Sources — East Germany

General works

Fulbrook, Mary. The People's State: East German Society from Hitler to Honecker. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. The most important book on the subject: how ordinary people lived inside the system and participated in it. Start here.
Fulbrook, Mary. Anatomy of a Dictatorship: Inside the GDR, 1949–1989. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Kopstein, Jeffrey. The Politics of Economic Decline in East Germany, 1945–1989. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. The standard account of why the economy failed, and careful about the Soviet extraction that set the starting point.
Maier, Charles S. Dissolution: The Crisis of Communism and the End of East Germany. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. The best single account of 1989 and its causes.
Ross, Corey. The East German Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives. London: Arnold, 2002. A guide to the historiographical arguments, which in this field are unusually heated.
Port, Andrew I. Conflict and Stability in the German Democratic Republic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Why a state this unpopular lasted forty years. Built from one industrial district's records.

Chapters I–III

Naimark, Norman M. The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945–1949. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1995. Unflinching on the reparations and on the mass rapes of 1945.
Ostermann, Christian F., ed. Uprising in East Germany 1953. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2001. The documents on 17 June, from both sides.
Harrison, Hope M. Driving the Soviets up the Wall: Soviet–East German Relations, 1953–1961. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. The book that established that Ulbricht pushed Moscow for the Wall rather than the reverse.
Taylor, Frederick. The Berlin Wall: 13 August 1961 – 9 November 1989. London: Bloomsbury, 2006.
Hertle, Hans-Hermann, and Maria Nooke. The Victims at the Berlin Wall, 1961–1989. Berlin: Ch. Links, 2011. The Potsdam research project's biographical register, and the source of the contested figure of 140.
Major, Patrick. Behind the Berlin Wall: East Germany and the Frontiers of Power. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Chapters IV–VII

Steiner, André. The Plans that Failed: An Economic History of the GDR. New York: Berghahn, 2010. The standard economic history, by the historian who knows the planning records best.
Schürer, Gerhard, et al. “Analyse der ökonomischen Lage der DDR.” Politburo submission, 27 October 1989. The insolvency report, printed in several document collections. Short and devastating.
Betts, Paul. Within Walls: Private Life in the German Democratic Republic. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Excellent on housing, family, complaint letters and the private sphere.
Merkel, Ina. Utopie und Bedürfnis: Die Geschichte der Konsumkultur in der DDR. Cologne: Böhlau, 1999. In German. The best study of consumption and shortage.
Pence, Katherine, and Paul Betts, eds. Socialist Modern: East German Everyday Culture and Politics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008.
Dennis, Mike. The Stasi: Myth and Reality. London: Longman, 2003.
Gieseke, Jens. The History of the Stasi: East German Secret Police, 1945–1990. New York: Berghahn, 2014. The authoritative account, by the archive's own historian. The place to check any Stasi statistic.
Ungerleider, Steven. Faust's Gold: Inside the East German Doping Machine. New York: Thomas Dunne, 2001.

Chapters VIII–X

Bruce, Gary. The Firm: The Inside Story of the Stasi. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Two rural districts, and what the ministry actually did day to day.
Neubert, Ehrhart. Geschichte der Opposition in der DDR 1949–1989. Bonn: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, 1997. In German. The standard history of the opposition, by a participant.
Pollack, Detlef, and Jan Wielgohs, eds. Dissent and Opposition in Communist Eastern Europe. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004.
Kowalczuk, Ilko-Sascha. Endspiel: Die Revolution von 1989 in der DDR. Munich: C. H. Beck, 2009. In German, and the best book on the revolution.
Zelikow, Philip, and Condoleezza Rice. Germany Unified and Europe Transformed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. The diplomacy of 1989–90, by two of the American participants.
Böick, Marcus. Die Treuhand: Idee — Praxis — Erfahrung 1990–1994. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2018. In German. The definitive study of the privatisation agency and the anger it left behind.
Hoyer, Katja. Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949–1990. London: Allen Lane, 2023. A recent and widely debated attempt to write the social history sympathetically. The criticisms it drew are themselves worth reading.

Memoir and testimony

Funder, Anna. Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall. London: Granta, 2003. Interviews with victims and with former Stasi officers. The best-written book on this list and the one to read first if you read only one.
Wolf, Christa. They Divided the Sky. Trans. Luise von Flotow. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2013. Originally Der geteilte Himmel, 1963. The division as personal catastrophe, published inside the GDR.
Wolf, Christa. What Remains. Trans. Heike Schwarzbauer and Rick Takvorian. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993. Written in 1979, published in 1990, and the centre of the argument about complicity that followed.
Plenzdorf, Ulrich. The New Sufferings of Young W. Trans. Kenneth Wilcox. New York: Ungar, 1979.
Biermann, Wolf. Warte nicht auf bessre Zeiten! Berlin: Propyläen, 2016. In German. The autobiography of the man whose expulsion in 1976 broke the state's bargain with its writers.
Kunze, Reiner. The Wonderful Years. Trans. Joachim Neugroschel. New York: George Braziller, 1977. Short prose pieces smuggled out and published in the West, which cost him his membership and then his country.
Maron, Monika. Flight of Ashes. Trans. David Newton Marinelli. London: Readers International, 1986. On the pollution of Bitterfeld, refused publication in the GDR.

Stasi Records Archive (Stasi-Unterlagen-Archiv), Berlin. 111 kilometres of files, transferred to the Federal Archives in 2021. Any citizen may read their own; researchers may apply.
Bundesarchiv, Abteilung DDR, Berlin-Lichterfelde. The state and party records: SED, Council of Ministers, Planning Commission.
Chronik der Mauer. Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung / Deutschlandradio / ZZF Potsdam. Free online, exhaustively sourced, with audio and the border-death register. The best single web resource on this subject.
Deutsches Rundfunkarchiv, Potsdam-Babelsberg. GDR radio and television, including the whole run of the news programme Aktuelle Kamera.