Dissolution

Dissolution

Charles S. Maier

Language: English

Pages: 464

ISBN: 0691007462

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Against the backdrop of one of the great transformations of our century, the sudden and unexpected fall of communism as a ruling system, Charles Maier recounts the history and demise of East Germany. Dissolution is his poignant, analytically provocative account of the decline and fall of the late German Democratic Republic.

This book explains the powerful causes for the disintegration of German communism as it constructs the complex history of the GDR. Maier looks at the turning points in East Germany's forty-year history and at the mix of coercion and consent by which the regime functioned. He analyzes the GDR as it evolved from the purges of the 1950s to the peace movements and emerging youth culture of the 1980s, and then turns his attention to charges of Stasi collaboration that surfaced after 1989. In the context of describing the larger collapse of communism, Maier analyzes German elements that had counterparts throughout the Soviet bloc, including its systemic and eventually terminal economic crisis, corruption and privilege in the SED, the influence of the Stasi and the plight of intellectuals and writers, and the slow loss of confidence on the part of the ruling elite. He then discusses the mass protests and proliferation of dissident groups in 1989, the collapse of the ruling party, and the troubled aftermath of unification.

Dissolution is the first book that spans the communist collapse and the ensuing process of unification, and that draws on newly available archival documents from the last phases of the GDR, including Stasi reports, transcripts of Politburo and Central Committee debates, and papers from the Economic Planning Commission, the Council of Ministers, and the office files of key party officials. This book is further bolstered by Maier's extensive knowledge of European history and the Cold War, his personal observations and conversations with East Germans during the country's dramatic transition, and memoirs and other eyewitness accounts published during the four-decade history of the GDR.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

other, interacted precisely because the events of 1989 established so compelling a case for the power of both. Of course, people are always making choices. The East Germans who did not contest their condition before 1989 made choices as well. But we observers were privileged in 1989 to watch them make new and unexpected choices, to opt for self-determination and not further acquiescence. Speaking personally, since much of my work as a twentieth-century historian has involved examining the

industrial plant to win a 1984 contract from the Spanish state energy authority to build two mammoth paddle-wheel excavators designed for open-pit mining operations. The TAKRAF Kombinat, which specialized in heavy earth-moving machinery, deliberately underbid the West German firms that dominated this sector precisely to gain a market foothold. From one perspective this was a bold entrepreneurial move, but the enterprise soon ran into all sorts of difficulties. As the state inspectors reported,

and Pas de Calais. “Charbonnages de France is a model for us,” the Czech mine director also told the reporter from Le Monde—the French national coal agency that halved its employees in four years and was the target of French Communist Party wrath.118 In part the pressure to shut down derived from the threat of ecological disaster: sulfur spewing forth above the Saxon plain or the Sudeten hills, chemicals dumped into lakes and rivers. For Czechoslovakia nuclear energy and imports of natural gas

Between Socialism and Capitalism Abwicklung: Academic Purge and Renewal Stasi Stains: The Old Regime on Trial 285 290 303 311 Wrapped Reichstag, 1995 330 Notes 339 A Note on Sources 421 Index 427 Preface THIS book addresses one of the great transformations of our century, the sudden and unexpected fall of communism as a ruling system. As Tocqueville wrote about the French events of 1789, whose bicentennial was being celebrated even as the story told here gathered momentum, rarely was

determining role.” Even Jakeš referred to the “breakthrough” character of the present age and argued that a complex transformation of Czech society that required extensive democratization had now begun. And Jaruzelski justified his government’s round-table negotiations with Solidarity by tracing the repeated cycles of working-class protest. In 1981, he emphasized, Solidarity had burst over our life like a typhoon, like a tornado. But the Poles were attempting to solve the current crisis “without

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