Best Books on the Berlin Wall and Divided Germany

On the night of August 12, 1961, East German workers began laying barbed wire across the streets of Berlin. By morning, a city of four million people was divided. Families who had gone to bed in the same country woke up in two different ones. Over the following months and years, the barbed wire became a concrete wall, then a fortified strip of death traps and watchtowers, then a system so elaborate and so permanent that most people on both sides stopped imagining it would ever change. It changed in November 1989, when the Communist government announced that East Germans could cross freely, and crowds gathered at the checkpoints and eventually started dismantling the wall themselves. That moment, one of the most joyful and unexpected in modern European history, only makes sense against the backdrop of the 28 years that preceded it. ## How the Division Happened Germany's division was the direct result of the Second World War and the Cold War that followed. The Allied powers (the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, and France) divided occupied Germany into zones in 1945. Berlin, deep inside the Soviet zone, was itself divided into four sectors. What was intended as a temporary arrangement hardened as relations between the Western powers and the Soviet Union deteriorated. The German Democratic Republic (GDR), the East German state established in 1949, faced a severe problem: its citizens could leave. Before the Wall, more than three million East Germans had emigrated to the West through Berlin, a flow that included a disproportionate number of professionals, the doctors, engineers, and teachers whose departure threatened to hollow out the East German economy entirely. The Wall was built to stop this hemorrhage. It did. It also made the entire country a prison. ## The Books **Frederick Taylor's** *The Berlin Wall: A World Divided, 1961-1989* (2006) is the most comprehensive English-language history of the Wall from construction to fall. Taylor draws on East German secret police (Stasi) archives that became available after reunification, giving readers an unusually clear picture of how the East German state understood what it had built and how it managed the population on its side of the barrier. Taylor is particularly good on the Wall's construction, the political crisis that preceded it, and the individual stories of those who tried to cross. **Anna Funder's** *Stasiland* (2002) approaches the subject from a different angle. Funder, an Australian journalist, spent time in the former East Germany in the 1990s interviewing both former Stasi agents and the people they surveilled. The Stasi was one of the most extensive surveillance organizations in history: at its peak, it employed one full-time agent for every 63 citizens, plus a vast network of informal informers that reached into workplaces, apartment buildings, and families. The book is the best account available of what it felt like to live under that system, and it is also one of the best examples of narrative journalism written in the past thirty years. For the fall of the Wall itself, **Mary Elise Sarotte's** *The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall* (2014) tells the story of November 9, 1989, with meticulous detail. Sarotte shows that the opening of the Wall was not planned. It resulted from a miscommunication, a Politburo member reading out new travel regulations at a press conference and getting the implementation date wrong, combined with the decisions of individual checkpoint commanders in the hours that followed who chose not to fire on the crowds that gathered. History turned on a series of accidents and individual human choices made under pressure. ## Life in Division For people who did not live through it, the hardest thing to understand about divided Germany is how complete the separation became. In the early years, East Germans could still receive West German television and radio, and they did, which gave them a window into a more prosperous alternative. But physical contact between the two populations was almost entirely cut off. Families separated by the Wall in 1961 often did not see each other for decades. Some never did. East Germans developed their own cultural references, music, humor, and social codes, a distinct experience of being German that did not map onto the Western version. When reunification came in 1990, the expectation was that the two societies would simply merge. The reality was more complicated. The term "Ostalgie" (nostalgia for the East) emerged to describe the complicated feelings many former East Germans had about a system that had oppressed them but had also been their entire world. ## What the Wall Left Behind The physical Wall was largely demolished after 1989, but its effects persist. German reunification was enormously expensive. Economic disparities between the former East and West persisted for decades. Political differences emerged as well: former East German regions have shown higher support for far-right and far-left parties than the West, a pattern some researchers attribute to the different political culture produced by decades of life under a one-party state. The Berlin Wall is also a monument to a basic human capacity for adaptation. People on both sides built lives, raised children, and found meaning within a system that most of them had not chosen and could not change. The books that capture this most honestly are the ones worth reading. ## Further Reading Explore more Cold War history books on Skriuwer: [/category/history](/category/history)