Wall of misery.(The Berlin Wall: 13 August 1961-9 November 1989)(Book review)

The Berlin Wall: 13 August 1961-9 November 1989, by Frederick Taylor; Bloomsbury, 2006, $35.

IN THE SUMMER Or 2006 friends of mine, a middle-aged couple from Bautzen, a thousand-year-old city in the Upper Lusatian region of Saxony between Dresden and the Polish border, were cycling around Holland. In Rotterdam on a guided tour they were told that they were in the "new city". In all innocence they asked what had happened to the "old city". Their guide took some pleasure in explaining to them in grim detail exactly what had happened to Rotterdam on the night of May 14, 1940.

My friends' dilemma is a stark reminder that, before the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet satrap state known as the German Democratic Republic (the DDR), around 17 million highly educated and sophisticated people were locked up in the middle of Europe in what Frederick Taylor calls a "surreal cage", permanently banned (with few exceptions) from going anywhere else in the world except to other countries of the Soviet bloc, and fed a diet of news, information and history skewed completely to the ideological interests of their communist masters.

Taylor's superb narrative centres around the Wall from its hasty construction as a barbed-wire barrier on the boundary line of Berlin's Soviet Sector on August 13, 1961, through the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s when it seemed to be an impregnable barrier about which Paul Johnson could write in the Spectator of April 27, 1985, that it would divide Germany for "perhaps for a century or more", to its demise in good-natured chaos on November 9, 1989.

There is more here, however, than just this single dramatic story. Radiating outwards, Taylor gives us a history of Berlin from its beginnings as a Slavic swamp settlement, through its life as the capital of Brandenburg (and Prussia after 1618), its depredation by the Swedes during the Thirty Years War, its glory days under the Hohenzollerns and its raffish days in the Weimar Republic. Nazi Berlin is only seen briefly in sepia.

Taylor gets into stride with his description of how in the immediate postwar years East Germany and East Berlin gradually separated from the rest of Occupied Germany. For the three years after the war the Allied Control Commission based in Berlin was supposed to have been the ruling body for the whole country. Berlin was 160 kilometres inside the Soviet Zone. Inside the Soviet Zone's boundaries lay much of the industrial and cultural heart of old Germany and the great cities of Dresden, Leipzig, Weimar and the centre of old Berlin itself. It was only after the Allied Airlift of 1948 broke the Soviet Blockade that Berlin was divided politically and administratively. By that time the Control Commission was a dead letter and, within a year, two hostile German states had come into existence.

In Berlin for the next twelve years sector borders and occasional checkpoints and restrictions ambiguously coexisted with the free movement of people around the city and with shared telephone lines, water, sewerage and transport. All this took place while the 1381-kilometre border between the two German states from the Baltic to the forests of Bavaria froze into an impregnable line of fortifications. The biggest eruption in these times was the June 17, 1953, uprising in Berlin's Soviet Sector, which was ruthlessly crushed by Russian tanks at the cost of 267 lives (with a further 200 executed and 1400 sentenced to life imprisonment after perfunctory trials). The bloody lessons of this traumatic event fuelled the DDR leadership's corporate paranoia to the end.