Before the Berlin Wall Came Down: A Foreign Correspondent's Search For Truth Behind the Iron Curtain

This book will change the reader's perception of how ordinary citizens lived behind the Iron Curtain.

The author was the longest-serving foreign correspondent in Berlin during the Cold War. His latest book "Before the Berlin Wall Came Down" offers a very different perspective on life behind the Iron Curtain for tens of millions of East Germans and East Europeans.

As a young news stringer for Time Magazine Leslie R. Colitt witnessed the building of the Berlin Wall and helped his wife-to-be to escape from East Berlin. His first brush with the Stasi came when he was befriended by Armin, an East German "refugee" in West Berlin. Only after the fall of the Wall did he learn who Armin really was.

Colitt's pursuit by the Stasi and other Communist intelligence agencies fill two bulging volumes in the Stasi archives in Berlin.

The author relates his mind-bending conversations with the notorious Markus Wolf, East Germany's foreign intelligence chief. Wolf became the subject in 1995 of Colitt's book "Spymaster - the Real-Life Karla, His Moles, and the East German Secret Police." "Spymaster" was well-reviewed by Time Magazine, the Washington Post Book World, San Francisco Chronicle, The Times (London), The Independent (London), Financial Times (London) and many other publications.

But the lives of most people behind the Wall were, in fact, not directly affected by the Stasi. Wherever the author worked as a foreign correspondent- in East Berlin, Prague, Warsaw, Budapest, Bucharest, Sofia and Moscow - he discovered what really concerned the proverbial man and woman in the street.

Colitt writes about the leading dissidents in Eastern Europe he knew, from Lech Walesa and Bronislaw Geremek in Poland to Vaclav Havel and Jiri Dienstbier in Czechoslovakia. He interviewed Viktor Orban, the present-day authoritarian Prime Minister of Hungary, when Orban was a student and dissident in the 1980s hiding from the political police.

The author recreates the atmosphere of the events he covered such as the Prague Spring of 1968, extinguished by a Soviet-led invasion.

Arriving in Prague he writes:
"...in front of us stood a long line of Soviet tanks...In the tiny park outside our hotel streamers of what looked like white bandages had been spread to dry on the bushes. The men of the Red Army did not run on socks but instead, like the Russian Army of old, still wrapped their feet in cloth."

Colitt offers a wealth of insights into the trials, tribulations and occasional
triumphs of working as a foreign correspondent in totalitarian societies.

The author accompanies Willy Brandt's mission of reconciliation to Warsaw in 1970 and witnesses the first uprising on the Polish Baltic Seacoast a few weeks later. He speaks with the organizers of the Gdansk shipyard strike of 1980 and tells of his first meeting with its leader Lech Walesa. Colitt was one of two Western correspondents present at the launching of Charter 77, the Czechoslovak dissident movement. On leaving Czechoslovakia his notebook of over 100 pages was confiscated at the border. Handed over to East German border police at Dresden railway station, he was ordered to remain in a waiting room until the arrival of the next train to Berlin six hours later. Interrupted only by occasional Soviet Army MPs searching for deserters, he managed to recreate his notes. The U.S. State Department formally protested against his treatment but he was still banned for five years from entering Czechoslovakia.

After working at The New York Times, Colitt served as the Berlin-based correspondent for Germany and Eastern Europe of The Observer (London) from 1968 to 1974. He was the Financial Times (London) correspondent in Berlin and Eastern Europe from 1972 to 1993.
"Before the Berlin Wall Came Down" is richly illustrated with original documents and photos.

This book is indispensable for an understanding of life under Communist