Mary Sarotte has taken advantage of the opportunity afforded by the twenty-fifth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall to investigate in minute detail the final months of the East German regime. Taking a page from Stephen Jay Gould, she outlines the plethora of contingencies and personalities, missed telephone calls, hastily-changed documents, and fortuitous positioning of Western television cameras that led to the “accidental opening” of the Berlin Wall on the night of November 9, 1989. Sarotte does address longer-term issues, but her primary focus is on the immediate period around the fall of the Wall.

In the first section, Sarotte describes the progression of unrest in Saxony (which did not exist as a German Land at the time) from a marginal group of dissenters loosely affiliated with the Lutheran church to a mass movement that culminated in a demonstration of at least 70,000 in Leipzig on October 9, 1989. Her almost minute-by-minute account of the events of that day is a gripping read that rescues Helmut Hackenberg, the local party official in charge of the armed units, from the historical shadows. The self-serving claim by ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED) chairman Egon Krenz that it was he who ordered security services in Leipzig to hold their fire has convinced few historians. Sarotte confirms that Krenz, like much of the Politburo, was in a state of paralysis that night, leaving his subordinates in Leipzig to determine how to deal with the crisis on their own. Lacking clear orders from Berlin, Hackenberg allowed the demonstrators to pass unharmed—making it Hackenberg, not Krenz, who deserves credit for refraining to use the regime's considerable force against its opponents.

Immediately after the collapse of communism in East Germany, it was commonplace to refer to the events of 1989–1990 as the Wende (“turn” or “change”). Since that time, German scholars and politicians have demonstrated a preference for the term peaceful revolution instead. Those fall days of 1989 could hardly be categorized as “peaceful,” however: not only did the security services intervene brutally in East Berlin, Dresden, and Plauen, but, as Sarotte also notes, it was precisely the regime's history of heavy-handedness and the threat of violence—the so-called Tiananmen solution—that caused more people to join the opposition movement. In the end, the swollen crowds in Leipzig and Berlin were so large that they caused the security services to doubt whether they were sufficiently equipped to disperse them.

Sarotte's account of the opening of the Berlin Wall is as richly detailed as her description of the Leipzig demonstrations. She traces the backroom politics on November 9, 1989 that led to a poorly thought-out and hastily amended policy of easing travel restrictions, then describes Günter Schabowski's botched press conference that evening announcing the party's new position on travel to the West. Having watched on television the Politburo member's cryptic announcement that they were now permitted to visit the West, a number of East Berliners appeared at the Bornholmerstraße border crossing demanding to be let through. Sarotte highlights in this context an important mechanism that helped the inititally small crowds at the border soon become overwhelming: Western television—which had been part of many East Germans’ daily routine since the late 1950s—broadcasted the scenes at the Wall back into East Germany, thus serving to undermine the regime to the very end.

Sarotte's eminently readable account passes easily from the macro to the micro, from machinations inside the SED to an East German woman watching the evening's telecast in her home. Its main appeal will likely be to an English-speaking audience approaching the topic for the first time. Specialists will find the story familiar, not least thanks to Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk's monumental work on the demise of the GDR, Endspiel (2009)—which Sarotte only cites in passing. The Collapse is a thorough account, for the most part, but Sarotte's narrow definition of “short-term” reasons for the regime's demise causes her to miss crucial events that took place even earlier in 1989. She mentions neither the Luxemburg-Liebknecht demonstration of January 1989, nor the falsified communal elections of May 1989 that drew the ire of many East Germans. Just as important—and without detracting from the importance of the fall of the Wall—future research on the course of the revolution outside the major urban centers is likely to tell us more about East Germany's final chapter than additional research on Berlin or Leipzig.

On a broader, conceptual level, Sarotte (or perhaps the publisher) oversells her argument about the “accidental” nature of the opening of the Wall. After all, what great historical moment is not the result of a confluence of forces, events, and personalities? Contingency informs all of history. The regime certainly intended to ease travel restrictions in some fashion in November 1989, but unforeseen events—like the sudden appearance of huge crowds at the Berlin Wall and border guard Harald Jäger's single-handed decision to lift the barrier after hours of waiting in vain for direction from his superiors—overtook it, as they did elsewhere in the Soviet bloc. Like the opening of the Berlin Wall, similarly fateful if less well-known episodes elsewhere in East Europe were less “accidents” of history than a form of entropy. Some historical processes are simply hard to shift into reverse. Bismarck famously noted in a memorandum reflecting on the Franco-Prussian war that one can only “ride the wave” during those ungovernable historical moments where societal forces and contingency dominate (Fert unda nec regitur). The breach of the Berlin Wall was not an accident—it was part of the wave.