The Year that Changed the World: The Untold Story Behind the Fall of the Berlin Wall [Hardcover]

More than anything else, Michael Meyer seeks to challenge the perception that the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989 primarily due to the policies of the United States and Ronald Reagan. Meyer, a former Newsweek correspondent who reported on the demise of Communism throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, concentrates on the domestic resistance movements that blossomed behind the Iron Curtain. As a result, dissidents such as Vaclav Havel and Lech Walesa feature prominently in his account. However, no one receives more credit for the destruction of the Eastern bloc than Miklos Nemeth.

Nemeth, the Communist prime minister of Hungary who inaugurated a wave of reforms after coming to office in November 1988, made the fateful decision to remove the fence between his country and Austria in the summer of 1989. This move -- which is fittingly characterized by Meyer as pulling the plug out of a sink of water -- facilitated the movement of thousands of East Germans from their country to freedom in the West. Indeed, the discussion of Nemeth is one of the great strengths of the book. Meyer explains how the prime minister and several of his closest associates hoped to make Hungary the first of the eastern bloc nations to remove the Communist Party from power. This, these reformers believed, would allow Hungary to benefit from generous subsidies, credits, and other aid from the West. This plan, of course, did not proceed quite the way these men intended, since Communism collapsed so quickly and completely in only a few months. Thus, Hungary's "head-start" into the West was nullified, and instead the West focused most of its attention on the much more dramatic events of East Germany.

There will be those that disagree with Meyer's interpretation of these events, yet Meyer himself notes that his view was shaped by his time watching (and sometimes participating) in the events in Eastern Europe. Moreover, it is hard to deny that nationalism played a critical role in the events of 1989. Poles, Hungarians, Germans, Czechs, and Slovaks from all walks of life made the conscious decision to defy the authority of the dictatorships that ruled their countries. These decisions were not to be taken lightly, and Meyer occasionally mentions the grave consequences that might result from these actions. Nowhere was this more true than in the last domino to fall: Romania.

This book also rightly stresses the importance of Mikhail Gorbachev to the events of 1989. The Soviet leader made clear to the gerontocracy dominating Eastern Europe that it could no longer rely on Soviet tanks to maintain control. This policy marked a break with the Brezhnev Doctrine established twenty years earlier with the invasion of Prague in 1968 (and has been called the "Sinatra Doctrine" by some historians who saw this is as an indication that the satellites could do it their own way). Without Soviet support, the leaders of Eastern Europe had to be prepared to pursue the "Tienanmen solution" and open fire on their own people to hold on to power. Meyer's discussion of the October protests in the East German city of Leipzig highlights just how close Eastern Europe came to the spilling of blood in the streets.

My one quibble with this book would be that the focus on 1989 obscures the deeper origins of the internal resistance movements in these countries. It is true that Meyer is not an historian, but a more complete discussion of popular protests (1953 in the GDR; 1956 in Poland and Hungary; 1968 in Czechoslovakia; 1980 in Poland) behind the Iron Curtain would be valuable. There are allusions here to Charter 77 and Solidarity, but their work over several years merits more discussion in explaining how the events of 1989 transpired. Additionally, there were those working in a less formal manner to challenge the Communist Party in these countries, particularly those involved with the Church. These criticisms aside, this is an engaging and entertaining read. And hopefully, it will prompt more interested readers to read further on resistance in Eastern Europe.

This book, written by a Newsweek magazine writer, reads like a magazine article. Very compact and concise and it gives a good review, if brief, of the events in 1989 and the fall of the Berlin wall. In a addition to describing the events he witnessed he also gives his political opinions. The last few pages were a bit much. On these he rapidly summarizes American foreign policy from George H.W.Bush, Bill Clinton down to George W. with typical talking head cliches.

Meyer begins the book (after a rather rambling section in which he tries, unsuccessfully, to connect his subject to America's current problems) with a description of Reagan's famous speech at the Brandenburg Gate. As someone who was living in Berlin at the time and attended the speech, I can tell you that Meyer makes several errors. For starters, he claims that Reagan was standing in front of the Gate with the Wall visible a hundred yards in the background. Reagan wasn't even a hundred yards from the Gate -- *I* wasn't a hundred yards from the Gate where I was watching from -- and the Wall was between us and the Gate. In fact, the Wall bulged into the West around the Gate, making it much, much closer than the Gate.

Next, Meyer makes the claim that the American flags waved by the crowd had been "planted" by the US embassy. "Planted" is a loaded word. Imagine you're going to a big Fourth of July celebration -- a concert in the park followed by fireworks -- and on your way in you pass a table where people are giving away miniature American flags. Would you say they're planting the flags? Of course not. But that's exactly how the flags were distributed on that day in Berlin.

Then there's Meyer's claim that Berliners were strongly anti-American. Now, I lived in Panama in the early '80s, so I have some idea what it's like when people aren't keen to have Americans around. There was none of that in Berlin. If Meyer wanted to say that Berliners weren't fond of Reagan, that'd be one thing -- though even that, I think, was more pronounced in West Germany proper than Berlin -- but the anti-American claim is over the top.

Finally, I'd like to say something about Meyer's reasoning. At one point he says that the fall of the Berlin Wall could not be the result of historical forces or the weakness of Communism because happenstance played such a large role in events -- i.e., it was miscommunication on the part of an East German official that sent people out to tear down the Wall. This is the fallacy of the excluded middle -- you can have broad historical forces at work, which express themselves through random chance or luck. The fact that happenstance played a role in the way Communism crumbled doesn't mean Communism wouldn't've crumbled, albeit differently, if the situation had been slightly different.

Much of the book deals with the revolutions in other countries of the Warsaw Pact which I don't have first-hand knowledge of, but the errors about Berlin lead me to suspect the accuracy of those parts. But I guess that's what I get for reading a history book by a reporter instead of a reputable historian.

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