List of Abbreviations
Acknowledgments
Preface to the 2015 edition

Introduction

Part 1: Images of a Social Crisis

Prologue
Chapter 1. General Conditions
Chapter 2. The GDR in Its International Context
Chapter 3. Symptoms of Crisis
Chapter 4. Nuances: Regional Variations and Subcultures
Chapter 5. Countermovements: The Pull of the West and the Churches
Chapter 6. Opposition in the SED State
Chapter 7. Germination Time: The Ossietzky Affair

Part 2: From the Social Crisis to a Crisis of the Dictatorship

Chapter 8. The Social Crisis Deepens
Chapter 9. Regime Collapse and Historic Days

Part 3: The Fall of a Dictatorship

Chapter 10. From Demonstrations to the Fall of the Wall
Chapter 11. The Fallout
Chapter 12. Forging a New Path: Elections and Reunification

Conclusion: The Revolution. Or: Otto Schily as a Symbol

Afterword for the 2021 edition: From the Revolution in the GDR in 1989 to Eastern Germany in the Twenty-first Century

Select Bibliography
Index

Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk is a historian in the research department of the Stasi Records Authority, where he has been on leave since 2018. Currently, he is a researcher at the Hamburg Foundation for the Promotion of Science and Culture to write a biography on Walter Ulbricht. He is the author of many books, including Die Übernahme. Wie Ostdeutschland Teil der Bundesrepublik wurde (2019), ’Fasse Dich kurz!” Der grenzüberschreitende Telefonverkehr der Opposition in den 1980er Jahren und das Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (2014), and 17. Juni 1953 (2013), Stasi konkret. Überwachung und Repression in der DDR (2013),