East Germany
Story Stream
How the Stasi Poets Tried to Win the Cold War February 21, 2022
One of the ironies of the Cold War was that the communist world, which repressed and jailed its writers, seemed to value literature much more highly than the West, where writers were free but neglected. In the Soviet Union the works of Dostoevsky and...
Enemy in the Mirror May 18, 2020
“Unlike Lenin, Hitler came to power in a free election, which makes Auschwitz also the result of free elections.” The East German dramatist and poet Heiner Müller wrote these words in late November of 1989, on the eve of the first free elections on t...
How Punk Changed Berlin November 27, 2019
hen walls are built through a city, strengthened with reinforced concrete and steel, separated by a strip of land where you can be shot and left to die, you don’t expect things to break through. But radio broadcasts don’t stop at borders. Political r...
Another Brick in the Wall October 21, 2019
The division of Berlin created a cage designed to stop a population fleeing. It was a triumph of East German and Russian ingenuity â?" but it could not last....
