The history of communism as the story of its crises: The two authors Ralph Giordano and Hans-Ulrich Barth take up various uprisings and protests to demonstrate the discrepancy between the claim to power and the reality in “socialist imperialism.” A more nuanced light is shed on individual uprisings, while at the same time feeding into stereotypical Cold War images of the enemy.

Poznań, June 1956: For a long time, the “forgotten uprising” in which dozens of people lost their lives was a taboo in Poland. It was only in the mid-1980s, in a period of liberalisation, that Marek Drążewski could make this astonishingly frank review, in which he condenses the dramatic events using private photos, footage and memories of contemporary witnesses.