East Germany

AN INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER From the ashes of the Second World War to the fall of the Berlin Wall, “an expansive and generous history” of East Germany (New Republic) In 1990, a country disappeared. When the Iron Curtain fell, East Germany ceased to be. For over forty years, from the ruin...

In the long-awaited follow-up to her Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag, acclaimed journalist Anne Applebaum delivers a groundbreaking history of how Communism took over Eastern Europe after World War II and transformed in frightening fashion the individuals who came under its sway. At the end of...

In The Cold War, Odd Arne Westad offers a new perspective on a century when a superpower rivalry and an ideological war transformed every corner of our globe. We traditionally think of the Cold War as a post-World War II diplomatic and military conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union. But in this major new work, Westad argues that the conflict must be understood as a global ideological confrontation with roots in the industrial revolution and with continuing implications for the world today.

A fast-paced World War II historical novel based on the true story of holocaust survivors This historical novel, based on a true story, brings World War Two to a new level of reality and a descriptive intensity that will leave the reader spellbound. It brings to life the dramatic experiences of a woman caught between a ruthless government and the will to survive with her children during the last six months of World War 2 in Nazi Germany as she flees the incoming Russian front in the East and right into the carpet bombing in the West. This book brings this war down to a human level in a way ...

In Stasiland, Anna Funder tells extraordinary stories of ordinary people who heroically resisted the communist dictatorship, and of those who worked for its vicious secret police, the Stasi. She meets Miriam, who as a 16-year-old was accused of trying to start World War III. She visits the regime’s cartographer, a man obsessed to this day with the Berlin Wall, then gets drunk with the legendary “Mik Jegger” of the east, once declared by the authorities “no longer to exist.”

By 1990, the Berlin Wall had fallen and the East German state security service folded. During 40 years, they had amassed more than a billion pages in manila files detailing the lives of their citizens. Overnight, almost 100,000 Stasi employees, many of them experienced officers with access to highly personal information, found themselves unemployed. This is the story of what they did next. 

This is a series of articles written and published in 1996-2000 in Macedonia, in Russia, in Egypt and in the Czech Republic. How the West lost the East. The economics, the politics, the geopolitics, the conspiracies, the corruption, the old and the new, the plough and the internet – it is all here, in prose, as provocative and vitriolic and loving and longing as I could make it. From "The Mind of Darkness": "'The Balkans' – I say – 'is the unconscious of the world'. People stop to digest this metaphor and then they nod enthusiastically. It is here that the repressed memories of ...

The history of East Germany was closely intertwined with the development of its security services, specifically the Stasi. In an era of totalitarian countries dominated by repressive state agencies, the Stasi stood out for its size and the sheer breadth and depth of its surveillance. The Stasi: The History and Legacy of East Germany’s Secret Police Agency examines the history of one of the most notorious agencies in history. You will learn about the Stasi like never before.

In the summer of 1961, a wall of barbed wire goes up quickly in the dead of night, officially dividing Berlin. Luisa Voigt lives in West Berlin, but her grandmother lives across the border and is now trapped inside the newly isolated communist country of East Germany. Desperate to rescue her grandmother and aware of the many others whose families have been divided, Luisa joins a secret spy network, risking her life to help bring others through a makeshift underground tunnel to West Germany. Their work is dangerous, and not everyone will successfully escape or live to see freedom.

Erich Honecker’s life traces the arc of a century defined by ideology, ambition, and the hard edges of power. Rising from a modest childhood in the Saarland to become the unyielding leader of the German Democratic Republic, Honecker built a state that promised socialism and delivered surveillance, stability, and repression in equal measure. This biography follows his journey from young communist activist to the architect of East Germany’s rigid political order, revealing the convictions that drove him and the contradictions that ultimately consumed his regime. It explores the world he ...

1989: Richard, an expatriate American, is working a profitable yet “pointless” job selling software for a small U.S. firm in West Berlin. Katarina Weber is a married mother whose hedonistic escapades help distract him from the emptiness of his existence. When Richard ventures beyond the No Man’s Land into East Berlin to fulfill a personal obligation, he meets Traudi Franzke, a young nurse addicted to the communist ideals inherited at an early age from her father. The ensuing relationship, separated from reality by the notorious Berlin Wall, exposes beliefs long since betrayed but ...

April 1945. The Third Reich is dying, but Berlin still refuses to surrender. As the Red Army closes on the German capital, the last battle in the East becomes a struggle fought on every level at once: across the Oder, through the suburbs, inside shattered streets, beneath the Reich Chancellery, and finally in the ruined heart of Hitler’s empire. The city that once directed conquest across Europe is reduced to rubble, fear, smoke, and desperation. Old men, boys, broken formations, police, fanatics, and civilians are all pulled into the final convulsion of a regime that can no longer win, ...

For seven decades, our understanding of World War II has been shaped by a standard narrative built on conventional wisdom, propaganda, the dramatic but narrow experiences of soldiers on the ground, and an early generation of historians. For his new history, James Holland has spent over 12 years unearthing new research, recording original testimony, and visiting battlefields and archives that have never before been so accessible.

This volume in a series of world history case studies investigates the career of East Germany’s Walter Ulbricht, one of the few communist leaders to live long enough to experience the most important events of the twentieth century. Too often discounted or ignored by historians, this ever-calculating man survived World War I, Hitler’s rise to power, Stalinism, and World War II to become the architect of Berlin Wall and a man committed to creating a utopian socialist state at any cost. Ulbricht’s perspective helps us to understand Europe’s modern history in a new way.

Hans Unterwald doesn’t pull triggers — he pulls strings When the Berlin Wall falls, one man sees opportunity in the wreckage. Ex–Luftwaffe pilot Hans Unterwald spent the Cold War uncovering traitors inside his own ranks — until the system paid him to keep quiet. Now he sells silence for a living. In the chaos of a reunited Germany, Unterwald becomes the Fixer: the man politicians call when scandals need to vanish and enemies need to disappear. But when he seizes a cache of stolen Stasi files, he discovers the deadliest currency in Europe isn’t money — it’s information. And ...

You will be on the edge of your seat with the harrowing story of a young mother and her daughters in Koenigsberg, East Prussia during the Russian invasion in 1945. The book is compiled from the actual memoir of Heidi's aunt who lived through the events. Welcome to a chunk of history that continues in the lives of the children!

Using archival records, in this book, David Stahel presents a history of Germany's summer campaign from the perspective of the two largest and most powerful Panzer groups on the Eastern front. Stahel's research provides a fundamental reassessment of Germany's war against the Soviet Union, highlighting the prodigious internal problems of the vital Panzer forces and revealing that their demise in the earliest phase of the war undermined the whole German invasion. 

For nearly a century, historians have depicted Germany as a rabidly nationalist land, born in a sea of aggression. Not so, says Helmut Walser Smith, who, in this groundbreaking 500-year history, challenges traditional perceptions of Germany's conflicted past, revealing a nation far more thematically complicated than 20th-century historians have imagined. 

Two men. Two intelligence empires. One secret war that shaped the modern world. Allen Dulles, the CIA's master builder, and Markus Wolf, the ghost who ran the Stasi's foreign spy service. This is the definitive dual biography of the spymasters who fought the Cold War from the shadows. The history books celebrate presidents and generals. They forget the men who toppled governments with a bag of cash, who seduced secretaries into betraying their countries, who built secret armies that changed the course of history. The official records left out one crucial detail: the Cold War was won and ...

A City Divided. A Love Forbidden. A Wall That Changes Everything. Berlin, 1961. In a city caught between freedom and fear, childhood pen pals Lieselotte and Wolfgang reunite by chance on the bustling streets of West Berlin. What begins as a spark of memory ignites into a powerful, undeniable love—one that defies the political lines drawn to keep them apart. Lieselotte lives in the West, where freedom is fragile and watched from the shadows. Wolfgang, raised under the iron grip of East Berlin, finds his world increasingly stifled by the watchful eye of the Stasi and the slow erosion of ...