Avis sur le produitBerlin Calling : A Story of Anarchy, Music, the Wall, and the Birth of the New Berlin by Paul Hockenos (2017, Hardcover)

Excellent Account

History is never neat. It's a mess of interwoven events, players, and circumstances. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent, rushed unification of Germany is no exception. Events happened so quickly that the seduction of telling at as an account of "the West wins the Cold War" loomed large and did a great disservice to many of the players and factors--social, political, cultural--that helped usher in the revolution at street level. This is particularly true of the East Berlin underground's role in shaping events which is a story too often ignored or overlooked in most histories on the subject. Hockenos does justice to this story like few, if any, English-language accounts, have bothered to tell. The author was not only present and able to draw on first-hand accounts but he also understood the bigger picture. As an expatriate American living in Berlin and Budapest during the years in question, he was afforded the benefit of a grasp of the bigger picture while being acutely tuned into the details. It is an art to not only understand a complex web of events but beyond that, to be able to tell the tale in an engaging, informative way. This history scores on both counts. It's a superb read.Lire l'avis complet...

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