Collapse

The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall by Mary Elise Sarotte, 184 pages

In 1989, change swept Eastern Europe.  In Poland and Hungary, competitive elections were held, breaking the Communist monopoly on power.  Unlike other popular uprisings in Warsaw Pact countries during the post-War period, this time the Soviet Union did not use military force to prop up its puppets.  Yet some regimes stood firm against the mounting tide of unrest - none more so than Erich Honecker's hard-line government in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), which only encouraged tens of thousands of East Germans to make their way to the West through Hungary and Czechoslovakia.

The GDR was unique in many ways.  It had the most comprehensive secret police force in the world (one Stasi agent for every 180 citizens, vs one KGB agent for every 600 Soviet citizens).  It shared a long border with a neighboring nation with which it shared a common language, history, and culture, and where many citizens had friends and family.  Finally, it had in its midst an outpost of the West in the form of West Berlin, surrounded on all sides by the Berlin Wall to prevent East Germans from escaping to the West.  The Wall stood as the ultimate symbol of Communist oppression, the Iron Curtain incarnate in concrete and barbed wire.

Then, in the course of a few hours on November 9, the unthinkable happened.  The Collapse tells the story of how, through a combination of popular determination, official uncertainty, and bureaucratic bungling, the Wall became obsolete in the blink of an eye.  Above all, it shows how this might not have happened, except for the complete failure of moral conviction on the part of the regime.