Product Description

The appearance of a hastily-constructed barbed wire entanglement through the heart of Berlin during the night of 12-13 August 1961 was both dramatic and unexpected. Within days, it had started to metamorphose into a structure that would come to symbolise the brutal insanity of the Cold War: the Berlin Wall. A city of almost four million was cut ruthlessly in two, unleashing a potentially catastrophic East-West crisis and plunging the entire world for the first time into the fear of imminent missile-borne apocalypse. This threat would vanish only when the very people the Wall had been built to imprison, breached it on the historic night of 9 November 1989. Frederick Taylor's eagerly awaited new book reveals the strange and chilling story of how the initial barrier system was conceived, then systematically extended, adapted and strengthened over almost thirty years. Patrolled by vicious dogs and by guards on shoot-to-kill orders, the Wall, with its more than 300 towers, became a wired and lethally booby-trapped monument to a world torn apart by fiercely antagonistic ideologies. The Wall had tragic consequences in personal and political terms, affecting the lives of Germans and non-Germans alike in a myriad of cruel, inhuman and occasionally absurd ways. The Berlin Wall is the definitive account of a divided city and its people.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #106831 in Books
• Published on: 2007-09-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 752 pages

Review
PRAISE FOR 'DRESDEN' 'In narrative power and persuasion, he has paralleled in Dresden what Antony Beevor achieved in Stalingrad' Independent on Sunday 'Well-researched and unpretentious fascinating Taylor skilfully interweaves various personal accounts of the impact of the raids' Michael Burleigh, Guardian 'Impressive Taylor weaves a chilling narrative from eyewitness accounts and painstaking documentary research, particularly with German sources. He explains the conceptual and strategic background with admirable clarity. His account of the air operation itself is quite superb' The Times

About the Author
Frederick Taylor was educated at Aylesbury Grammar School, and read History and Modern Languages at Oxford, and did postgraduate work at Sussex University. He is the author of the acclaimed bestseller, Dresden. He edited and translated The Goebbels Diaries. He lives in Cornwall.

Customer Reviews

Entertaining history of frighteningly recent events in Europe
Frederick Taylor's book is a superb social and political history of the concrete wall that divided the people of East and West Berlin from 1961 to 1989.

This is a fascinating subject. For most of my lifetime up to the fall of the Wall eighteen years ago, a part of Europe not so far from home ran along the lines of a truly authentic Orwellian dictatorship. The notorious East German secret police (the Ministry for State Security or `Stasi') spied, poked and pried into the lives of every single citizen, looking for and punishing any form of dissent against the regime. Even in the Soviet Union, the DDR's `motherland', the ratio of `watched' to `watchers' was never anywhere near as high.

At the end of the Second World War, West Berlin was occupied by the British, French and Americans, with the Soviet Union looking after the East of the city. Shortly afterwards, the border between Soviet-occupied East Germany and the newly proclaimed Republic of West Germany was drawn several miles to the West. Effectively, West Berlin became a `capitalist' island in a communist sea. The Wall was erected around West Berlin in 1961 to stem the flow of East German defectors, hitherto able to permanently vacate life in the 'East' by simply crossing the city. The leaders of the DDR and their Soviet backers claimed at the time that they were trying to prevent 'Westerners' from crossing over to buy cheap Eastern goods but, with defections across the porous border running into thousands every week, it was clear what the real intention was.

Taylor's book charts the history of events leading up to the building of the Wall, subsequent efforts to broker a compromise and the eventual decline of the DDR leading to the toppling of the Wall and German reunification. Amongst the cast are the leading characters of US President John F. Kennedy, Mayor of West Berlin Willy Brandt and the terrifyingly committed East German Presidents, Walter Ulbricht and Erich Honeker. Behind the main story, there are also tales of daring escape attempts through underground tunnels, dark sewers and across the icy waters of the River Spree. There is also plenty of social and cultural background fleshing out the story of how the two halves of the city developed in parallel after the Wall went up. I particularly liked the part about East German punks and the interest the Stasi took in them.

If I have one criticism it is that the late 1970s and early 1980s are dealt with quite quickly. This was `my era' and I would have liked to have read more of Taylor's social history of that time. That is a small criticism really and this is still a marvellous book, very entertainingly written.

Dry political history
Obviously you can't write a book about the Berlin Wall or the Second World War without including a lot of politics. I was expecting that. But this book goes to extremes. It is top-heavy history. Taylor is too concerned with the statesmen, the politicians, the generals, the ministers, etc., and their speeches, decisions and policies.

Very little of this book is given over to the little people and their inconsequential -- but fascinating -- lives and experiences. I would certainly have liked more of this sort of thing. Instead I discovered within its tissue-thin, Bible-like pages nothing but politics and -- worse -- economics and statistics!

Also, I don't think Taylor includes much analysis. He tells us who was involved and what occurred with commendable exactitude (plenty of dates and times), but he fails to say enough about WHY this happened and what the consequences were. I think he's aiming this book at readers who already know something about the Berlin Wall and aren't, as I am, too young to know much about it.

Still, I think I learned something from this book even if it glossed over the lives of the ordinary East and West Berliners a bit. I think Taylor could have included a few more interesting anecdotes and personal testimonies without compromising the status of the book as a work of 'serious' history.

PS: I like the cover artwork, but the pages come perilously close to falling out when the spine is creased!

A great, fast - paced read.
I am unsure what the people who didn't enjoy this were actaully looking for. It is true that the Wall is not built until half way through the book but what went before is perhaps as important as the wall itself. Whenever a history of an event or time period is written it is vital that the reader understands exactly why the event happened or where that period fits into the narrative of its history.
As for the end being rushed, I entirely disagree. It is fast, short and breathless. I think this is fitting, after all the state of East Germany had existed for 40 years and took a matter of weeks to collapse. I would have liked to know more about the feelings of the people standing on the wall on that November night in 1989 but this is my only criticism of an otherwise fantastic book.
As for the 70's and 80's being skipped over, what do you want to know? People continued to suffer at the hands of a regime that to the outside world was stable and showed no signs of what was to come. I believe that to have included too much detail about this period would have meant that the book lost its pace and that, to me at least, is one of the outstanding features.