Berlin Journal, 1989-1990
18 August 1993
Description
“Makes us appreciate something of what it felt like for Germans East and West as the world ended.” —Anthony Bailey, New York Times Book Review
Shock waves from the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 continue to pulse through German society. As the difficult process of reunification continues, it is worth recalling the revolutionary moment when immense crowds took to the streets of Leipzig and Berlin under the banner “We Are the People” and brought down one of the world’s most oppressive dictatorships. Robert Darnton’s eyewitness account of those historic days “is direct and vivid. His prose conveys the immediacy of the drama.” He gives us a memorable cast of characters, from two experts on the repair of broken-down Trabis to the environmental councilor for the polluted city of Bitterfeld, and Isaak Behar, a Jew who managed to survive the Holocaust while hiding in wartime Berlin. With wit and insight Darnton takes us behind the scenes to meet “ordinary people grappling with great change, humanizing history.”
Also By: Robert Darnton 
The Revolutionary Temper: Paris, 1748-1789
Hardback, 2023
Shortlisted for the 2024 American Library in Paris Book Award
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
A groundbreaking account of the coming of the French Revolution from a historian of...
Censors at Work: How States Shaped Literature
Paperback, 2015
"Splendid…[Darnton gives] us vivid, hard-won detail, illuminating narrative, and subtle, original insight." —Timothy Garton Ash, New York Review of Books
Censors at Work: How States Shaped Literature
E Book, 2014
"Splendid…[Darnton gives] us vivid, hard-won detail, illuminating narrative, and subtle, original insight." —Timothy Garton Ash, New York Review of Books
The Corpus of Clandestine Literature in France, 1769-1789
Paperback, 2012
Having thoroughly mined the sources, Darnton provides a trove of information on the illegal literature of Old Regime France. The result is an invaluable resource to specialists in French cultural...
George Washington's False Teeth: An Unconventional Guide to the Eighteenth Century
Paperback, 2010
A master historian's excavations into the past unearth a world that is unexpected and compelling.