Overview
On the morning of August 13, 1961, the residents of East Berlin found themselves cut off from family, friends and jobs in the West by a tangle of barbed wire that ruthlessly cut a city of four million in two. Within days the barbed-wire entanglement would undergo an extraordinary metamorphosis: it became an imposing 103-mile-long wall guarded by three hundred watchtowers. A physical manifestation of the struggle between Soviet Communism and American capitalism—totalitarianism and freedom—that would stand for nearly thirty years, the Berlin Wall was the high-risk fault line between East and West on which rested the fate of all humanity. Many brave people risked their lives to overcome this lethal barrier, and some paid the ultimate price.
In this captivating work, sure to be the definitive history on the subject, Frederick Taylor weaves together official history, archival materials and personal accounts to tell the complete story of the Wall's rise and fall, from the postwar political tensions that created a divided Berlin to the internal and external pressures that led to the Wall's demise. In addition, he explores the geopolitical ramifications as well as the impact the wall had on ordinary lives that is still felt today. For the first time the entire world faced the threat of imminent nuclear apocalypse, a fear that would be eased only when the very people the Wall had been built to imprison breached it on the historic night of November 9, 1989.
Gripping and authoritative, The Berlin Wall is the first comprehensive account of a divided city and its people in a time when the world seemed to stand permanently on the edge of destruction.
Editorials
William Grimes
Rarely does history wind up its dramas so neatly, with the same actor reciting both prologue and epilogue, and Frederick Taylor quite rightly savors the coincidence in The Berlin Wall, his gripping, impassioned history of the cold war’s most malevolent symbol … Mr. Taylor, the author of Dresden, does a great service in carefully separating myth from reality, symbol from substance as he traces the history of the wall from its beginnings in August 1961 as a hastily thrown-down barbed-wire barrier to its final form: 30 miles of concrete, with 300 watchtowers manned by soldiers with orders to shoot to kill.— The New York Times
Anne Applebaum
This book tells the story of this strange piece of architecture—that is, how the Berlin Wall was built, and how it then suddenly, and strangely, ceased to exist. It's a story we think we know, since the outlines have long figured in headlines. But as Frederick Taylor demonstrates in this new history, it's also a story with odd twists and hidden secrets, many only recently revealed, some that have been forgotten and are worth repeating…Taylor concludes his excellent history much as I began this review, with a stroll through the newly intact neighborhoods, marveling at the fact that in many parts of Berlin, it is impossible to tell where the Wall used to be. Indeed, sometimes it seems as if it had never existed at all.—The Washington Post
Publishers Weekly
Walls, like those of Hadrian and Maginot, do not have a good reputation, and Taylor (Dresden) has written a superb narrative of the rise and fall of the monstrous one that scarred Berlin between August 1961 and November 1989. Walls, too, are more than merely bricks and mortar (or, in the 100-mile-long Berlin version's case, anti-vehicle crash obstacles, unclimbable barriers, barbed-wire fences, self-activating searchlights and heavily armed border guards), and one of Taylor's major themes is the Berlin Wall's significance in the global power politics of the Cold War. According to Taylor, Kennedy, Macmillan and de Gaulle were not decisively opposed to the division between East and West Germans. Berlin, in truth, was a dangerously volatile potential flashpoint, and while the erection of the wall was brutal and oppressive to those caught behind or trying to get over it, it stabilized Europe and symbolized the differences between capitalism and communism. Reagan, however, emphasized the rights of the trapped and challenged Gorbachev to tear it down. The Kremlin, ironically, was undone by its own creation. Taylor's enthralling story, combined with impeccable research and its rich human interest, makes this as dramatically gripping as any of the spy thrillers that used the wall as a backdrop. 16 pages of b&w photos, map. (June 1)
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