Suzanne Munshower profiles ten of her favourite Berlin Wall books…
At 1 am on 13 August 1961, barbed wire was rolled out in the first step of building a wall that would split a city for more than quarter of a century. These books can provide a better understanding of the geography of, the history behind and the collateral damage caused by this monument to humankind’s perversity.
The starting point for me is Frederick Taylor’s The Berlin Wall because of its masterful detailing of events leading to the Wall’s construction and demolition. This lively and thought-provoking book is a must for experiencing divided Berlin not just with politicos such as Willy Brandt, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, but with the multitudes who woke one morning to find friends, neighbours and even family suddenly a world away.
Twelve Years, Joel Agee’s low-key memoir of his Jewish-American Communist boyhood in pre-Wall Berlin, drives home the otherness of drüben (“over there”) and the scorn reserved for Republikflüchtige, people fleeing to the west. By the time he left Germany in 1960, Agee, once an enthusiastic “red diaper baby,” had weathered the pain and pathos of his mother and stepfather’s commitment to a party that had already failed all but its most ardent believers.
It’s this pre-Wall yet segregated city that takes centre stage in The Innocent, its disconnection as much a character as the novel’s young English protagonist. Starting from the true story of a joint CIA-MI6 surveillance project, Ian McEwan has written an edge-of-the-seat espionage story that’s also a searing tale of lost innocence and the untrustworthiness of naivete. His Berlin is both corrupted and corrupting, west as well as east.
Because he’s a hell of a storyteller, I forgive Len Deighton his irritating habit of supplying backstory through contrived conversations starting, “Remember when we…?” Out of several books set in Berlin, Berlin Game is one of his most compelling. Spymaster Bernie Samson crosses and recrosses East Berlin checkpoints as he schemes to get an operative out of the east and discover who’s double-crossing him. Somebody’s got to lose, but it won’t be the reader of this sly, sardonic tale.
Some stayed, some left, some died trying. And Peter Schneider’s The Wall Jumper tells their stories in what might be the best Wall fiction ever written. Living in the west of this metropolis, the narrator confesses, “I could orient myself better in New York than in the half-city just a little over three …