The berlin wall

We all live with boundaries, but few of us feel that as keenly as Jenny Erpenbeck, who grew up in the Pankow district of East Berlin, a stone’s throw from the Wall. Now a leading novelist of a unified Germany, she explained several years ago that when the Wall came down in 1989 and the East German state collapsed (she was 22 at the time), a ‘border’ was created between two halves of her life. ‘Without this experience of transition, from one world to a very other one, I would probably never have started writing.’ It will never be like this again, thinks Hans. It will always be this way,

This is an important and topical book. Mary Sarotte traces the difficult course of Russia’s relations with Europe and the United States during the decade which followed the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, a period which saw Russia’s brief dalliance with democracy and Nato’s advance to the frontiers of the old Soviet Union. The story has been told before, but never so fully or so well. In a remarkable historical coup, Sarotte has persuaded the German foreign ministry to open its archives to her, and the Americans to declassify thousands of documents previously closed to researchers. When Vladimir Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov was moved to denounce so much