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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 Maier, the Krupp Foundation Professor of European Studies at the University of Harvard, must be as well placed as any to offer an interpretation of events. His numerous books and articles on Europe in the twentieth century, his knowledge of economics, of European languages, and his capacity to look at European history not simply through the prism of American diplomacy and American power make him well suited to undertake a book on the collapse of the GDR. Moreover, he spent much of his time 'in the field' as events were unrolling, and he was on the board of the Potsdam Centre after unification - of which more later. Dissolution is intended as a synthetic history rather than as an elaboration of a particular view or thesis. Much of the book is a chronological account of the diplomacy of the dissolution of the GDR, although Maier's emphasis upon the East German dimension is quite different from that of Zelikow and Rice, or Pond. Without rehearsing here the whole 'dissolution' story, it is worth recounting two moments in particular of Maier's account. They tell a great deal about the inflexibility of the established leaders of the GDR, and the structural weakness of the GDR in the international system, and go a long way to answering the question of whether the GDR's dissolution was inevitable, and why its collapse happened so quickly.