Afeatured article in Die Zeit, the leading German weekly, begins with "Melvin, du hast gewonnen"--Mel, you have won! In his extraordinary account of the final days of the German Democratic Republic (DDR) we see the reckoning of a regime, and also the vindication of a life-long devotee of European democracy. It is unlikely that any comparable memoir will be written, since Lasky's career spanned the entire history of wartime and postwar Germany, especially in divided and Wall-torn Berlin.Voices in a Revolution, now in paperback, offers an in-depth portrayal of the Communist police state before the breakdown, followed by a blow-by-blow account of the drama of breakdown and regime transformation. Characters in the everyday cultural world of Germany come alive as harbingers and heralds of the end of the old and the necessity of the new.Lasky understands the role of accident as well as of necessity. The West Germans had all but abandoned the slogan of One People, One Nation when they were faced with the immense task of supervising just such a reintegration. The work ends with the awakening conscience at the very point that the Berlin Wall came tumbling down. This is a memorable work--one likely to sear the conscience of lovers of freedom and analysts of tyranny alike.

The importance of Melvin J. Lasky and of the journals he has edited (Encounter in London, Der Monat in Berlin) has been beautifully captured by a young European intellectual, Dr. Michael Naumann: "Lasky's work, quite apart from its value as a meditation, is a testimony of personal courage. This is the work of an outsider, of a thinker in crazed times, who ranks with the few who can apply that 16th-century observation of Richard Hooker to themselves with every justification: 'Posterity may know we have not loosely through silence permitted things to pass away as in a dream.'..."On The Barricades, And Off, is an extraordinary collection of writings by Lasky dealing with Revolutionaries and Ideologies, with the German Problem and the Russian Question, with Travelling and Climates of Opinion. But there is nothing eclectic or random about this effort. Indeed the essays are stitched together by an impassioned dedication to the open society and, no less, a universal, even-handed critique of all closed societies.Born in New York City, Melvin J. Lasky has been co-editor of Encounter in London (called "the most brilliant European periodical") since he succeeded Irving Kristol in 1958. He was educated at the City College of New York, at the University of Michigan, and Columbia University. He was the literary editor of the New Leader before serving in World War II as a combat historian in France and •Germany. After the war he was a foreign correspondent for the New York Times, The Reporter, Partisan Review, and other publications. His work as an editor and writer reflects that unusual group of cosmopolitan scholars and men of letters who emerged from the ashes of conflict to help recreate the intellectual climate for democracy in Europe, indirectly reestablishing transatlantic critical standards in America.