year that Changed the World Michael Meyer, 2010-08-05 '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. |
| collapse of the berlin wall: After the Berlin Wall Hope M. Harrison, 2019-09-26 A revelatory history of the commemoration of the Berlin Wall and its significance in defining contemporary German national identity. |
| collapse of the berlin wall: Burning Down the Haus Tim Mohr, 2019-09-03 NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Rolling Stone * BookPage * Amazon * Rough Trade Longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence “[A] riveting and inspiring history of punk’s hard-fought struggle in East Germany.” —The New York Times Book Review “A thrilling and essential social history that details the rebellious youth movement that helped change the world.” —Rolling Stone “Original and inspiring . . . Mr. Mohr has written an important work of Cold War cultural history.” —The Wall Street Journal “Wildly entertaining . . . A thrilling tale . . . A joy in the way it brings back punk’s fury and high stakes.”—Vogue It began with a handful of East Berlin teens who heard the Sex Pistols on a British military radio broadcast to troops in West Berlin, and it ended with the collapse of the East German dictatorship. Punk rock was a life-changing discovery. The buzz-saw guitars, the messed-up clothing and hair, the rejection of society and the DIY approach to building a new one: in their gray surroundings, where everyone’s future was preordained by some communist apparatchik, punk represented a revolutionary philosophy—quite literally, as it turned out. But as these young kids tried to form bands and became more visible, security forces—including the dreaded secret police, the Stasi—targeted them. They were spied on by friends and even members of their own families; they were expelled from schools and fired from jobs; they were beaten by police and imprisoned. Instead of conforming, the punks fought back, playing an indispensable role in the underground movements that helped bring down the Berlin Wall. This secret history of East German punk rock is not just about the music; it is a story of extraordinary bravery in the face of one of the most oppressive regimes in history. Rollicking, cinematic, deeply researched, highly readable, and thrillingly topical, Burning Down the Haus brings to life the young men and women who successfully fought authoritarianism three chords at a time—and is a fiery testament to the irrepressible spirit of revolution. |
| collapse of the berlin wall: Masterpieces of History Svetlana Savranskaya, Thomas S. Blanton, Vladislav Zubok, 2010-05-20 Twenty years in the making, this collection presents 122 top-level Soviet, European and American records on the superpowers' role in the annus mirabilis of 1989. Consisting of Politburo minutes; diary entries from Gorbachev's senior aide, Anatoly Chernyaev; meeting notes and private communications of Gorbachev with George H.W. Bush, Margaret Thatcher, Helmut Kohl and François Mitterrand; and high-level CIA analyses, this volume offers a rare insider's look at the historic, world-transforming events that culminated in the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the end of the Cold War. Most of these records have never been published before. |
| collapse of the berlin wall: Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East Barry Rubin, Wolfgang G. Schwanitz, 2014-02-25 A groundbreaking account of the Nazi-Islamist alliance that changed the course of World War II and influences the Arab world to this day |
| collapse of the berlin wall: The Plans That Failed André Steiner, 2013-08-01 The establishment of the Communist social model in one part of Germany was a result of international postwar developments, of the Cold War waged by East and West, and of the resultant partition of Germany. As the author argues, the GDR’s ‘new’ society was deliberately conceived as a counter-model to the liberal and marketregulated system. Although the hopes connected with this alternative system turned out to be misplaced and the planned economy may be thoroughly discredited today, it is important to understand the context in which it developed and failed. This study, a bestseller in its German version, offers an in-depth exploration of the GDR economy’s starting conditions and the obstacles to growth it confronted during the consolidation phase. These factors, however, were not decisive in the GDR’s lack of growth compared to that of the Federal Republic. As this study convincingly shows, it was the economic model that led to failure. |
| collapse of the berlin wall: Way Out There In the Blue Frances FitzGerald, 2001-02-21 Way Out There in the Blue is a major work of history by the Pulitzer Prizewinning author of Fire in the Lake. Using the Star Wars missile defense program as a magnifying glass on his presidency, Frances FitzGerald gives us a wholly original portrait of Ronald Reagan, the most puzzling president of the last half of the twentieth century. Reagan's presidency and the man himself have always been difficult to fathom. His influence was enormous, and the few powerful ideas he espoused remain with us still -- yet he seemed nothing more than a charming, simple-minded, inattentive actor. FitzGerald shows us a Reagan far more complex than the man we thought we knew. A master of the American language and of self-presentation, the greatest storyteller ever to occupy the Oval Office, Reagan created a compelling public persona that bore little relationship to himself. The real Ronald Reagan -- the Reagan who emerges from FitzGerald's book -- was a gifted politician with a deep understanding of the American national psyche and at the same time an executive almost totally disengaged from the policies of his administration and from the people who surrounded him. The idea that America should have an impregnable shield against nuclear weapons was Reagan's invention. His famous Star Wars speech, in which he promised us such a shield and called upon scientists to produce it, gave rise to the Strategic Defense Initiative. Reagan used his sure understanding of American mythology, history and politics to persuade the country that a perfect defense against Soviet nuclear weapons would be possible, even though the technology did not exist and was not remotely feasible. His idea turned into a multibillion-dollar research program. SDI played a central role in U.S.-Soviet relations at a crucial juncture in the Cold War, and in a different form it survives to this day. Drawing on prodigious research, including interviews with the participants, FitzGerald offers new insights into American foreign policy in the Reagan era. She gives us revealing portraits of major players in Reagan's administration, including George Shultz, Caspar Weinberger, Donald Regan and Paul Nitze, and she provides a radically new view of what happened at the Reagan-Gorbachev summits in Geneva, Reykjavik, Washington and Moscow. FitzGerald describes the fierce battles among Reagan's advisers and the frightening increase of Cold War tensions during Reagan's first term. She shows how the president who presided over the greatest peacetime military buildup came to espouse the elimination of nuclear weapons, and how the man who insisted that the Soviet Union was an evil empire came to embrace the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, and to proclaim an end to the Cold War long before most in Washington understood that it had ended. Way Out There in the Blue is a ground-breaking history of the American side of the end of the Cold War. Both appalling and funny, it is a black comedy in which Reagan, playing the role he wrote for himself, is the hero. |
| collapse of the berlin wall: Revolution 1989 Victor Sebestyen, 2010 Documents the collapse of the Soviet Union's European empire (East Germany, Poland, Czechoslvakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria) and the transition of each to independent states, drawing on interviews and newly uncovered archival material to offer insight into 1989's rapid changes and the USSR's minimal resistance. |
| collapse of the berlin wall: Checkmate in Berlin Giles Milton, 2021-07-13 From a master of popular history, the lively, immersive story of the race to seize Berlin in the aftermath of World War II as it’s never been told before BERLIN’S FATE WAS SEALED AT THE 1945 YALTA CONFERENCE: the city, along with the rest of Germany, was to be carved up among the victorious powers— the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union. On paper, it seemed a pragmatic solution. In reality, once the four powers were no longer united by the common purpose of defeating Germany, they wasted little time reverting to their prewar hostility toward—and suspicion of—one another. The veneer of civility between the Western allies and the Soviets was to break down in spectacular fashion in Berlin. Rival systems, rival ideologies, and rival personalities ensured that the German capital became an explosive battleground. The warring leaders who ran Berlin’s four sectors were charismatic, mercurial men, and Giles Milton brings them all to rich and thrilling life here. We meet unforgettable individuals like America’s explosive Frank “Howlin’ Mad” Howley, a brusque sharp-tongued colonel with a relish for mischief and a loathing for all Russians. Appointed commandant of the city’s American sector, Howley fought an intensely personal battle against his wily nemesis, General Alexander Kotikov, commandant of the Soviet sector. Kotikov oozed charm as he proposed vodka toasts at his alcohol-fueled parties, but Howley correctly suspected his Soviet rival was Stalin’s agent, appointed to evict the Western allies from Berlin and ultimately from Germany as well. Throughout, Checkmate in Berlin recounts the first battle of the Cold War as we’ve never before seen it. An exhilarating tale of intense rivalry and raw power, it is above all a story of flawed individuals who were determined to win, and Milton does a masterful job of weaving between all the key players’ motivations and thinking at every turn. A story of unprecedented human drama, it’s one that had a profound, and often underestimated, shaping force on the modern world – one that’s still felt today. |
| collapse of the berlin wall: The Collapse of Communism Lee Edwards, 2013-11-01 Experts continue to debate one of the most important political questions of the twentieth century—why did Communism collapse so suddenly? These essays suggest that a wide range of forces—political, economic, strategic, religious, add the indispensable role of the principled statesman and the brave dissident—brought about the collapse of communism. |
| collapse of the berlin wall: The Rise and Fall of the Berlin Wall John DiConsiglio, 2006 Chronicles the history of the Berlin Wall, explaining why it was built, how it was constructed, and the impact it had on the lives of people on both sides, and describes the events leading up to the wall's destruction. |
| collapse of the berlin wall: Between Containment and Rollback Christian F. Ostermann, 2021-04-27 In the aftermath of World War II, American policymakers turned to the task of rebuilding Europe while keeping communism at bay. In Germany, formally divided since 1949,the United States prioritized the political, economic, and, eventually, military integration of the fledgling Federal Republic with the West. The extraordinary success story of forging this alliance has dominated our historical under-standing of the American-German relationship. Largely left out of the grand narrative of American–German relations were most East Germans who found themselves caught under Soviet and then communist control by the post-1945 geo-political fallout of the war that Nazi Germany had launched. They were the ones who most dearly paid the price for the country's division. This book writes the East Germans—both leadership and general populace—back into that history as objects of American policy and as historical agents in their own right Based on recently declassified documents from American, Russian, and German archives, this book demonstrates that U.S. efforts from 1945 to 1953 went beyond building a prosperous democracy in western Germany and containing Soviet-Communist power to the east. Under the Truman and then the Eisenhower administrations, American policy also included efforts to undermine and roll back Soviet and German communist control in the eastern part of the country. This story sheds light on a dark-er side to the American Cold War in Germany: propaganda, covert operations, economic pressure, and psychological warfare. Christian F. Ostermann takes an international history approach, capturing Soviet and East German responses and actions, and drawing a rich and complex picture of the early East–West confrontation in the heart of Europe. |
| collapse of the berlin wall: Berlin Divided City, 1945-1989 Philip Broadbent, Sabine Hake, 2010-09-01 A great deal of attention continues to focus on Berlin’s cultural and political landscape after the fall of the Berlin Wall, but as yet, no single volume looks at the divided city through an interdisciplinary analysis. This volume examines how the city was conceived, perceived, and represented during the four decades preceding reunification and thereby offers a unique perspective on divided Berlin’s identities. German historians, art historians, architectural historians, and literary and cultural studies scholars explore the divisions and antagonisms that defined East and West Berlin; and by tracing the little studied similarities and extensive exchanges that occurred despite the presence of the Berlin Wall, they present an indispensible study on the politics and culture of the Cold War. |
| collapse of the berlin wall: After the Cold War Robert Owen Keohane, Joseph S. Nye (Jr.), Stanley Hoffmann, 1993 FROST (Copy 2): From the John Holmes Library Collection. |
| collapse of the berlin wall: Picnic at the Iron Curtain Susan Viets, 2012 Based on diaries, reporting notebooks, letters and memory, the author, a student turned journalist, tells of her adventures in Europe within a ten-year period (1988 to 1998) which included major historical and political change in countries such as Budapest, Bishkek, Chornobyl and Chechnya. She finishes her stories with an eyewitness account of Ukraine's Orange Revolution in 2004. |
| collapse of the berlin wall: Behind the Berlin Wall Patrick Major, 2010 On 13 August 1961 eighteen million East Germans awoke to find themselves walled in by an edifice which was to become synonymous with the Cold War: the Berlin Wall. Patrick Major explores how the border closure affected ordinary East Germans, from workers and farmers to teenagers and even party members, 'caught out' by Sunday the Thirteenth. |
| collapse of the berlin wall: The Fall of the Berlin Wall William F. Buckley (Jr.), 2004-03-22 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. |
| collapse of the berlin wall: Not One Inch M. E. Sarotte, 2021-11-30 Thirty years after the Soviet Union’s collapse, this book reveals how tensions between America, NATO, and Russia transformed geopolitics in the decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall “The most engaging and carefully documented account of this period in East-West diplomacy currently available.”—Andrew Moravscik, Foreign Affairs Not one inch. With these words, Secretary of State James Baker proposed a hypothetical bargain to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev after the fall of the Berlin Wall: if you let your part of Germany go, we will move NATO not one inch eastward. Controversy erupted almost immediately over this 1990 exchange—but more important was the decade to come, when the words took on new meaning. Gorbachev let his Germany go, but Washington rethought the bargain, not least after the Soviet Union’s own collapse in December 1991. Washington realized it could not just win big but win bigger. Not one inch of territory needed to be off limits to NATO. On the thirtieth anniversary of the Soviet collapse, this book uses new evidence and interviews to show how, in the decade that culminated in Vladimir Putin’s rise to power, the United States and Russia undermined a potentially lasting partnership. Prize-winning historian M. E. Sarotte shows what went wrong. |
| collapse of the berlin wall: Born in the GDR Hester Vaizey, 2016 The real life stories of eight East Germans caught up in the dramatic transition from Communism to Capitalism by the fall of the Berlin Wall - and what they feel about life after the Wall. |
| collapse of the berlin wall: End of History and the Last Man Francis Fukuyama, 2006-03-01 Ever since its first publication in 1992, the New York Times bestselling The End of History and the Last Man has provoked controversy and debate. Profoundly realistic and important...supremely timely and cogent...the first book to fully fathom the depth and range of the changes now sweeping through the world. —The Washington Post Book World Francis Fukuyama's prescient analysis of religious fundamentalism, politics, scientific progress, ethical codes, and war is as essential for a world fighting fundamentalist terrorists as it was for the end of the Cold War. Now updated with a new afterword, The End of History and the Last Man is a modern classic. |
| collapse of the berlin wall: The Collapse Mary Elise Sarotte, 2014-10-07 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 GüSchabowski, mistakenly suggesting that the Wall is open to a press conference full of foreign journalists, including NBC's Tom Brokaw; and Stasi officer Harald Jär, 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. |
| collapse of the berlin wall: The Candy Bombers Andrei Cherny, 2008-04-17 In the tradition of the great narrative storytellers, Andrei Cherny recounts the exhilarating saga of the unlikely men who made the Berlin Airlift one of the great military and humanitarian successes of American history. “What an exciting, inspiring, and wonderfully-written book this is....Each page has lessons for today, and it is also a thrilling narrative to read.”—Walter Isaacson, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Steve Jobs The Candy Bombers is a remarkable story with profound implications for our own time. Cherny tells the tale of the ill-assorted group of castoffs and secondstringers who not only saved millions of desperate people from a dire threat, but also won the hearts of America’s defeated enemies, inspired people around the world to believe in America’s fundamental goodness, avoided World War III, and won the greatest battle of the Cold War without firing a shot. With newly unclassified documents, unpublished letters and diaries, and fresh primary interviews, The Candy Bombers takes readers along as American pilots, with only a few small rickety planes, manage to feed and supply West Berlin completely by air for nearly a year; as Harry Truman exploits the very real threat of war to win an upset reelection campaign; as America’s first secretary of defense descends into madness in the midst of a dangerous military crisis; and as a lovesick American pilot shows that acts of basic human kindness can send powerful ripples through the course of history. |
| collapse of the berlin wall: The Berlin Airlift Barry Turner, 2017-10-05 Acclaimed historian Barry Turner presents a new history of the Cold War's defining episode. Berlin, 1948 – a divided city in a divided country in a divided Europe. The ruined German capital lay 120 miles inside Soviet-controlled eastern Germany. Stalin wanted the Allies out; the Allies were determined to stay, but had only three narrow air corridors linking the city to the West. Stalin was confident he could crush Berlin's resolve by cutting off food and fuel. In the USA, despite some voices still urging 'America first', it was believed that a rebuilt Germany was the best insurance against the spread of communism across Europe. And so over eleven months from June 1948 to May 1949, British and American aircraft carried out the most ambitious airborne relief operation ever mounted, flying over 2 million tons of supplies on almost 300,000 flights to save a beleaguered Berlin. With new material from American, British and German archives and original interviews with veterans, Turner paints a fresh, vivid picture the airlift, whose repercussions – the role of the USA as global leader, German ascendancy, Russian threat – we are still living with today. |
| collapse of the berlin wall: Berlin Now Peter Schneider, 2014-08-05 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. |
| collapse of the berlin wall: Forty Autumns Nina Willner, 2016-10-04 In this illuminating and deeply moving memoir, a former American military intelligence officer goes beyond traditional Cold War espionage tales to tell the true story of her family—of five women separated by the Iron Curtain for more than forty years, and their miraculous reunion after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Forty Autumns makes visceral the pain and longing of one family forced to live apart in a world divided by two. At twenty, Hanna escaped from East to West Germany. But the price of freedom—leaving behind her parents, eight siblings, and family home—was heartbreaking. Uprooted, Hanna eventually moved to America, where she settled down with her husband and had children of her own. Growing up near Washington, D.C., Hanna’s daughter, Nina Willner became the first female Army Intelligence Officer to lead sensitive intelligence operations in East Berlin at the height of the Cold War. Though only a few miles separated American Nina and her German relatives—grandmother Oma, Aunt Heidi, and cousin, Cordula, a member of the East German Olympic training team—a bitter political war kept them apart. In Forty Autumns, Nina recounts her family’s story—five ordinary lives buffeted by circumstances beyond their control. She takes us deep into the tumultuous and terrifying world of East Germany under Communist rule, revealing both the cruel reality her relatives endured and her own experiences as an intelligence officer, running secret operations behind the Berlin Wall that put her life at risk. A personal look at a tenuous era that divided a city and a nation, and continues to haunt us, Forty Autumns is an intimate and beautifully written story of courage, resilience, and love—of five women whose spirits could not be broken, and who fought to preserve what matters most: family. Forty Autumns is illustrated with dozens of black-and-white and color photographs. |
| collapse of the berlin wall: The Strategic Defense Initiative United States. President (1981-1989 : Reagan), 1985 |
| collapse of the berlin wall: Becoming Hitler Thomas Weber, 2017 In Becoming Hitler, Thomas Weber continues from where he left off in his previous book, Hitler's First War, stripping away the layers of myth and fabrication in Hitler's own tale to tell the real story of Hitler's politicization and radicalization in post-First World War Munich. It is the gripping account of how an awkward and unemployed loner with virtually no recognizable leadership qualities and fluctuating political ideas turned into thecharismatic, self-assured, virulently anti-Semitic leader with an all-or-nothing approach to politics with whom the world was soon to become tragically familiar. As Weber clearly shows, far from the picture of afully-formed political leader which Hitler wanted to portray in Mein Kampf, his ideas and priorities were still very uncertain and largely undefined in early 1919 - and they continued to shift until 1923. |
| collapse of the berlin wall: The Fall of the Berlin Wall Jeff Hay, 2010 Collects nineteen essays that offer varying perspectives on the destruction of the Berlin Wall, discussing the history of the wall, controversies, and the political and personal significance of the wall's destruction. |
| collapse of the berlin wall: 1989 the Berlin Wall Peter Millar, 2014-08-12 Follow Peter Millar on a journey in the heart of Cold War Europe, from the carousing bars of 1970s Fleet Street to the East Berlin corner pub with its eclectic cast of characters who embodied the reality of living on the wrong side of the wall. |
Collapse Of The Berlin Wall (book) - netsec.csuci.edu
Collapse Of The Berlin Wall collapse of the berlin wall: The Collapse Mary Sarotte, 2014-10-07 On the night of November 9, 1989, massive crowds surged toward the Berlin Wall, drawn by …
Document No. 15: Diary of Anatoly Chernyaev regarding the …
10 Nov 1989 · Collapse of the Berlin Wall . November 10, 1989 . The Berlin Wall has collapsed. This entire era in the history of the socialist system is over. After the PUWP and the HSWP …
The Fall of the Berlin Wall - DW
The Fall of the Berlin Wall was one of the most significant events of the last century and was a turning point in history, not only for Germany. With a combination of peaceful pressure and...
The Berlin Wall: How It Rose, How It Fell, and Its Relevance to …
The significance of the Second World War to the Berlin Wall is that the aftermath left Germany, especially Berlin, vulnerable to the influence of occupying powers. Germany was desperate to …
The Fall of the Berlin Wall: The Counterrevolution in Soviet Foreign ...
The fall of the Berlin Wall was not only a sudden and dramatic event in world history, but it was a critical moment that began a reevaluation of theories of international relations.
GCSE History Superpower relations and the Cold War
The significance of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The collapse of the Soviet Union and its significance in bringing about the end of the Warsaw Pact. Every subtopic has a 10 question knowledge …
A Brief History of the Berlin Crisis of 1961 - National Archives
On Saturday August 12, 1961, East Berlin mayor Walter Ulbricht signed an order to close the border and erect a Wall. The tide of East Germans flooding to the West through the many
Thirty Years After the Berlin Wall - Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen
after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it takes a broad view on German unification and transformation research. Transformation and unification processes in East and West Germany are
Social Education 74(3), pp 152–154 ©2010 National Council for …
tested simulation for teaching the Berlin Wall and (2) provide educators with a list of relevant resources. The Berlin Wall Simulation The Berlin Wall was a 27-mile wall built by the East …
FALL OF THE BERLIN WALL 30th anniversary - Consilium
The fall of the Berlin Wall is an important milestone in EU history and triggered a domino effect of events that propelled democratic change in the CEE region. Within days of the fall of the Wall, …
Bitter Measures: Intelligence and Action in the Berlin Crisis, 1961
The building of the Berlin Wall ensured that the German Democratic Republic would last only so long as the Wall remained. Its construction was an admission of defeat by the communist …
The End of Bipolarity - NCERT
The Berlin Wall, which had been built at the height of the Cold War and was its greatest symbol, was toppled by the people in 1989. This dramatic event was followed by an equally dramatic …
East Germans and the Berlin Wall: Popular Opinion and Social
The building of the Berlin Wall was the culmination of one of the central Cold War crises of the late 1950s and early 1960s, whose international political background need not concern us …
Reflections on Communism: Twenty Years after the Fall of the …
years ago the Berlin Wall fell, marking the col-lapse of Soviet communism. The failure of the com-munist system was not merely economic and political; it was a moral failure as well. Over...
After the Berlin Wall: Realigned Worlds, Invisible Lines, and ...
AFTER THE BERLIN WALL 3 constructivist, not positivist terms—as a key architect in the demise of the Cold War. Research like this challenges the assumption of a victorious Western …
The Fall of the Berlin Wall: Perceptions and Implications for Australia
In Europe, the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989 was a watershed for East-West relations.1 This soon became evident at the meeting of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization …
The Collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989: A Historical Turning ... - ed
The study reported in this paper centred on the question whether the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 had any effect on the status of religion / religious education in South Africa.
Goodbye Lenin - Film Education
Hailed as the Best European Film at the 2003 Berlin Film Festival, Goodbye Lenin is set in East Germany around the time of the collapse of the Berlin Wall. The film provides a fleeting …
The Demise of the Soviet Bloc - JSTOR
decade was out, the communist regimes in East-Central Europe would collapse peacefully (apart from violence in Romania) and that the Berlin Wall - the symbolic divide in Europe for nearly …
Collapse Of The Berlin Wall (book) - netsec.csuci.edu
Collapse Of The Berlin Wall collapse of the berlin wall: The Collapse Mary Sarotte, 2014-10-07 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
Document No. 15: Diary of Anatoly Chernyaev regarding the Collapse …
10 Nov 1989 · Collapse of the Berlin Wall . November 10, 1989 . The Berlin Wall has collapsed. This entire era in the history of the socialist system is over. After the PUWP and the HSWP went Honecker. Today we received messages about the "retirement" of Deng Xiaopeng and Todor Zhivkov. Only our "best friends" Castro, Ceauşescu, and Kim Il Sung are
The Fall of the Wall: The Unintended Self-Dissolution of East …
East Germany’s sudden collapse like a house of cards in fall 1989 caught both the political and academic worlds by surprise.1 The decisive moment of the collapse was undoubtedly the fall of the Berlin Wall during the night of 9 November 1989.
The Fall of the Berlin Wall - DW
The Fall of the Berlin Wall was one of the most significant events of the last century and was a turning point in history, not only for Germany. With a combination of peaceful pressure and...
The Berlin Wall: How It Rose, How It Fell, and Its Relevance to …
The significance of the Second World War to the Berlin Wall is that the aftermath left Germany, especially Berlin, vulnerable to the influence of occupying powers. Germany was desperate to be stable and proud. In 1933, the Nazi Party’s massive propaganda campaign, which promised a new Germany, thrived.
The Fall of the Berlin Wall: The Counterrevolution in Soviet …
The fall of the Berlin Wall was not only a sudden and dramatic event in world history, but it was a critical moment that began a reevaluation of theories of international relations.
GCSE History Superpower relations and the Cold War
The significance of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The collapse of the Soviet Union and its significance in bringing about the end of the Warsaw Pact. Every subtopic has a 10 question knowledge check. At the end of each key topic there are exam questions to …
A Brief History of the Berlin Crisis of 1961 - National Archives
On Saturday August 12, 1961, East Berlin mayor Walter Ulbricht signed an order to close the border and erect a Wall. The tide of East Germans flooding to the West through the many
Thirty Years After the Berlin Wall - Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen
after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it takes a broad view on German unification and transformation research. Transformation and unification processes in East and West Germany are
Social Education 74(3), pp 152–154 ©2010 National Council for …
tested simulation for teaching the Berlin Wall and (2) provide educators with a list of relevant resources. The Berlin Wall Simulation The Berlin Wall was a 27-mile wall built by the East German government in 1961 to protect its people from capi-talism. The wall split Berlin into East and West Berlin. East Berlin was part of
FALL OF THE BERLIN WALL 30th anniversary - Consilium
The fall of the Berlin Wall is an important milestone in EU history and triggered a domino effect of events that propelled democratic change in the CEE region. Within days of the fall of the Wall, the European Parliament held a plenary debate on the situation in the CEE states.
Bitter Measures: Intelligence and Action in the Berlin Crisis, 1961
The building of the Berlin Wall ensured that the German Democratic Republic would last only so long as the Wall remained. Its construction was an admission of defeat by the communist leadership. Once built, it was doomed, sooner or later, to come down. It did not seem so at the time. The Berlin Wall was built in a period of soaring
The End of Bipolarity - NCERT
The Berlin Wall, which had been built at the height of the Cold War and was its greatest symbol, was toppled by the people in 1989. This dramatic event was followed by an equally dramatic and historic chain of events that led to the collapse of the ‘second world’ and the end of the Cold War. Germany, divided after the Second World War, was ...
East Germans and the Berlin Wall: Popular Opinion and Social
The building of the Berlin Wall was the culmination of one of the central Cold War crises of the late 1950s and early 1960s, whose international political background need not concern us here. For our purposes it is merely worth not-ing that, as research since the opening of the GDR's archives demonstrates, the
Reflections on Communism: Twenty Years after the Fall of the Berlin Wall
years ago the Berlin Wall fell, marking the col-lapse of Soviet communism. The failure of the com-munist system was not merely economic and political; it was a moral failure as well. Over...
After the Berlin Wall: Realigned Worlds, Invisible Lines, and ...
AFTER THE BERLIN WALL 3 constructivist, not positivist terms—as a key architect in the demise of the Cold War. Research like this challenges the assumption of a victorious Western socioeconomical system and complicates the idea of a “collapse” of the Soviet Union. For flag-waving and capital-carrying conservatives, however, the
The Fall of the Berlin Wall: Perceptions and Implications for Australia
In Europe, the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989 was a watershed for East-West relations.1 This soon became evident at the meeting of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) on 19 November 1989, which culminated in a declaration stating that the NATO Alliance and the Warsaw Pact members were no longer adversaries.
The Collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989: A Historical Turning ... - ed
The study reported in this paper centred on the question whether the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 had any effect on the status of religion / religious education in South Africa.
Goodbye Lenin - Film Education
Hailed as the Best European Film at the 2003 Berlin Film Festival, Goodbye Lenin is set in East Germany around the time of the collapse of the Berlin Wall. The film provides a fleeting glimpse into one of the major events in modern European history, touching many important political and …
The Demise of the Soviet Bloc - JSTOR
decade was out, the communist regimes in East-Central Europe would collapse peacefully (apart from violence in Romania) and that the Berlin Wall - the symbolic divide in Europe for nearly 30 years - would be opened. The momentous events of 1989 led to drastic changes in the political complexion of Eastern Europe and the end of the Cold War.
