5 Books About the Fall of the Berlin Wall Everyone Should Read

Jeffrey A. Engel’s edited volume is perhaps the single-best introduction to the events of 1989 and their legacies. It includes essays by Melvyn Leffler on the United States, Chen Jian on China, James Sheehan on Germany and Europe, and William Taubman and Svetlana Savranskaya on the Soviet Union.

Mary Sarotte tells the story of ordinary people who participated in the unexpectedly peaceful revolution that helped overcome the post-World War II division of Europe.

Tom Blanton and Svetlana Savranskaya of the National Security Archive have edited an invaluable collection of primary documents from Washington, Moscow, London, Paris, Budapest, Prague, and elsewhere, and provide important essays about Gorbachev’s thinking toward Eastern and Central Europe 1985–1989 and how the incoming administration of George H.W. Bush sought to distinguish itself from the Reagan era.

Harvard Professor Charles Maier’s authoritative chronicle of the last days of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), which in 1989–1990 became one of the few states in the modern era simply to vanish from the map.

The classic first-hand account of Timothy Garton Ash. Before the Internet and even before cell phones, he managed to find the right places at the right times and live history in real time.