Few historical changes occur literally overnight, but on August 13
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 Defense 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.
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