Berlin Quintet contains five pieces about Berlin before the fall of the Wall in 1989. They were all recorded in late 1984 and early 1985 and broadcast in 1985 on NPR's All Things Considered and Morning Edition, and by WBUR-FM, Boston. They are all in Mono.

Listen to all five pieces:

1. Year Zero

   On May 8, 1945, the Third Reich finally fell. Forty years later, in THE FALL OF BERLIN Julian Crandall Hollick talked to native Berliners about those last traumatic days of war, and their experiences and reminiscences of the (often) equally terrible first few weeks of peace. For in the first few weeks, only the Soviet Army occupied the ruins of Berlin, and they often exacted terrible vengeance on the survivors for all the Soviet Union had suffered in the previous years.

2. Restoration of Schauspielhaus

   In East Berlin, then divided from its Western half by the Wall, 1985 also saw the RESTORATION OF THE SCHAUSPIELHAUS - Karl Friedrich Schinkel's nineteenth century classic theatre, the latest in a succession of architectural restorations (including the Semper Opera in Dresden) undertaken by the then-DDR in an effort to claim for itself a nationalist legitimacy.

3. Berliner Ensemble

   East Berlin was also famous for its BERLINER ENSEMBLE, a theatre and troupe founded by Bertold Brecht in the 1950s to present his plays, not only to East German audiences, but all over Europe and the West. Somehow the Ensemble survived Brecht's death in 1956 and went on for the next 30 years to become the guardian of not only Brecht's legacy but also often-innovative stagings of contemporary and classical plays, including Shakespeare, where underlying themes of social and class conflict could be emphasized.

4. Ghetto

   1985 also marked the 40th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz to which the surviving residents of the Jewish ghetto in Vilna had finally been deported in 1943. They had held out that long by staging musical entertainment for their Nazi and Polish jailers. The Jewish playwright Joshua Sobol commemorated this theatre troupe in his 1985 musical GHETTO, which played to packed houses in East Berlin and Hamburg.

5. Living with the Wall

   In August 1961, the inhabitants of Berlin woke up to find their city had been divided in two. For the next twenty eight years, the 30 miles of ten foot high concrete and barbed wire, known as the Berlin Wall, became the symbol of Communism's refusal to risk allowing East Berliners to meet freely with family and friends in the Western part of the city. Julian Crandall Hollick spent time in both halves of the city learning how Berliners coped with LIVING WITH THE WALL, and all its very personal consequences.