Ezio Mauro
Anime prigioniere. Cronache dal muro di Berlino (Captive Souls. Chronicles from the Berlin Wall)
Feltrinelli, October 2019, 208 pages

We all know what happened on November 9, 1989 in Berlin. Some thought that history was finished and that over time the whole world would be more and more similar to the West. But history hides in the details, in the gestures, in the steps, missteps and second thoughts of its protagonists. In 1989, within the 108,000 square kilometers of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), the communist bloc crumbles and breaks free from the Wall’s imprisonment, a wall that runs for 106 kilometers and separates the city from the rest of Europe and the world. More than a simple barrier, it’s a symbol of the totalitarian monolith. It is a weapon. “Those who have risen high will fall into the abyss,” someone has spray-painted in Prenzlauer Berg, in the Berlin that lives by night and moves through the dark. If the fall of the Berlin Wall is etched into the identity of those who saw it on TV and those who were born later, it’s because since then things have taken a new direction – one very different from what we expected.

Ezio Mauro goes back to the divided city and for the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, he gives an impassioned account of the event that marked the beginning of today’s world.

Ezio Mauro

Ezio Mauro

Ezio Mauro started his career in journalism in 1972 at the newspaper Gazzetta del Popolo in Turin. Then, he became a political reporter in Rome for La Stampa, for which he was also a foreign correspondent, writing stories and conducting investigative reports in the United States. In 1988, he started contributing to the newspaper la Repubblica, writing from Moscow. On June 26, 1990 he re-joined La Stampa, becoming its editor-in-chief two years later. On May 6, 1996 he became the editor-in-chief of la Repubblica. In 2011, he published La felicità della democrazia. Un dialogo, with Gustavo Zagrebelsky, and in 2015 Babel, his dialogue on democracy with Zygmunt Bauman. He has written L’anno del ferro e del fuoco. Cronache di una rivoluzione (2017), L’uomo bianco (2018), Anime prigioniere. Cronache dal muro di Berlino (2019), Liberi dal male (2020), La dannazione (2020), Lo scrittore senza nome (2021). His most recent book is L’anno del fascismo (2022). In 2016 he left his place as editor-in-chief of la Repubblica, but he still contributes to it.

 

 

 

 

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