The Year that Changed the World: The Untold Story Behind the Fall of the Berlin Wall

By Michael Meyer

'Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!' This declamation by president Ronald Reagan when visiting Berlin in 1987 is widely cited as the clarion call that brought the Cold War to an end. The West had won, so this version of events goes, because the West had stood firm. American and Western European resoluteness had brought an evil empire to its knees.

Michael Meyer, in this extraordinarily compelling account of the revolutions that roiled Eastern Europe in 1989, begs to differ. Drawing together breathtakingly vivid, on-the-ground accounts of the rise of Solidarity in Poland, the stealth opening of the Hungarian border, the Velvet Revolution in Prague, and the collapse of the infamous wall in Berlin, Meyer shows that western intransigence was only one of the many factors that provoked such world-shaking change.

More important, Meyer contends, were the stands taken by individuals in the thick of the struggle, leaders such as poet and playwright Vaclav Havel in Prague; Lech Walesa; the quiet and determined reform prime minister in Budapest, Miklos Nemeth; and the man who realized his empire was already lost and decided, with courage and intelligence, to let it go in peace, Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev.

Michael Meyer captures these heady days in all their rich drama and unpredictability. In doing so he provides not just a thrilling chronicle of perhaps the most important year of the 20th century but also a crucial refutation of American mythology and a misunderstanding of history that was deliberately employed to lead the United States into some of the intractable conflicts it faces today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
• Release date: Aug 5, 2010
• ISBN: 9781849831994

Michael Meyer

MICHAEL MEYER is the author of three critically acclaimed books, as well as articles in the New York Times and other outlets. A Fulbright scholar, Guggenheim, NEH, Cullman Center and MacDowell fellow, and the recipient of the Whiting Writers Award, Meyer is a Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, where he teaches nonfiction writing. He lives in Pittsburgh.

Reviews for The Year that Changed the World

[bezoar44 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book has two purposes: first, as the author says in his 'notes on sources,' "to tell a story, largely unknown....a firsthand account of the revolutions in Eastern Europe and the fall of the Berlin Wall." By 'largely unknown', Meyer means that few Americans know about the individual communist leaders and reformers whose actions and reactions drove the fall of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989. Above all, Meyer wants readers to understand that the fall wasn't inevitable; the way it played out depended on a series of decisions by individuals, great and small. One of the most passionate passages in the book argues that even when great crowds of citizens gathered in protests in East Germany, the outcome of the night could turn on the decision of a single individual to yell a galvanizing comment: "It is immensely heartening, this view of history. So intimate, so uplifting, so human."Meyer's second purpose is emphasized in the epilogue: to strip away the myth that confrontational American power brought about the peaceful collapse of communism. Meyer believes this interpretation subsequently inflated America's sense of its own ability to shape the world, leading the US into unwise and ineffective foreign policies under Clinton and especially under George W. Bush (including but not limited to the invasion of Iraq). At its best, the book is a quick and engaging memoir of 1989 as it unfolded around the author. However, the book lacks the detail needed to offer much historical insight -- it describes the conditions in Eastern Bloc countries through anecdotes, rather than statistics, for example, so it's hard to understand exactly how weak the failing economies were. On the other hand, read as a memoir, the story feels detached; the anecdotes are episodic, and the sketches of historical figures often unrevealing. The writing is also loaded down with metaphors pushed too far, such as an extended comparison of the public to the wildebeests of the Serengeti; of Polish voters excising names on a ballot to a cavalry charge; of Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution as theater. Ultimately, this book seems most useful as an account to read side by side with several others, including memoirs by some of the key reformers.