After the Berlin Wall

After the Berlin Wall

Author: Hope M. Harrison

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2019-09-26

Total Pages: 483

ISBN-13: 1107049318

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


The Collapse

The Collapse

Author: Mary Sarotte

Publisher: Basic Books (AZ)

Published: 2014-10-07

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 0465064949

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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.


In Uncertain Times

In Uncertain Times

Author: Melvyn P. Leffler

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2011-05-15

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 0801460816

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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.


Berlin Now

Berlin Now

Author: Peter Schneider

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 2014-08-05

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 0374254842

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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.


After the Berlin Wall

After the Berlin Wall

Author: Christopher Hilton

Publisher: The History Press

Published: 2011-11-30

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 0752479962

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On 7 May 1945, Grand Admiral Donitz, named in Hitler's will as head of state, authorised the unconditional surrender of all German forces to the Allies on the following day. World War II in Europe was at an end. But many of the German people would continue to endure hardships, as both the country and the capital were to be divided between France, the UK and the USA in the west and the USSR in the east. East and West Germany, and East and West Berlin, would remain divided until 1989. By October 1990, however, the two countries were reunited, and the Berlin Reichstag was once again the seat of government. Here, politicians would put East and West back together again, marrying a totalitarian, atheist, communist system with a democratic, Christian, capitalist one. How did this marriage affect the everyday life of ordinary Germans? How did combining two telephone systems, two postal services, hospitals, farm land, property, industry, railways and roads work? How were women's rights, welfare, pensions, trades unions, arts, rents and housing affected? There had been no warning of this marriage and no preparation for it - and no country had ever tried putting two completely opposite systems together before. This is the story of what happened, in the words of the people it happened to - the people's story of an incredible unification.


After the Wall

After the Wall

Author: Jana Hensel

Publisher: PublicAffairs

Published: 2008-03-04

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781586485597

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Jana Hensel was thirteen on November 9, 1989, the night the Berlin Wall fell. In all the euphoria over German reunification, no one stopped to think what it would mean for Jana and her generation of East Germans. These were the kids of the seventies, who had grown up in the shadow of Communism with all its hokey comforts: the Young Pioneer youth groups, the cheerful Communist propaganda, and the comforting knowledge that they lived in a Germany unblemished by an ugly Nazi past and a callous capitalist future. Suddenly everything was gone. East Germany disappeared, swallowed up by the West, and in its place was everything Jana and her friends had coveted for so long: designer clothes, pop CDs, Hollywood movies, supermarkets, magazines. They snapped up every possible Western product and mannerism. They changed the way they talked, the way they walked, what they read, where they went. They cut off from their parents. They took English lessons, and opened bank accounts. Fifteen years later, they all have the right haircuts and drive the right cars, but who are they? Where are they going? In After the Wall, Jana Hensel tells the story of her confused generation of East Germans, who were forced to abandon their past and feel their way through a foreign landscape to an uncertain future. Now as they look back, they wonder whether the oppressive, yet comforting life of their childhood wasn't so bad after all.


When the Wall Came Down

When the Wall Came Down

Author: Serge Schmemann

Publisher: Paw Prints

Published: 2009-07-10

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781442038363

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Articles from the archives of "The New York Times" and the author's first-hand account of an historic moment in European history relate the division of Berlin after World War II and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.


After the Berlin Wall

After the Berlin Wall

Author: K. Gerstenberger

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2011-11-21

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 0230337759

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Twenty years after its fall, the wall that divided Berlin and Germany presents a conceptual paradox: on one hand, Germans have sought to erase it completely; on the other, it haunts the imagination in complex and often surprising ways


Economic Growth in Europe Since 1945

Economic Growth in Europe Since 1945

Author: N. F. R. Crafts

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1996-04-18

Total Pages: 636

ISBN-13: 9780521499644

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This compelling volume re-examines the topic of economic growth in Europe after the Second World War. The contributors approach the subject armed not only with new theoretical ideas, but also with the experience of the 1980s on which to draw. The analysis is based on both applied economics and on economic history. Thus, while the volume is greatly informed by insights from growth theory, emphasis is given to the presentation of chronological and institutional detail. The case study approach and the adoption of a longer-run perspective than is normal for economists allow new insights to be obtained. As well as including chapters that consider the experience of individual European countries, the book explores general European institutional arrangements and historical circumstances. The result is a genuinely comparative picture of post-war growth, with insights that do not emerge from standard cross-section regressions based on the post-1960 period.