The Berlin Wall: 13 August 1961 - 9 November 1989

By Frederick Taylor

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Aug 2, 2012
• ISBN: 9781408835821

Frederick Taylor

Frederick Taylor studied history and modern languages at Oxford University and Sussex University. A Volkswagen Studentship award enabled him to research and travel widely in both parts of divided Germany at the height of the Cold War. Taylor is the author of Dresden and has edited and translated a number of works from German, including The Goebbels Diaries, 1939-1941. He is married with three children and lives in Cornwall, England.

Reviews for The Berlin Wall

[jespercfs2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I really enjoyed reading this book. Taylor has a good 'flow' in his account and just the right dose - in my humble opinion - of personal remarks. If I had had the time I would have read it continuously

So, if you feel an irresistible urge to read about The Wall, this book is a very good choice. Go ahead and enjoy

[thecrow2 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A wall which divided a city and thousands of lives for decades and where dozens of people died. An easy to read and informative book about maybe the strangest symbolic monument of the XX. century.

[bke-3 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Not only covering the diplomatic and political background of the Wall, the author also interleaves personal stories of ordinary Berliners, creating dynamic history of what was an ugly scar on a city I love. I remember my first sight of the Wall in 1984, and watching its downfall on TV just 5 years later. This was the best history of the Berlin Wall I have read.

[cushlareads · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I gave this book 4 stars, which is really an average of 5 stars for content and 3 (barely) for the writing. I found Taylor's style really annoying. There are lots of sentences. Without verbs. For dramatic effect. And it's a bit repetitive. Some of the translations are bizarre (e.g. High Burgomaster for mayor), and I did not really need to know that Lyndon Johnson ate oatmeal and melon for breakfast the day he was in Berlin. But most of the content is terrific. I've just come back from a trip to Berlin and it enriched my visit hugely. I filled it with sticky notes and then visited some of the streets, like Bernauerstrasse where the wall split the street. Taylor presents a good overview of what happened in Germany and Berlin at the end of WW2. The East German regime was repressive from the start and funnily enough the East German people did not fall in love with communism and the SED (Communist party). Many tried to leave. After 1949, when the German Democratic Republic was created out of the Soviet zone, this became very difficult, except through West Berlin - if you could get to the airport there, you could get on a plane and leave, and thousands did. Berlin in turn was divided into 4 sectors in 1945, and there was more-or-less free flow of Berliners among the sectors. If you lived in the Russian sector, you could work in the other sectors and earn West German marks, or send your kids to school there - not without heavy criticism and accusations of being a traitor, but you could do it.By 1961, the East German government was desperate to stop the flow of emigrants, and finally got the go-ahead from Stalin to put a barrier up around West Berlin, so that it was completely closed in. This happened in secret and overnight. Taylor goes on to describe the repression, the escape attempts, diplomatic negotiations and cold war politics, West and East German politics, and of course what happened at the end. If you're going to Berlin, or interested in the period, I would read this book as well as The File by Timothy Garten Ash, or Stasiland by Anna Funder.

[theuniversityofgav · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

New Year's Eve 2009/2010 I wanted to be on my own, as I have many New Year's Eves, but a few days before a good friend invited me over to be with his girlfriend and a female friend of theirs. Still reluctant, and ambivalent about the fact I was convinced they were trying to set me up, I accepted and drove over. This friend of theirs was a teacher, was convinced of her own intellectual brilliance, and had a tendency to micro-manage conversation until the whole evening became one long, dread, succession of parlour games. Who would we invite to the ideal dinner party (I hate dinner parties), Barack Obama apparently, to which my unenthused response earned me the assured "Don't you read Time". No, I don't. Another such game led somehow to us discussing what would be our Mastermind topic. Hers was Elvis, and she issued a torrent of facts (and those justifications masquarading as facts that are never far from a true fanatic's lips). B_____'s would be Rallying in the '90s. His girlfriend's, I think, would be something to do with the Berlin Wall. At any rate, one thing I took away from the evening, aside from my own unsuitability for company of any kind and my desire to be a perfect recluse, as I had more or less managed that half year, was that, though I had many special interests as fiercely obsessive as our Elvis aficionado's that night, I was master of none of them; the fact that I had managed one tenuously assimilated fact about the Berlin Wall that night, and that I had for many years had an interest in precisely this period of Central and Eastern European history, and the Cold War seemed particularly stark, and I played a game of Solitaire Humiliations with myself for a long while afterwards. Soon after moving to North Wales I was walking around Bangor, a University town, and indeed, a university town I could have lived in had things turned out differently - for most of the summer, awaiting A-Level results, I had indeed believed I would end up at my second choice, studying English with Creative Writing, and looking back now I could see for sure it would have suited me better - and taking a look at the Oxfam, I could not hold back from buying Taylor's book on the very subject I had proven myself to not understand. One thought I depolyed against the compulsive purchase of the book was that I would never in a million years finish it. I don't do well with such long books. The faltering motivation and shifting priorities of my ADHD see to that. But it was no good. Two, three months on, I am glad of that. The book was a slog. I stalled on it numerous times and, though I left myself notes and To Do lists, and though I picked up the book again and again and pushed myself on, my self conscious re-focusing sessions were difficult. Something changed perhaps when I got one hundred and fifty or so pages in and the wall was built. Suddenly the recondite machinations of the various political parties and cabals were thrown into sharp relief by the very real human stories of the individuals and groups on either side of the wall. Unusually for me I zipped through the next few hundred pages, reading them quickly for me at any rate. The realities of events in the GDR and the larger than life characters of those such as Lyndon Johnson, Walter Ulbricht, John F Kennedy, Nikita Krushchev and, more particularly, those lesser known but, incredibly, equally rare individuals, are for me more enthralling than any political thriller. It may well be that the events were enthralling enough to keep me reading despite the lacklustre text. There were few passages where Taylor's prose or delivery stood out and it struck me that perhaps at times the scarcely believable events could have been better served. Still, I am glad I persisted, and feel no less determined, at the end of it, that any future games of Solitaire Humiliations will not find me so ignorant of an area of history I should by now be pretty sure of. Outside of the text I have a few of my usual bugbears. Acronyms and abbreviations can be opaque at the best of times, and histories concerning the Cold War especially so given the fact that many such are taken from the already perplexing initials of foreign institutions. At the very least I believe a history such as this ought to have a list of abbreviations used. Equally useful, though, would be a list of the key figures. It is not only those with ADHD like myself who may find themselves putting such a book as this aside for a time. It needs an investment of concentration and energy many people lack over a prolonged period. It can be difficult to remember a large cast of characters at the best of times. Overall, though, reading this book has made me less intimidated by serious historical texts, less liable to persuade myself that I would be unable to make it through them, and indeed, more likely to persist. I may well seek out Taylor's more highly rated Dresden, and try again with such texts as Timothy Garton Ash's We The People and The Polish Revolution. Whatever my reservations, this itself must be a high recommendation.