In the Mail: The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall.

I saw The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall mentioned somewhere a few days back, and I realized: by God but I am ready to read a book on how the Wall fell.  It’s been long enough that you can hope to get a reasonably objective view of what happened, but soon enough that enough of the people involved are likely still alive and able to answer questions. Although I suspect that many of them don’t know the answer, either.

Anyway, I’ll let you know how it goes.

Moe Lane

PS: I actually wrote up something about this for In Nomine, once (hermann-google-docs).  I changed around a bit or two, but it held up surprisingly well.  Of course, I’m obviously biased about my own work.

2 thoughts on “In the Mail: The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall.”

  1. It fell two days before I checked in to my first ship. It was two more years before the USSR fell. Heady days.

    And Reagan’s exhortation two years before was a perfect specimen of geopolitical rhetoric. It swells even today.

  2. In early 1988, I was a senior in high school on, among other things, the debate team. In debate, you generally have a number of fairly generic negative campaigns prepared, for if someone throws an affirmative at you that you’re unprepared for. In one tournament we were using one of these generic defenses, which went something like, “(some action the affirmative will cause) will destabilize the Soviet Union, which will cause it to break up, and then all the little ‘stans will end up with nukes, which will cause bad things”. This particular debate was not particularly close, we knew we’d won by a large margin. Until we got the judge’s sheet, which said something like “totally unbelievable negative case, nothing will break up the USSR”. The judge was a college political science professor.

    In a couple of months, the strikes in Poland started. A little more than a year later the Berlin wall fell. A week after that the Velvet Revolution started in Prague. Only a little more than three years after that tournament the Soviet Union was no more. I really wanted to look up that prof and just mail her a copy of her judging sheet at that point.

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