The Berlin Wall: A World Divided

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Berlin is my favorite city in the world.

I would have enjoyed Frederick Taylor’s incredibly rich and engaging history of the Berlin Wall, even if it weren’t such a great book in its own right.  It’s that rare historical non-fiction pageturner that successfully combines hard facts and soft details to craft a very compelling narrative of a fascinating era.

While a similar work could have been drafted from a comparably exhaustive review of literature and primary sources, Taylor has a unique gift for using anecdotal details to lend color to the historical timeline:

Free to come and go in the East as they wished, Western radical tourists liked its lack of commercialism and advertising, the cheap food, the bookshop next to Friedrichstrasse station where you could buy very inexpensive copies of the Marxist classics.  What could be so wrong with a state where you could buy a hardcover copy of Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire for the price of a cup of (terrible) coffee?

The Berlin Wall does an excellent job of covering the most relevant historical details and placing them within the proper context of the wall and the city itself.  The book is an excellent response to the notion that the wall was much more symbolically than actually significant to the cold war.  The thinking and actions of leaders in the US, the USSR and the GDR are tightly placed together and paired well with the realities of life in Berlin at the time.

Through carefully weaving the stories of world leaders and global politics with the anecdotes of individuals in the East and the West, Taylor .  Between relating the somewhat famous history of Rudi Dutschke’s disenchantment with the GDR as a student and the famous escape attempts of the early 1960s, he gives an primary source account of two border guards.  This simple account, like many in the book, help properly frame the thinking of Berliners and the events of their time:

Some fled on the spur of the moment.  One Grepo platoon commander, stationed on the suburban part of the border, who fled the West with a comrade in 1961, described the foxhole conversation that preceded the escape:

“As we were lying there, he suddenly said to me: ‘What would you do if I were to clear off?’  My answer was: ‘Well, there’s only one thing I’ll say to you — as a Christian I can’t shoot at another human being.’  So straight away he said, ‘I’m clearing off.  Do you want to come with me?’”

After some hesitation, the platoon commander went with him.

Little ground is left uncovered in the book, which begins with a brief and entertaining history of the city itself from the Middle Ages, through Modern Europe’s wars, the Cold War and reunification.  The Afterword on the legacy of the wall, the “Mauer im Kopf” (Wall in the Head), is both realistically pessimistic and cautiously hopeful, if a bit too Berlin-centric. I captures a feeling I get from talking with some of my best friends in Berlin, who are often reluctant to opine on their city’s place in history and where that leaves it today.