Best Books on Cold War Germany: Division and Reunification

In May 1949, the Federal Republic of Germany came into existence in the western zones of occupation. Five months later, the German Democratic Republic was declared in the Soviet zone. For forty years, the same people, speaking the same language, living on the same territory, built two radically different societies. The Wall that physically divided Berlin from 1961 to 1989 was the most visible symbol of that division. The books below cover both Germanys, the Cold War context, and the extraordinary moment when the Wall came down. ## The Division Germany's division was the direct product of Allied disagreement about what to do with a defeated Nazi state. The Western powers built a liberal democracy anchored to NATO and the emerging European Community. The Soviets installed a Stalinist party state based on the model they were establishing across Eastern Europe. Both states had strong incentives to claim legitimacy: the Federal Republic as the more democratic Germany, the GDR as the anti-fascist Germany. Neither fully succeeded, but both survived for four decades. ### After the Reich by Giles MacDonogh MacDonogh's 2007 book covers the period immediately after Germany's defeat in 1945, the mass expulsions of Germans from Eastern Europe, the Allied occupation policies, and the conditions that produced two separate German states. It is the essential starting point for understanding what Germany looked like before the division solidified. The expulsion chapters, covering the forced migration of 12-14 million ethnic Germans from Poland, Czechoslovakia, and other countries, are some of the most important and underread pages in twentieth-century European history. [After the Reich on Amazon](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0465008976?tag=31813-20) ### The Lives of Others (source material) For understanding daily life in the GDR, no single work of history has done more to shape popular understanding than the 2006 film "The Lives of Others," which depicts the Stasi's surveillance of East Berlin artists in the 1980s. The history behind it is Anna Funder's "Stasiland" (2002), which interviewed both former Stasi officers and their victims in the years after reunification. Funder's book is the best account in English of how the GDR's secret police operated and what it meant to live under that surveillance. [Stasiland by Anna Funder on Amazon](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1844086356?tag=31813-20) ## The Wall The Berlin Wall was built in the night of August 12-13, 1961, to stop the hemorrhage of East Germans fleeing to the West. In its twenty-eight years of existence, at least 140 people were killed trying to cross it, though the actual number may be higher. It became the defining symbol of the Cold War divide, literally inscribed on the landscape of a city. ### The Berlin Wall by Frederick Taylor Taylor's 2006 history of the Wall is the most thorough account of its construction, operation, and fall. He covers the political decisions that led to it, the escape attempts that followed, and the internal GDR debates about how long it could be maintained. The chapters on the night it came down, November 9, 1989, when a confused press conference created a stampede that the regime had no power to stop, are gripping. [The Berlin Wall by Frederick Taylor on Amazon](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0062985515?tag=31813-20) ## Reunification and Its Aftermath When the Wall fell, reunification happened faster than almost anyone expected. By October 3, 1990, barely eleven months after the first breach, East and West Germany were a single state. The speed created problems that lasted decades. West German institutions absorbed East German ones wholesale. East German industries collapsed under market competition. Millions of East Germans experienced reunification as a defeat as much as a liberation, their entire professional and social networks suddenly invalidated. Mary Elise Sarotte's "The Collapse" (2014) is the best account of the ten days between the Wall's opening and the first free East German elections. Timothy Garton Ash's reporting from inside Eastern Europe in 1989, collected in "The Magic Lantern," captures the mood of that extraordinary autumn from someone who was present. And for the long aftermath, Jana Hensel's memoir "After the Wall" gives an East German's account of growing up in a reunified country that treated her formative world as an embarrassment to be erased. ## Two Different Memories Thirty-five years after reunification, the question of how East and West Germans remember the Cold War period differently remains live. Polls consistently show that significant minorities of East Germans look back on GDR life with something like nostalgia, a phenomenon called Ostalgie. The reasons are not hard to find: full employment, affordable housing, free childcare, and social certainty were real features of GDR life, even if they came with surveillance and restricted freedom. Understanding both states honestly requires holding both of these realities at once. ## Further Reading For more Cold War and European history titles, browse the [history category](/category/history) on Skriuwer.