The Saddled Cow: East Germany's Life and Legacy

by Anne McElvoy

As "The Times" correspondent in East Berlin, the author of this book witnessed the collapse of the communist state and the unification of Germany. In this book, she explores the country's history, drawing on exclusive interviews with spies, politicians and dissedents speaking openly for the first time. Anne McElvoy recalls how exiled German communists met in seedy Moscow hotels to plan the new state, and she analyzes the role of the omnipotent Stasi Secret Police and the Berlin Wall. She relates the stories of the country's legendary spy chief, Markus Wolf, and its master propagandist Karl Eduard von Schnitzler. Finally she follows East Germany's dramatic absorption into the West, and the fate of its people after unification.

Genres: Nonfiction, History

288 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 1992

Reviews

[Mark Maguire · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an incredibly powerful review of the rise and fall of the German Democratic Republic. The narrative was compelling and comprehensive in equal measure and bordered on the melancholic when the end came in 1990.

If the book has a "key teaching" then it is probably found in the omnipresent disillusionment of the former East Germans in the wake of the implosion of their nation state. The psychological aparthied that greeted the newly liberated East Berliner's in the course of their interactions with their westernised cohorts. The rise of Neo-Nazism; wholesale sell-off of East German factories and enterprises, and the hasty removal of the superficial elements of the former GDR, all contrive to underpin a sense of alienation, and frustration, generated by the eradictation of previous norms and cultures by the hand of the victorious West.

The Author focuses upon the divergent levels of development between East and West, and captures the essence of this with the eyewitness account of archaic Trabants breaching the Wall and trundling into the materialistic West where they were met with derision and bewilderment in equal measure. In a quaint way, the metaphor of the Trabant poses the question of the former GDR's political and economic contribution to a wider Germany. Two former states, united unofficially by the concept of Volk, but officially divided by ideology and economics have now got to work together to rebuild a viable Germany built on new sensibilities whilst appearing to be "fair" to all sides of the debate.


Even as I write this in 2013, it is not immediately clear that "unity" has undone generations of indoctrination on both sides. Ultimately, who was right and who was wrong?


This is probably one of the most balanced and thought-provoking books on contemporary German history that I have ever read.

[Dan Konigsburg · Rating 5 out of 5]

'Communism fits Germany as a saddle fits a cow' - Stalin. Amazing look at the 40 years of the DDR, its fall from a British reporter based there in 89, and a window into today's Germany 25 years later. Emotional, insightful, mixing political history with personal stories and anecdotes. Best history I have read in a while.