Customer Reviews

The Berlin Wall: A World Divided, 1961-1989

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Having read Frederick Taylor's fast-moving and extremely informative 'Dresden,' I was looking forward to his latest book on that icon of the Cold War - the Berlin Wall. I was not disappointed.

The story of the Wall is not quite as linear as that of Dresden, in which events moved inexorably towards the horrific fire-bombing. Rather, there are three acts: the lead up to the construction of the Wall in 1961; the Wall years; the endgame, 1989.

From the start, the book builds with excitement as it is becomes clear that GDR leader Ulbricht, supported by Security Secretary Honecker, will prevail against the preference of (the surprisingly rational) Khrushchev and be allowed to imprison his own people (who were fleeing in huge numbers). Amazingly, all this was not clear to Western security services.

At the beginning of the 'Wall years' there is a slowing of pace as West Germany and the world come to grips with what has happened right under their noses, and in defiance of the four-power Potsdam Agreement. But it doesn't take long for the excitement to rise again with the escape attempts and the first death. The unravelling of Soviet power that leads to the eventual dismantling of the Wall seems, in the end, to be a closing chapter of the Second World War rather than of the Berlin Wall itself.

Taylor's strength as a historian and storyteller is his ability to weave a great deal of minutely researched detail into a highly readable, very accessible tale. The book taught me an astonishing amount, even though I lived through much of this saga. But it was a pleasure, never a chore.

This book is highly recommended for those who wish to more fully understand a frightening period of recent history.

Frederick Taylor distinguished himself in his previous book "Dresden." He repeats that distinction in this fascinating, informative book on the Berlin Wall. Deep research and a facile writing style make this book a highly informative and interesting read which moves effortlessly from specifics like escape attempts and stories of the dead to a well written overview ending which he entitles "the theft of hope" for the East Germans. His carefully concealed contempt for Walter Ulbricht and Erich Honecker never slides into a polemic. Taylor even allows a trace of humor or maybe farce describing Lyndon B. Johnson's 1961 visit to Berlin who sees Willy Brandt's fine shoes and demands to shop for a pair for himself on Sunday.

Taylor, obviously fluent in German, joins the ranks of other fine English historians, all knowledgeable in German, who have recently written superb histories about Germany and European affairs; Max Hastings' "Armageddon," Ian Kershaw on Hitler, Richard Evans' books on the rise of Nazism, Antony Beevor on the battles of Stalingrad and Berlin, and Adam Zamoyski on Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna.

These are all fine histories which obviously come about by the access to records, previously unavailable, before the fall of the Wall.

Frederick Taylor's breezy - and sometimes cheesy - anecdotal history of the German Democratic Republic makes excellent armchair reading, as long as the reader avoids the risk of considering it authoritative. Notice, please, that I've already dismissed Taylor's disingenuous title; "The Berlin Wall" is not simply an account of events from 1961 to 1989. It's a broad interpretation of the whole history of Germany, from the rise of Prussia, through the World Wars, to the central matter of the book, the "brief life and unlamented death" of East Germany, the GDR. Obviously too huge a topic, even for a 500 page book, but Taylor is less committed to responsible historiography than to entertaining journalism, and it's as the latter that this book should be read.

Taylor's first-chapter overview of German history involves the reader in some risk. If you are reasonably informed about modern European history, the risk is that you'll become enraged at Taylor's flippant simplistic account and hurl the book through a window. If you are NOT at least moderately informed, the risk is far more serious, that you might be persuaded by Taylor's cleverness to consider his account adequate. It isn't.

However, once Taylor gets to the point -- that is, to the division of post-war Germany into East and West, and more particularly to the bizarre 'career' of the GDR as a communist society -- the book gets better, the research more apparent and more plausible... and the anecdotes more amusing. And when he finally narrates "Operation Rose", the clandestine construction of 'The Wall' in 1961, followed by case after case of courageous resistance and thrilling escape, Taylor is in his element as a journalist. There are truly 101 blockbuster movie scripts to be found in The Berlin Wall, some of them tales of individual heroism, some of them sad parables of greed and hypocrisy.

Straddling The Wall, nevertheless, there's the far more significant story, as Taylor acknowledges, of the Cold War decades, during which neither Germany, East or West, could pursue its own development apart from the interventions of the Superpowers. As Taylor reports, the reunification of Germany was not a welcome prospect for England, France, or Russia. Both Germanies were, in a sense, front-line pawns and puppet states, at least as perceived from 'behind', and the aspirations of the Germans themselves would continue to be thwarted by global considerations right up until the sudden denouement -- metaphorically, the Fall of the Wall. Taylor's reportage focuses on the Eastern half of this story, the tortuous relationships between the Soviet occupiers and the GDR-to-be. This is material that will be new to most Western readers, based on studies of archives that only become accessible quite recently. Taylor's thesis, stating it simply, is that the GDR was doomed to implode, to self-destruct, because of its inherent economic weaknesses, made more fragile by the ideological rigidity of its leadership.

Taylor is at pains throughout his account of the GDR to "give the devil his due", that is, to credit the chief figures -- Ulbricht, Krushchev, Honecker -- and most of the lesser figures, with not only some degree of political ability but also with 'the courage of their convictions'. They were ideological fanatics, perhaps, but sincere idealists as well. Idealists, Taylor's portrayal would suggest, make the worst tyrants. Nothing that resulted from even the most noble-sounding ideology in the communist states, of course, justified and palliated the repression and stagnation that Taylor describes as the norm of the decades of dictated idealism under Ulbricht and Honecker.

Taylor is also careful not to give the devil more than his due. In his analysis, the collapse of the GDR, i.e. the Fall of the Wall, and indeed the end of the Cold War resulted more from the inherent internal shortcomings of Soviet/GDR statism than from any performances by Western or American leaders. Taylor is British himself, so one ought not to be surprised if he is less respectful of American pretensions, and of the American Presidency, than American readers normally presume. JFK, in Taylor's account, is unattractively venal and opportunistic, though he proves stronger in the end than his wiliest adversaries expected. LBJ, as limned by Taylor, is a buffoon of Texan proportion, a vulgar ambitious pol whose real significance in the events in Europe was chiefly inadvertent and counter-productive; if anything, Taylor would have it, LBJ's Vietnam and subsequent American global adventurism gave 'credibility' to GDR anti-capitalist, anti-American propaganda, thus prolonging the survival of East Germany as a communist experiment.

Taylor is more careful in his treatment of Ronald Reagan, though scarcely more respectful. There are many, Taylor concedes disingenuously, who credit Ronald Reagan's fervid anti-communism with hastening the collapse of the USSR, the end of the Cold War, the Fall of the Wall... And then Taylor proceeds to ignore Reagan completely, to depict the precise 'local' pressure of events in the GDR and in the other countries of the Warsaw Pact that in fact took the Americans and the rest of the West as much by surprise as the 'old guard' of communism. The Wall was demolished, Taylor more than implies, by the will of the people on both sides of it.

Then, when the Wall is rubble, when chunks of authentic Wall concrete are sold as souvenirs? Taylor's brief assessment of the 'success' of German reunification, which concludes the book, is realistically grim. The ordinary folk of the GDR, as he sees it, lost and lost again. "Ostalgia" (nostalgia for the idealism of the Old Left egalitarian communism, sorry sham that it was) is a real phenomenon in Germany today, as I observed for myself in November of 2009, when I was in Berlin for the 20th anniversary 'celebration' of the Fall of the Wall.

Taylor's great strength in this book is his snappy anecdotal style, his ability to 'script' history in terms of vivid personalities. His weaknesses are his too-apparent partisanship in analyzing the ideological conflicts of the Cold War Era, and his willingness to let a vivacious anecdote serve in lieu of cautious scholarship.

This title was my first ever purchase of an e-book. Although it is a well written book I am very disappointed at the number of typos I discovered. Actually, this e-book has more typos than most printed books I have read. I don't know whether this is just a fluke or whether there is a problem with the translation process from print to electronic form. If, in fact, this is the norm I may consider staying with printed versions instead. Perhaps some readers that have more experience with e-books could enlighten me. The content of this book is excellent but the typos really take away from the experience. I hope these comments have been helpful.

A well written insightful look at Berlin, the wall and the cold war. As with any good history this is a story of people places and time. Taylor brings to life people as diverse (or maybe as similar) as Fredrich the Great, Erich Honecker, the Cold War Leaders and working class Berliners. Each story had me going to Google Earth to look for the part of Berlin in which it took place. Taylor starts not in 1961, but with founding of Berlin as a divided cityand takes us through the rise and fall of the wall and those who built it. If you like history from a European viewpoint rather than the harsh anti-communism of most American treatment of this subject you'll like this book.

Fredrick Taylor's The Berlin Wall: A World Divided 1961-1989 makes the Berlin Wall a very interesting and informative.

Taylor's makes the Berlin Wall interesting through his use of short stories. These stories not only make the wall personal, but they allow the reader to become invested in the book through the harrowing tales of survivors. Taylor not only tells the persons stories but separates it up and spreads them throughout the book. They become little treasures to the story, you want the complete picture of what each person desires. By dispersing parts of the story, he keeps you invested and interested in the book.

Taylor also give a huge amount of detail about the Wall. The information given helps you understand the ways of the wall, why people acted and reacted the way they did. The information also gave me much more information than I ever knew about that wall or the people held captive by it.

This book and this topic need to be studied so that something as catastrophic as the Berlin Wall and the Cold War never happens again. This book is informative and interesting and for that you should read it.

While this book is about the Berlin Wall, in places it extends to a history of Berlin or the GDR. The best part about the book, in my opinion is that it goes beyond a characterization of official statistics or political history in many places and tells individual stories and annecdotes. This is one of the more complete collections of stories about escape attempts, for instance. In spite of these positive aspects, the main organizing factor of the book continues to be the political history of the wall and in a larger sense, border issues. In any case, if you are interested in the Berlin Wall and all of the social and political issues surrounding it as well as some of the more personal details such as the lives of those who guarded it and tried to escape across it, this is an excellent book from which to get some good background material.

I gave this book to my husband as a gift. Here is what he says: It makes fascinating reading, especially for people who have lived through that era. It is all very well explained and the reporting is precise and historically correct. It is a surprising relevation as the writer reveals the mind and execution of events by German communistic elements. He also gives the insight of how the Western Forces: Great Britain, France and the USA handled the situation in occupied Germany.

Frederick Taylor has constructed a book as forceful as the Berlin Wall, itself. Impassioned, and fervently anti-Communist, Taylor begins and largely finishes a dissemination of the East's regime. It's a landmark book and one to be read by anyone who went through the cold war years.

While "The Berlin Wall" is rife with human sacrifice, as it should be, this book is more of a political juggernaut than deems necessary. JFK, Erich Honecker and others are lumped into the bad guy category while Ronald Reagan makes a cameo appearance as the last true standout. One would have thought we had gotten past the mere simplicity of that argument....the one that Reagan's rhetoric got things changed, but apparently not.

Taylor's book is worth the read but his conclusions leave the reader as cold as the cold war. One hopes he doesn't plan a hagiography of Reagan.

I was only a boy when the east sector of Berlin was sealed. It captured my imagination. If the background to this important event is of interest, then I cannot imagine it being covered better than in Frederick Taylor's book. For me the book has the added pleasure of reading like a thriller. An extremely rewarding read, backed by thorough research.