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Recommended books about Berlin and the Wall

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    Recommended books about Berlin and the Wall

    Was in Berlin last week, loved it. Fascinating city. As my teenage years began in the mid-80s, the fall of the Wall was part of my growing up and visiting makes me want to find out more about how people in the city coped.

    Plus would love recommendations on the odd spy thriller - I've read "The Spy Who Came In From The Cold", but anything of that grim, grey 70s/80s Cold War period would be of interest.

    #2
    I bought Peter Millar's '1989 The Berlin Wall: My Part in its Downfall' the other week, and it's close to the top of my to-read list. Will report back. Blurb calls it "this engaging, garrulous, bibulous memoir".

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      #3
      Anna Funder's Stasiland is excellent.

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        #4
        Mary Elise Sarotte's "The Collapse", which is about October-November 1989 is pretty well done. Uncovers the question of who exactly gave the order to allow border crossings on the night of November 9th (which is an amazing story).

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          #5
          I echo AG's rather understated recommendation for the Sarotte book. It is a remarkable and very well written book. It gives a lot of background to the various strands of circumstances that led to the Leipzig protests and how other internal pressures and external pressure (especially from the Kohl government, which played its hand very well) led to the disintegration of the regime's authority. And then there is the bizarre coincidence of Soviet leadership being unreachable when it really needed to be (from a regime POV).

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            #6
            It did come off as understated didn't it? I should have been more fulsome. It was a very good book. And I read it while staying in Berlin, which in many ways made it better.

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              #7
              Must read that Sarotte book then, the topic is of huge fascination to me (partly because I lived and worked in West Berlin for 6 months of my gap year in 1982 and travelled underneath East Berlin through the ghost stations and Friedrichstrasse twice every working day on the U6, and also got to know some East Berliners privately).

              I echo TG's recommendation of Stasiland - it's a superb book. Absolutely compelling stories, superbly told.

              I've also started Timothy Garton Ash's The File, based on a strong recommendation from a journalist friend.

              I take it you've already seen The Lives of Others?

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                #8
                Question for G-man or other native German speakers: is the word "zeitenleer" (as used in the lyrics for Reinhard Lakomy's "Alles Stasi ausser Mutti", link below) a generally used expression, or is it a poetic coinage of the writer>

                http://www.songtexte.com/songtext/re...-5b83b320.html

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                  #9
                  I think it's a poetic coinage. I only say 'I think' because I've never heard the word, but that's not to say it doesn't generally exit - vocab was always my weak point, and I still have to look up a new word almost every day after reading the paper.

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                    #10
                    Not a native speaker, but it isn't something I came across when living there. And the vast majority of Google hits for the term refer to the lyric.

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                      #11
                      Originally posted by Evariste Euler Gauss View Post
                      Question for G-man or other native German speakers: is the word "zeitenleer" (as used in the lyrics for Reinhard Lakomy's "Alles Stasi ausser Mutti", link below) a generally used expression, or is it a poetic coinage of the writer>

                      http://www.songtexte.com/songtext/re...-5b83b320.html
                      Yes, poetic.

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                        #12
                        Thanks all.

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                          #13
                          I found the ghost stations to be, for want of a better word, my "favourite" bit. Just trying to imagine how all that worked and operated, the concept of the train lights being turned off and sliding by a load of people holding guns as part of a regular commute...

                          I think the thing I realised - which is completely obvious in hindsight - is that West Berliners were just as trapped as the East. I didn't quite get my head around the geography, but the concept of just going for a Sunday drive into the countryside wasn't really available. Sure, it was better, but in a very enclosed space.

                          I found it interesting that the US and French embassies are now on the Eastern side of the wall. Can't help but think a point was being made there.

                          Thanks for the recommendations. I've got Stasiland and started The Collapse. Will work my way through the others. I found it a fascinating city - happened to be in the Kaiser-Wilhelm I Church just at the right moment for the weekly worldwide reading of the Coventry Prayer. Didn't know anything about that beforehand, can't speak a word of German, not religious at all, but to be there for that sort of moment was pretty cool.

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                            #14
                            but the concept of just going for a Sunday drive into the countryside wasn't really available. Sure, it was better, but in a very enclosed space.
                            Well, yes and no. Sure, it was enclosed, so your options were limited. But the scale of Berlin is huge, and the city limits include dozens of square miles of non-urban territory to the west and south west in particular. You can easily get lost in the Grunewald forest, and it has contains several lakes including one massive one. I was only there six months to be fair, but I never felt I'd run out of countryside to explore.

                            Going through the ghost stations was something you got used to very quickly. There weren't many guards on duty on the platform at each station, I usually just spotted two if any at all. The main security for the GDR was making the platforms inaccessible (except to the border force) from the street.

                            One quirky experience on that U6 commute that I took each day from Tempelhof to Rehberge and back was the West German Customs control. The tube platform at Friedrichstrasse was on the western side of the border controls but it was of course GDR territory, and they exploited that fact to earn hard currency by flogging booze and fags at kiosks on the platform, free of West German excise duties. Stopping off to buy such stuff constituted duty evasion/smuggling from a West German perspective, so every so often, when the train stopped at the first stop back in West Beriln, a horde of Customs officers would jump on to the tube, covering all doors to prevent escape, and search the passengers' bags for contraband.

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