Dissolution
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€72.99
A01=Charles S. Maier
Adam Michnik
Allied Control Council
Allies of World War II
Anschluss
Anti-communism
Appeasement
Author_Charles S. Maier
Category=JPA
Category=JPFC
Category=NHD
Central Committee
Checkpoint Charlie
Cold War
Cold War (1985-91)
Comecon
Communism
Confessing Church
Crisis of Leadership
Czechoslovakia
Decolonization
Deutsche Mark
Dual power
East Germany
Egon Krenz
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Erich Honecker
Federal republic
German re-armament
German resistance to Nazism
Goulash Communism
Gregor Gysi
Gyula Horn
Helmut Kohl
Historikerstreit
Hungarian Revolution of 1956
Imperialism
Joachim Gauck
Konrad Adenauer
Liberalization
Mikhail Gorbachev
Military dictatorship
National Democratic Party of Germany
New class
New Economic Policy
New Forum
North American Free Trade Agreement
On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences
Ostpolitik
Perestroika
Police action
Prague Spring
Reprisal
Revanchism
Romanticism
Rudolf Bahro
Rudolf Herrnstadt
Russians in Germany
Samizdat
Smith Act
Sonderweg
Soviet dissidents
Soviet Empire
Soviet Union
Stalin Note
Stasi
State socialism
Superiority (short story)
Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany
Unemployment
Velvet Revolution
Walther Rathenau
Wessi
West Germany
Willy Brandt
Wolfgang Vogel
Product details
- ISBN 9780691007465
- Weight: 624g
- Dimensions: 152 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 21 Mar 1999
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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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.
Charles S. Maier teaches history at Harvard University. He is Krupp Foundation Professor of European Studies, Director of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, and Chairman of the Committee on Degrees in Social Studies. His books include Recasting Bourgeois Europe: Stabilization in France, Germany, and Italy in the Decade after World War I and The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity.
