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...

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 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.

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.

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 ...

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.

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.

A “constantly captivating…well-researched and often moving” (The Wall Street Journal) history of Checkpoint Charlie, the famous military gate on the border of East and West Berlin where the United States confronted the USSR during the Cold War. In the early 1960s, East Germany committed a...

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.”

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 ...

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 ...

Imagine a society with no unemployment, zero inflation, free healthcare and education, free childcare, virtually no serious crime, and where women and men are treated with absolute equality. Such a society has existed: in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), popularly known as East Germany.

Peter was born on the east side of Germany, the side that wasn't free. He watches news programs rather than cartoons, and wears scratchy uniforms instead of blue jeans. His family endures long lines and early curfews. But Peter knows it won't always be this way. Peter and his family have a secret. Late at night in their attic, they are piecing together a hot-air balloon—and a plan. Can Peter and his family fly their way to freedom?

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.

East Germany: The History and Legacy of the Soviet Satellite State Established after World War II examines the controversial country and its place in the Cold War. The history of East Germany was a remarkable one, from its chaotic origins through its ossification as a Stalinist regime, until the country collapsed with the Berlin Wall. Not only is Germany still marked by the division, but the old frontier still represents different expectations, social conditions, and worldviews.

A "riveting" (Wall Street Journal) book tells the unbelievable true story of an escape tunnel under the Berlin Wall--the people who built it, the spy who betrayed it, and the media event it inspired. In September 1961, at the height of the Cold War, 22-year-old Joachim Rudolph escaped from East...

A classic of Japanese history, this audiobook is the preeminent work on the history of Japan. Newly revised and updated, A History of Japan is a single-volume complete history of the nation of Japan. Starting in ancient Japan during its early pre-history period, A History of Japan covers every important aspect of history and culture through feudal Japan to the post-Cold War period and collapse of the bubble economy in the early 1990s. Recent findings shed additional light on the origins of Japanese civilization and the birth of Japanese culture.    

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. 

A new identity. A new job. A new life. But the past is never far behind. Ewe Bohn, a man who thought he had buried his former self, is lured back into the shadows of his old profession. In post-war Germany, where loyalties are as fragile as the crumbling walls around him, Bohn's skills are once again in high demand by the CIA. The Gehlen Organization, a covert network of former Nazi operatives now serving the West, is expanding rapidly to counter the rising threats from the Soviet Union and the newly minted East Germany. As Bohn plunges deeper into this dangerous world, he must decide how ...