In her heyday, Lotte Ulbricht came close enough to Josef Stalin to kiss him. In her dotage, she was a crumpled piece of cloth peering from a pile of blankets in a wheelchair. She refused to see visitors, apart from former party hacks, and was defiant enough to have the name “Ulbricht” displayed on the front-gate letterbox. This attracted unwanted mail. One anonymous letter read, “You shriveled bigwig pig, why don’t you drop dead, you ancient lump of shit, you old East German sow. We’ll fix you!”

---Chapter 1—A Funeral in Berlin. . . read more . . .


While the Eastern economy did grow after unification and begin to catch up with the West, the catch-up basically ended in 1995. But, because unification was required to be a success for political and patriotic reasons, it became almost apostasy to suggest it was not working. The corner was always about to be reached, but that corner still hasn’t come.

---Chapter 2—An Economic Flop. . .  read more . . .


A wave of nostalgia is washing across the East. It is a matter of reaching for a bottle, taking a laudanum fix, and entering a make-believe time warp of warmth and benevolence cloaked in a romantic pink haze. A television show takes a walk down memory lane, and stores sell items of East German miscellany. People who lived for forty years under a regime they loathed have invented a new past. They forget the oppression and the tedium, and yearn for the days they used to hate.

---Chapter 4—Retreat into Nostalgia


Few people believed Axel Schulz could win the world heavyweight boxing title. But this 220-pound Nordic warrior from Valhalla, a product of the communist amateur boxing machine, was getting his chance against George Foreman. He was not supposed to be in Foreman’s class, but his two handlers, trainer Manfred Wolke and manager Wilfried Sauerland, thought otherwise. What Schulz, Wolke, and Sauerland did not know was that Schulz wasn’t merely fighting Foreman. He was also up against a gang of crooks.  

---Chapter 5—The Boxer


When Guenter Schabowski rose on the morning of November 9, 1989, he knew he had a busy day ahead. But, as he said good-bye to his Russian wife before being driven from the stockade at Wandlitz, outside East Berlin, to a meeting of the party’s Central Committee, he had not the slightest inkling that he was stepping into the center of a political storm that was to change the world.

---Chapter 6—The Man Who Gave History a Nudge


Ursula Popiolek woke with a sore throat at 4 a.m. on Sunday, February 17, 1995, at her Eastern Berlin home. As she went to fetch a glass of water, she noticed a light flickering outside. She went to the window and what she saw made her forget her throat. A car in her driveway was ablaze. The police and fire brigade arrived and discovered that the fire had been caused by a bomb.

---Chapter 7—The Midnight Guerillas


On November 4, 1989, a massive crowd gathered in East Berlin’s Alexanderplatz to call for free elections and other rights. Speaker after speaker stepped forward and condemned the ruling party and its leaders for forty years of misrule and oppression. But then came Gregor Gysi. Gysi hit all the right notes. From behind his metal-rimmed spectacles, he seemed to exude warmth, clarity, logic and, above everything, hope. The party rank-and-file knew this was the paladin they were looking for. He was not just the party’s vision of the future. He was the future.

---Chapter 8—The Conjuror


If anyone believed neo-Nazi extremists were merely disparate groups of bored youths striking targets of opportunity, they were rudely awakened in June 1991 when more than 1,500 marched through the baroque city of Dresden in the biggest fascist parade since the end of the Third Reich.
 
---Chapter 12—Reign of Terror in the Baroque City


A battle to manipulate history is being fought out across Eastern Germany. The manipulators want to remove any concept of guilt for the killings at the border between the two German states. They say this violence resulted from the twelve years of Nazi rule that led to Germany’s division into two hostile camps. No one is to blame—there are no villains, only victims, runs the argument. The aim is to let the East Berlin regime, and thus its henchmen, off the hook..

---Chapter 13—Victims Fight to Avoid Oblivion . . . read more . . .


One February morning in 1963, the Ruehrdanz misery took a dramatic turn for the worse. It was 15 degrees below zero when, at 7:30 a.m., Sigrid left the Kaulsdorf house and walked across the hardpacked snow to catch a bus. At the corner of Ulmen Strasse and Sadowa Strasse, two men in civilian clothes forced her into the back of a BMW car and drove off. A few minutes later, another team went to the house and took Hartmut away.

---Chapter 14—Echoes from the Dungeon


The People Trade was simple and lucrative. East Berlin arrested people, “tried them,” found them guilty, and jailed them. The West German government bought them out. It was supply and demand. The East needed the cash. The West wanted the prisoners. For both political and moral reasons, the trade was kept secret. In the West, people objected to paying cash to the pariah Ulbricht regime.

---Chapter 17—The People Trade  


The East German state broke its own laws by smuggling works of art to the West. The system was completely cynical. As border guards searched private cars to prevent items disappearing to the West, trucks of the state’s own smuggling agency steamed across the border, taking paintings; antique childrens’ dolls; musical instruments; and Nazi memorabilia to the collectors’ markets of the capitalist world. In charge of this lucrative shady trade was state smuggling boss Alexander Schalck-Golodkowski

---Chapter 19—From Marauder to Merchant


Pastor Alfred Scharnweber put it this way: when, in the communist era, schoolboys saw him walking past a school, they would take a fiendish delight in calling out to him, “Pastor, when can we come to church?” They knew that would anger the teachers. These days when boys see him, they mockingly call, “Hallelujah.”

---Chapter 20—Awkward Questions for the Church


Between 1949 and 1989, more than one thousand people died along the death strip surrounding East Germany. They were shot dead or they drowned; they were blown up by self-shooting devices; and they were mangled by land mines. The toll keeps mounting as information comes to light about previously unknown victims dying, often in remote locations, often late at night, their corpses dragged away out of sight of prying eyes in the West and taken to morgues where doctors would falsify certificates to hide the cause of death.

---Chapter 21—The Death Strip


One Saturday night in August 1961, the Heidelberger Krug, on the corner of Elsen Strasse and Heidelberger Strasse, was just another corner bar in West Berlin. That changed a few minutes after midnight when forty helmeted East German border police carrying sub-machineguns with fixed bayonets leapt from trucks and people trying to enter the Soviet sector were stopped by a row of glinting bayonets. The bar emptied and the drinkers joined a jostling crowd outside on this warm, late summer evening. They watched, anger growing, as uniformed work teams trucked in behind the border police  rolled out barbed wire. Many in the crowd were both angry and drunk. “Communist pigs!” someone screamed. “Just wait until the Amis come!” yelled another. But the Americans did not come. Construction of the Berlin Wall had begun.

---Chapter 23—The Bar at the End of the World
 

It was no place to be in the middle of the night, this dark Sahara of heathland and opaque forests where the slightest sound raced away to the moon. Nothing here except the faint filigree gleam of a wire-mesh palisade emerging out of the nothingness. The three men were alone; or just maybe they weren’t. Gartenschlaeger stood by the open car trunk, checked the 7.65mm Espana Star pistol in his pocket, took a can of boot polish, blackened his face and hands, and passed the can to the other two. He took out a shotgun and tossed it to Uebe, who caught it uncertainly and held it as if it were a dead cat. Suddenly, this adventure was not what he had imagined.

Chapter 24—Gartenschlaeger’s Private War

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