Every Communist country considered the Church to be an internal enemy. Strangely, though, East Germany, among the most regulated, had one of the least repressive policies towards the Church, though still with severe restrictions, as Wendy Tyndale's book amply illustrates. The one country which has disappeared and which has the most systematically catalogued archives has, in over twenty years, yielded very few secrets in the form of studies in English. Nor does this book take us into the Berlin vaults of the Stasi (secret police). What it does, though – and this brilliantly – is to present the thoughts and opinions of over twenty men and women who were deeply involved, in many different ways, in the struggle to maintain human dignity and the integrity of their faith in the face of a German regime which John Arnold (former president of the Conference of Christian Churches) describes as ‘“real existing socialism” in its most consistently Stalinist form’ (p. ii). Wendy Tyndale's short but impressive book does not actually bear this out. Stalin's anti-religious policies in the USSR were brutal to a degree never practised or even imagined in East Germany. She deals in subtleties: the variety of ways in which a dastardly regime gnawed away at religious liberty, while continuing to allow not only churches to be open, but (unlike Russia) Christian education to exist, church meetings to take place and bible commentaries to be printed. In welding together the results of tape recordings with her well-chosen interviewees (pastors, theologians and teachers, rather than men and women of high ecclesiastical rank), Tyndale has forged a convincing picture of integrity under intense pressure, compromise, suffering and sacrifice of careers. It is intense and kaleidoscopic, presenting the Evangelical Church of the German Democratic Republic not in sociological terms, but through the eyes of people who lived through the traumas and cope psychologically even today with the consequences. The fall of the Berlin Wall was, miraculously, a peaceful event, not least because the people of the GDR had adopted non-violent protest. More than that, of course, Mikhail Gorbachev, who had seen the protests on Tiananmen Square in Beijing just before the massacre, refused to call in the Soviet army which was encamped in key locations throughout the country. The reunification of the German Church, alongside that of the two halves of the country, brought its own problems and injustices, as this book illustrates. What it does prove, though, is the indomitability of the human spirit and the indestructibility of the Christian faith. There has been a trend among political scientists to underplay the role of religion in undermining Communism. Let them read this book and follow believers on their peaceful, candle-lit vigils in Dresden and Leipzig as the regime, never supported by any legitimacy, began to lose its grip on power and then, suddenly, even its self-belief.