Behind the Berlin Wall: East Germany and the Frontiers of Power

by Patrick Major

Overview

Few historical changes occur literally overnight, but on 13 August 1961 eighteen million East Germans awoke to find themselves walled in by an edifice which was to become synonymous with the Cold War: the Berlin Wall. This new history rejects traditional, top-down approaches to Cold War politics, exploring instead how the border closure affected ordinary East Germans, from workers and farmers to teenagers and even party members, 'caught out' by Sunday the Thirteenth. Party, police, and Stasi reports reveal why one in six East Germans fled the country during the 1950s, undermining communist rule and forcing the eleventh-hour decision by Khrushchev and Ulbricht to build a wall along the Cold War's frontline. Did East Germans resist or come to terms with immurement? Did the communist regime become more or less dictatorial within the confines of the so-called 'Antifascist Defence Rampart'? Using film and literature, but also the GDR's losing battle against Beatlemania, Patrick Major's cross-disciplinary study suggests that popular culture both reinforced and undermined the closed society. Linking external and internal developments, Major argues that the GDR's official quest for international recognition, culminating in Ostpolitik and United Nations membership in the early 1970s, became its undoing, unleashing a human rights movement which fed into, but then broke with, the protests of 1989. After exploring the reasons for the fall of the Wall and reconstructing the heady days of the autumn revolution, the author reflects on the fate of the Wall after 1989, as it moved from demolition into the realm of memory.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780191608247
Publisher:	OUP Oxford
Publication date:	11/26/2009
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

Patrick Major studied as an undergraduate and postgraduate at the University of Oxford. He came to know East Berlin during a year living in West Berlin in 1985-86, and was one of the first western researchers allowed into the East German communist party's archives after the fall of the wall in February 1990, for a PhD on The Death of the KPD: Communism and Anti-Communism in West Germany, 1945-1956 (OUP, 1997) which won the Royal Historical Society's Gladstone Prize.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations viii

Abbreviations ix

1 Introduction: The Frontiers of Power 1

Part I Before The Wall, 1945-61

2 East Germany's Dual Crisis: Politics and Economics on the Eve of the Wall 23

3 Crossing the Line: Republikflucht between Defection and Migration 56

4 Holding the Line: Policing the Open Border 89

Part II Behind the Wall, 1961-89

5 Walled in: 13 August 1961 119

6 In the Shadow of the Wall: Coming to Terms with Communism 155

7 Wanderlust: Travel, Emigration and the Movement 194

Part III Beyond the Wall

8 The Fall of the Wall: 9 November 1989 227

9 Seeking Closure: Remembering the Wall 258

Bibliography 295

Index 317