Patrick Major's new book was published in 2010 and is one of several monographs to have appeared on the subject of the GDR over the last few years. One thinks, for instance, of Mary Fulbrook's seminal work The People's State (Yale University Press, 2005); Frederick Taylor's The Berlin Wall (Harper Collins, 2007); Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk's massive study of the 1989 revolution, Endspiel (C. H. Beck, 2009); or Edgar Wolfrum's short but densely written history of the Berlin Wall, Die Mauer (C. H. Beck, 2009), to name but only a few. No easy task, then, to add meaningfully to this voluminous literature, but it is one that Major, by and large, succeeds in mastering.

The book is made up of three extensive sections. Major explores the history of the GDR's border regime prior to the building of the Berlin Wall (1945–1961); the history of the construction of the Wall and its impact on GDR politics and society; and, finally, the history of the fall of the Wall in 1989, and of the way the Wall and life in its shadow have been remembered and represented in post-unification Germany. This may sound like just another conventional political account, and in many respects Major has indeed written a political history. But his telling of this history is always fresh and imaginative, supported as it is by a seemingly exhaustive exploration of archival material, not least the holdings of the Federal Archives in Berlin-Lichterfelde. He is able to uncover much that is new, as in his recounting of the circumstances under which the Wall came to be built in the first place. Resisting the temptation to blame either Ulbricht or Khrushchev solely, Major deftly explores the degree to which both were responsible, while nevertheless showing convincingly that it was probably Ulbricht who started the ball rolling (pp. 108–116). Again and again, moreover, Major is able to show that the GDR political system was sensitive to the concerns, complaints, and wishes of its citizens, to which it felt the need to respond by a mixture of measures that might roughly be understood as constituting a “carrot-and-stick” approach. The value of Major's book is that it always sees the political, economic, and diplomatic history of the GDR, and the drastic measures it took to resolve accompanying problems, in connection to the mood of its citizens—a mood that various GDR institutions, including of course the Stasi, attempted to keep close tabs on.

Throughout his book, Major cites from a range of sources—official reports, citizens’ petitions—to demonstrate that the GDR public did find various ways to express its opinion. GDR citizens, especially when it came to applying for the right to travel to a western country or petitioning to leave, sought to manipulate the regime into according to their wishes, while the regime in turn tried where it could to use these petitions against those who filed them. Major shows GDR domestic politics to be an interlocking system of state action and public reaction, or public action and state reaction, not simply a process of top-down enforcement (although, of course, it was that, too). In “writing the citizens” back into the history of the GDR, Major continues the work done by Mary Fulbrook, but achieves originality by focusing particularly on the relationship between the Wall and the population. The best parts of this always very good book are, to my mind, the sections examining the complex set of motives behind the wish of GDR citizens to leave the GDR. Major carefully charts, too, how the closing of the border in 1961 impacted somewhat paradoxically on these motives. While the desire to leave often intensified, at the same time it could be tempered by a sense of needing to make the best of the limited possibilities in the GDR. This ambivalent impact contributed, of course, to the development of exit and voice movements in the 1980s (pp. 155–223).

For all my strong admiration for this book, there are moments, perhaps, where Major lets his predilection for telling anecdotes rather run away with him. Having found so much not just of value in the archives, but also of considerable entertainment value (such as political jokes), Major is keen to use it. This is understandable, perhaps, and it makes for amusing reading, but the recounting does not always add to the book's analytical power. At times, too, the citation of citizens’ thoughts and responses is not as well interwoven into the political history as it might be, serving rather to leaven passages of heavier political analysis rather than truly to connect this analysis with popular attitudes. But for the most part, Major succeeds in producing a truly integrated, readable, and thought-provoking history of politics and people that adds significantly to our understanding of the GDR.