"Serge searingly evokes the epochal hopes and shattering setbacks of a generation of leftists."--Bookforum Following in the wake of the carnage reaped across Europe by world war, German workers undertook a struggle that would prove decisive in determining the course of the entire twentieth century. In 1923 the fledgling Comintern dispatched Victor Serge, with his peerless journalistic skills, to Berlin to expedite the German Revolution and write these moving reports from the battlefront. Victor Serge is best known as a novelist and for his Memoirs of a Revolutionary. Originally a participant in the anarchist movement, Serge became a committed bolshevik upon arrival in Russia in 1919 and lent his considerable talents to the cause of spreading the revolution across Europe. An eloquent critic of tyranny no matter its form, Serge was a leading member of the Left Opposition in its struggle against Stalin, a cause which ultimately resulted in his exile from Russia.

Provocative and personal, Berlin Witness is likely to be the definitive American description of the first phase of the German Revolution until the government opens its archives in the next century and will be a valuable resource for anyone wishing to understand the background of the new Germany

In a remarkable combination of personal reflections, official dispatches, and sophisticated political analysis, Berlin Witness recounts the dramatic story of the erosion of Communism in East Germany and the forging of the new Germany. Jonathan Greenwald arrived in East Berlin in the summer of 1987, when discontented East German youths were shouting &"Gorby, Gorby!&" on Unter den Linden and Erich Honecker was still received in Bonn as the respected leader of the Soviet Union's most powerful ally. Germany was divided, and Honecker's GDR was a cornerstone of the armed but apparently stable security order that grew up after the Second World War. As Political Counselor of the American Embassy, Greenwald expected to chronicle Europe's evolution away from East-West confrontation and to assess for the State Department the implications of strengthening ties between the two German states that were beginning to cause unease in the alliances of both superpowers. Instead, he found and described a revolution that climaxed with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Empire, and the unification of Germany. The daily entries, beginning with a traditional Communist May Day 1989 when time seemed to stand still, tell the story of that astonishing year from the unique perspective of a senior American diplomat. Greenwald had access not only to the leading personalities of the GDR, including Honecker, Egon Krenz, and Gregor Gysi, but also to the idealistic young people and churchmen who set in motion the events that astonished the world and changed all our lives. He participated in the often frustrating efforts to shape an American policy response to the accelerating crisis. In his Afterword, he offers insightful, and sometimes skeptical, observations about the rush to unification that has left Germany whole and free but racked by new tensions and self-doubts. Provocative and personal, Berlin Witness is likely to be the definitive American description of the first phase of the German Revolution until the government opens its archives in the next century and will be a valuable resource for anyone wishing to understand the background of the new Germany.

The story of an epochal event in German history, this is also the story of the most important revolution that you might never have heard of.

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

A myth-busting popular history of the German Revolution focusing on the roles of women, workers and ordinary people.