Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Entertaining history of frighteningly recent events in Europe, 25 Nov 2007
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.
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4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Dry political history, 23 Nov 2008
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!
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A great, fast - paced read., 10 Nov 2008
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.
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