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Andrew Bickford, Fallen Elites: The Military Other in Post-Unification Germany (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011)
In 1998, I published a book on the collapse of the German Democratic Republic's National People's Army (NVA) and the impact it had on is members, primarily officers.1 I assumed at the time that it would probably be the last book published on the topic, at least in English. I was wrong, and happily so. This new book by Andrew Bickford is a welcome addition to our understanding of the men who staffed the former East German military and their fate as members of the new, unified Germany.
Bickford became interested in the fate of those who served in the vaunted East German Army after meeting several former members of it in Berlin. His goal, in this well-written book, is to enable the reader to understand the life and times of these former soldiers. He makes it clear that efforts to dump these men on the "ash heap of history" does injustice to those who served their military and former state honestly and with the exception of the Border Troops, never fired a weapon in anger.
Bickford is an anthropologist. As a result, he is primarily interested in the thought process of these men as they were transformed from one of the most feared Warsaw Pact militaries, to what he argues amounts to outcasts in...