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Book After the Berlin Wall

    Book Details:
  • Author : Hope M. Harrison
  • Publisher : Cambridge University Press
  • Release : 2019-09-26
  • ISBN : 1107049318
  • Pages : 483 pages

Download or read book After the Berlin Wall written by Hope M. Harrison and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-09-26 with total page 483 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A revelatory history of the commemoration of the Berlin Wall and its significance in defining contemporary German national identity.

Book 20 Years since the Fall of the Berlin Wall

Download or read book 20 Years since the Fall of the Berlin Wall written by Elisabeth Bakke and published by BWV Verlag. This book was released on 2011-01-01 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: HauptbeschreibungOn 9 November 1989, the Berlin Wall was opened, signalling the beginning of the end of the communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe. By 1990, free elections had been held in most countries in the region. Forty - in some cases fifty - years of communism had come to an end. However, the 'revolutions' of 1989 were not uniform processes: the starting points were different, the trajectories were different - and outside Central Europe even the outcomes of the transitions from communism were different. The fall of communism also caused the Soviet empire to crumble, and the Soviet Union itself fell apart in December 1991 - as did Czechoslovakia in 1993, and Yugoslavia in a gradual process that was to last from 1991 to 2008. This book originated in a conference held in Oslo 11-13 November 2009, arranged by the E.ON Ruhrgas scholarship programme for political science, and commemorating the 20th anniversary of the 'revolutions' in Central and Eastern Europe. The 16 chapters take stock of developments after 1989, with special emphasis on the causes and effects of the transitions, including the processes of state unification and separation that followed in the wake of the 'revolutions'. The book is divided into four main parts: regime transitions from communism; state unification and separation; party system continuity and change since 1989 (in Germany, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland); and on the effects of German unification on external and internal German relations. The geographical scope thus varies from chapter to chapter, but the main emphasis is on Germany and its closest Central European neighbours.Elisabeth Bakke is Associate Professor at Department of Political Science, University of Oslo. Ingo Peters is Associate Professor at Department of Political and Social Sciences, Otto Suhr Institute of Political Science, Freie Universitnt Berlin."

Book 20 Years After the Fall of the Berlin Wall

Download or read book 20 Years After the Fall of the Berlin Wall written by and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 147 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book After the Berlin Wall

Download or read book After the Berlin Wall written by K. Gerstenberger and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-11-21 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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

Book A Long Walk to Democracy

Download or read book A Long Walk to Democracy written by Wilhelm Hofmeister and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 147 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book Stasiland

    Book Details:
  • Author : Anna Funder
  • Publisher : Odyssey Editions
  • Release : 2015-10-29
  • ISBN : 1623730376
  • Pages : 232 pages

Download or read book Stasiland written by Anna Funder and published by Odyssey Editions. This book was released on 2015-10-29 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stasiland tells true stories of people who heroically resisted the communist dictatorship of East Germany, and of people who worked for its secret police, the Stasi. Internationally hailed as a classic, it is ‘fascinating, entertaining, hilarious, horrifying and very important’ (Tom Hanks) and ‘a heartbreaking, beautifully written book.’ (Claire Tomalin). East Germany was one of the most intrusive surveillance states of all time. One in 7 people spied on their friends, family and colleagues. In ‘the most humane and sensitive way’ (J.M. Coetzee) Funder tells the true stories of four people who had the extraordinary courage to refuse to collaborate with the Stasi, and the price they paid. She meets Miriam Weber, who was imprisoned at 16 after scaling the Berlin Wall. She drinks with the legendary “Mik Jegger” of the Eastern Bloc who was ‘disappeared’. And she finds former Stasi men who defend their regime long past its demise, and yearn for the second coming of Communism. Stasiland won the Samuel Johnson Prize for best non-fiction published in English in 2004. It was a finalist for the Guardian First Book Award, the W.H. Heinemann Award, the Index Freedom of Expression Awards, The Age Book of the Year Awards, the Queensland Premier’s Literary Award and the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature (Innovation in Writing). It is read in schools and universities in many countries, and has been adapted for CD and the stage by The National Theatre, London.

Book The Collapse

    Book Details:
  • Author : Mary Sarotte
  • Publisher : Basic Books (AZ)
  • Release : 2014-10-07
  • ISBN : 0465064949
  • Pages : 322 pages

Download or read book The Collapse written by Mary Sarotte and published by Basic Books (AZ). This book was released on 2014-10-07 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Book The Evolution of Integration in Europe  20 Years After the Fall of the Berlin Wall

Download or read book The Evolution of Integration in Europe 20 Years After the Fall of the Berlin Wall written by Alfred Hecht and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book The Fall of the Berlin Wall

Download or read book The Fall of the Berlin Wall written by Jeffrey A. Engel and published by OUP USA. This book was released on 2011-10 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Book Masterpieces of History

Download or read book Masterpieces of History written by Svetlana Savranskaya and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2010-05-20 with total page 783 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Book 20 Years Since the Fall of the Berlin Wall

Download or read book 20 Years Since the Fall of the Berlin Wall written by Elisabeth Bakke and published by BWV Verlag. This book was released on 2011-01-01 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book The Year that Changed the World

Download or read book The Year that Changed the World written by Michael Meyer and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: '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.

Book After the Berlin Wall

Download or read book After the Berlin Wall written by Andrew Kilpatrick and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-01 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After the Berlin Wall tells the inside story of an international financial institution, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), created in the aftermath of communism to help the countries of central and eastern Europe transition towards open market-oriented democratic economies. The first volume of a history in two parts, After the Berlin Wall charts the EBRD’s life from a fledgling high-risk start-up investing in former socialist countries from 1991 to become an established member of the international financial community, which (as of April 2020) operates in almost 40 countries across three continents. This volume describes the multilateral negotiations that created this cosmopolitan institution with a ‘European character’ and the emergence of the EBRD’s unique business model: a focus on the private sector and a mission to deliver development impact with sustainable financial returns. The author recounts the challenges that ‘transition’ countries faced in moving from a defunct to a functioning economic system and maps the EBRD’s response to critical events, from the dissolution of the Soviet Union, to the safe confinement of the Chernobyl disaster site, the debt default in Russia and the onset of the global financial crisis in 2008.

Book The Path to the Berlin Wall

Download or read book The Path to the Berlin Wall written by Manfred Wilke and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2014-04-01 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The long path to the Berlin Wall began in 1945, when Josef Stalin instructed the Communist Party to take power in the Soviet occupation zone while the three Western allies secured their areas of influence. When Germany was split into separate states in 1949, Berlin remained divided into four sectors, with West Berlin surrounded by the GDR but lingering as a captivating showcase for Western values and goods. Following a failed Soviet attempt to expel the allies from West Berlin with a blockade in 1948–49, a second crisis ensued from 1958–61, during which the Soviet Union demanded once and for all the withdrawal of the Western powers and the transition of West Berlin to a “Free City.” Ultimately Nikita Khrushchev decided to close the border in hopes of halting the overwhelming exodus of East Germans into the West. Tracing this path from a German perspective, Manfred Wilke draws on recently published conversations between Khrushchev and Walter Ulbricht, head of the East German state, in order to reconstruct the coordination process between these two leaders and the events that led to building the Berlin Wall.

Book The Year that Changed the World

Download or read book The Year that Changed the World written by Michael Meyer and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-08-05 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: '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.

Book Checkpoint Charlie

    Book Details:
  • Author : Iain MacGregor
  • Publisher : Hachette UK
  • Release : 2019-10-24
  • ISBN : 1472130561
  • Pages : 352 pages

Download or read book Checkpoint Charlie written by Iain MacGregor and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2019-10-24 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'As convoluted and deadly as the plot of a novel by John le Carre, but all too real' Daily Mail, Must Reads 'With a gripping narrative and vivid interviews with those on all sides whose lives were directly affected by that grim symbol of the East-West divide that poisoned Europe for almost half a century, [MacGregor] has made an important contribution to the history of our times' Jonathan Dimbleby 'Captures brilliantly and comprehensively both the danger and exhilaration that I and other reporters, soldiers, and people experienced intersecting with the wall - a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the Europe we have inherited' Jon Snow A powerful, fascinating, and ground-breaking history of Checkpoint Charlie, the legendary and most important military gate on the border of East and West Berlin where the United States and her allies confronted the USSR during the Cold War. As the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall approaches in 2019, Iain MacGregor captures the mistrust, oppression, paranoia, and fear that gripped the city throughout this period. Checkpoint Charlie is about the nerve-wracking confrontation between the West and the Soviet Union that contains never-before-heard interviews with the men who built and dismantled the Wall; lovers who crossed it; relatives and friends who lost family trying to escape over it; German, British, French, and Russian soldiers who guarded its checkpoints; CIA, MI6 and Stasi operatives who oversaw secret operations across its borders; politicians whose ambitions shaped it; journalists who recorded its story; and many more whose living memories contributed to the full story of Checkpoint Charlie. A brilliant work of historical journalism, Checkpoint Charlie is an invaluable record of this period.

Book The Berlin Wall

    Book Details:
  • Author : Frederick Taylor
  • Publisher : A&C Black
  • Release : 2012-08-02
  • ISBN : 1408835827
  • Pages : 618 pages

Download or read book The Berlin Wall written by Frederick Taylor and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2012-08-02 with total page 618 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.