Berlin reading, part 3: "The Berlin Wall" by Frederick Taylor

So to the last of the three Berlin books in my little spate, this a history of the famous Wall. (For the record, the previous ones were "Berlin at War" by Roger Moorhouse and Hans Fallada's bleak 1947 novel "Alone in Berlin.) 

Taylor writes a straight, well-paced, indeed gripping, history of the wall. It is not so much a beginning, a middle and an end but an origins, beginning and end book. He takes a fairly long run-up, starting with a potted history of the Prussian state (to which he subsequently refers to make some perhaps rather rhetorical comparisons with the GDR), and then a much more detailed account of the stresses and strains in four-power Berlin which, combined with the Stalinist obsessions of German communist leader Walter Ulbricht, led to the erection of the Wall. The planning and execution of the initial installation, which reveal the formidable organisational talents of Erich Honnecker, bizarrely shows the GDR system at its "best" - an extraordinary nocturnal exploit, wildly successful in its own terms, stopping the haemmoraging of population from the GDR in its tracks. 

Taylor takes his time over the early days, months and years of the Wall, detailing the human triumphs and tragedies, the technical and geographical detail, and the local, national and global politics surrounding it. 

Taylor, who obviously has a profound knowledge of Germany and its people, is duly passionate and affronted by the inhumanity of the Wall, and sympathises with the dismay of Berliners when they see the cool reaction of the Western Allies to the imprisonment of their fellows in the East. This does not however prevent him from seeing the larger picture, and from appreciating how, from Western governments' perspective, the Wall actually stabilised a dangerous situation which could even have led to world war. For it remains true, for all the moral aberration of the Wall, it effectively allowed the East German state to survive and thereby kept the Cold War cold. 

Not much consolation for those stuck inside it, of course, and, though Taylor's book is not about the GDR as such, it is about one of its defining features and he gives us much flavour of the benighted world inside what he frequently refers to as a "prison". 

All this said, the book largely skips the sclerotic "middle" period, the 70s and 80s, when the Wall seemed, as it were, set in stone, and subject to sullen acceptance by the populations, realpolitical acceptance from the great powers, and the curiosity of Western tourists. (One of them was me, in 1986, with a crossing of the Wall into a world made utterly alien by nothing more than politics still one of my life's most memorable and defining experiences.)

Of course, it all came tumbling down in 1989, a series of events tracked in renewed detail, and which for many bring our own associations and recollections. 

This is a scholarly and extremely well-researched book, but at the same time reads almost like a page turning thriller. If you share my fascination for this period and place, you will definitely love this book. 

The outrage and the fascination.