Download or read book After the Wall written by Jana Hensel and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2008-03-04 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
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.
Download or read book Tunnel 29 written by Helena Merriman and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2021-08-24 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
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.
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 650 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.
Download or read book After the Fall How Humpty Dumpty Got Back Up Again written by Dan Santat and published by . This book was released on 2017-10-03 with total page 45 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the New York Times-bestselling creator of The Adventures of Beekle: The Unimaginary Friend comes the inspiring epilogue to the beloved classic nursery rhyme Humpty Dumpty. Everyone knows that when Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. But what happened after? Caldecott Medalist Dan Santat's poignant tale follows Humpty Dumpty, an avid bird watcher whose favorite place to be is high up on the city wall--that is, until after his famous fall. Now terrified of heights, Humpty can longer do many of the things he loves most. Will he summon the courage to face his fear? After the Fall (How Humpty Dumpty Got Back Up Again) is a masterful picture book that will remind readers of all ages that Life begins when you get back up. 2018 NCTE Charlotte Huck Award Winner A Kirkus Reviews Best Picture Book of 2017 A New York Times Notable Children's Book of 2017 A New York City Public Library Notable Best Book for Kids A Chicago Public Library Best Book of 2017 A Horn Book Fanfare Best Book of 2017 An NPR Best Book of 2017
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.
Download or read book Mitterrand the End of the Cold War and German Unification written by Frédéric Bozo and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2009 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the role of France in the events leading up to the end of the Cold War and German unification. --from publisher description.
Download or read book Stasiland written by Anna Funder and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2011-11-22 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Uncivil Society written by Stephen Kotkin and published by Modern Library. This book was released on 2010-10-12 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book 1989 written by Mary Elise Sarotte and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2014-10-19 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
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.
Download or read book Wall Disease The Psychological Toll of Living Up Against a Border written by Jessica Wapner and published by The Experiment, LLC. This book was released on 2020-10-06 with total page 133 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We build border walls to keep danger out. But do we understand the danger posed by walls themselves? East Germans were the first to give the crisis a name: Mauerkrankheit, or “wall disease.” The afflicted—everyday citizens living on both sides of the Berlin wall—displayed some combination of depression, anxiety, excitability, suicidal ideation, and paranoia. The Berlin Wall is no more, but today there are at least seventy policed borders like it. What are they doing to our minds? Jessica Wapner investigates, following a trail of psychological harm around the world. In Brownsville, Texas, the hotly contested US-Mexico border wall instills more feelings of fear than of safety. And in eastern Europe, a Georgian grandfather pines for his homeland—cut off from his daughters, his baker, and his bank by the arbitrary path of a razor-wire fence built in 2013. Even in borderlands riven by conflict, the same walls that once offered relief become enduring reminders of trauma and helplessness. Our brains, Wapner writes, devote “border cells” to where we can and cannot go safely—so, a wall that goes up in our town also goes up in our minds. Weaving together interviews with those living up against walls and expert testimonies from geographers, scientists, psychologists, and other specialists, she explores the growing epidemic of wall disease—and illuminates how neither those “outside” nor “inside” are immune.
Download or read book The Victims at the Berlin Wall 1961 1989 written by Hans-Hermann Hertle and published by Ch. Links Verlag. This book was released on 2011 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although many deaths at the Berlin Wall have been publicized over the years in the media, the number, identity and fate of the victims still remain largely unknown. This handbook changes this by answering the following questions: How many people actually died at the Berlin Wall between 1961 and 1989? Who were these people? How did they die? How were their relatives and their friends treated after their deaths? What public and political reactions were triggered in the East and the West by these fatalities? What were the consequences for the border guards who pulled the trigger and the military and political leaders who gave them their orders after the East German border regime collapsed and the Wall fell? How have the victims been commemorated since their deaths? By documenting the lives and circumstances under which these men and women died at the Wall, these deaths are placed in a contemporary historical context. The authors, in addition to systematically researching the relevant archives and examining all the legal proceedings and Stasi documents, also conducted interviews with family members and contemporary witnesses.
Download or read book West Germany and the Iron Curtain written by Astrid M. Eckert and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-09-02 with total page 445 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: West Germany and the Iron Curtain takes a fresh look at the history of Cold War Germany and the German reunification process from the spatial perspective of the West German borderlands that emerged along the volatile inter-German border after 1945. These border regions constituted the Federal Republic's most sensitive geographical space where it had to confront partition and engage its socialist neighbor East Germany in concrete ways. Each issue that arose in these borderlands - from economic deficiencies, border tourism, environmental pollution, landscape change, and the siting decision for a major nuclear facility - was magnified and mediated by the presence of what became the most militarized border of its day, the Iron Curtain. In topical chapters, the book addresses the economic consequences of the border for West Germany, which defined the border regions as depressed areas, and examines the cultural practice of western tourism to the Iron Curtain. At the heart of this deeply-researched book stands an environmental history of the Iron Curtain that explores transboundary pollution, landscape change, and a planned nuclear industrial site at Gorleben that was meant to bring jobs into the depressed border regions. The book traces these subjects across the caesura of 1989/90, thereby integrating the "long" postwar era with the post-unification decades. As Eckert demonstrates, the borderlands that emerged with partition and disappeared with reunification did not merely mirror some larger developments in the Federal Republic's history but actually helped to shape them.
Download or read book The World Is Flat Further Updated and Expanded Release 3 0 written by Thomas L. Friedman and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2007-08-07 with total page 682 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores globalization, its opportunities for individual empowerment, its achievements at lifting millions out of poverty, and its drawbacks--environmental, social, and political.
Download or read book The Tell Tale Heart written by Edgar Allan Poe and published by SAMPI Books. This book was released on 2024-01-29 with total page 22 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart", the narrator tries to prove his sanity after murdering an elderly man because of his "vulture eye". His growing guilt leads him to hear the old man's heart beating under the floorboards, which drives him to confess the crime to the police.
