The story of 1989 that circulates in the West is a story of liberation. Philipp Ther's book is about what it leaves out.

In Wolfgang Becker's film Good Bye Lenin!, a young East German man constructs an elaborate fiction to protect his mother, who has spent the pivotal months of 1989 in a coma and whose fragile heart, her doctors warn, cannot survive a shock. She must not learn that the Wall has fallen, that the GDR no longer exists, that the world she knew has been replaced. Her son maintains the pretence with increasing ingenuity — sourcing discontinued East German products, staging fake news broadcasts, building a version of the old country inside a single apartment. The fiction is an act of love. It is also, as the film gradually reveals, a way of holding open the question of what, exactly, was lost.

That question — what was lost, for whom, and at what cost — is the one that Philipp Ther's history keeps insisting on, in the face of a dominant narrative that has found it easier to answer differently. The story most commonly told about 1989 in the West is a story of liberation: the Soviet system collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions, democracy and capitalism proved more durable and more desirable, and the countries of Eastern Europe were returned to their rightful place in the European family. Ther's argument is that it is not the only narrative, and that the version circulating in Western capitals has systematically obscured what the transition felt like from the inside.

The instrument of that obscuring was speed. Shock therapy — the rapid, simultaneous liberalisation of prices, privatisation of state assets, and withdrawal of public support — was applied across much of Eastern Europe in the early 1990s on the premise that the pain would be brief and the gains rapid. In the capital cities, among the educated urban middle classes who were positioned to benefit from the new order, this proved roughly true. Warsaw, Prague, and Budapest generated prosperous, globally integrated economies whose success became the evidence cited for the transition's success.

What this accounting left out were the regions that had organised themselves around state industries which simply ceased to exist — the smaller towns and rural areas where the transition arrived not as opportunity but as abandonment, where the promised growth never came, and where the resentments accumulated quietly for two decades before finding political expression in the nationalist movements that would eventually surprise the same Western observers who had declared the story over.

Ther’s point is precise: the terms on which the transition was conducted, and the narrative constructed around it, served particular interests and particular geographies, and that the people left outside that narrative have been living with the consequences ever since. The 2008 financial crisis is one of his sharpest exhibits — the divergence between countries like Poland, which had built sufficient institutional capacity to absorb the shock, and those which had remained dependent on foreign capital and had no buffer when it withdrew, maps almost exactly onto the divergence between the transition's beneficiaries and its casualties.

The film's fictional GDR, maintained with such tenderness inside a Berlin apartment, stands for something beyond its immediate story. It is a reminder that the same historical moment can be experienced as triumph and as loss simultaneously, by people living within walking distance of each other — and that the account which gets called history is usually the one written by whoever had the cleaner experience of it. Ther's book is an argument for reading the other account with equal seriousness. And this argument has a methodological weight that extends well beyond Eastern Europe.