The Burning Wall

Hava Kohav Beller's history of dissent in the German Democratic Republic is admirably concise and surprisingly thorough, given the broad range of the subject matter and the secrecy that still surrounds the often-criminal efforts of East Germany's secret police — the Stasi — to stifle voices of opposition. Beller's strategy is to use as a framework the story of chemist Robert Havemann, an anti-Nazi resistance hero and member of East German parliament, whose experiences as an "enemy of the state" are in many ways representative of the overall persecution of dissent in the GDR. Sentenced to death by the Nazis and eventually freed from prison by Russian troops,...