The Wall

About This Book

On a Sunday morning in August 1961, Berliners woke to find their city cut in two. Overnight, soldiers had strung barbed wire down the middle of the streets, torn up the tram tracks, and sealed the railways. Families who had gone to sleep in one city awoke in two. Within months the wire had hardened into concrete, and for the next twenty-eight years a wall ran through the heart of Berlin — ninety-six miles of it, guarded by watchtowers, dogs, and a raked strip of sand engineered for a clear shot at anyone who tried to cross.

In The Wall, E.B Cohen tells the whole story of the twentieth century's most notorious border — not just the night it fell, but everything that led to it. Here is the ruined, four-flag Berlin of 1945; the blockade and the airlift that saved a starving city from the sky; the two-million-person exodus that drove a failing regime to cage its own people; and the anatomy of the death strip itself, told through the guards who manned it and the desperate men, women, and children who dug beneath it, flew over it, swam around it, and died against it.

And here, at last, is the night of 9 November 1989 — a mis-read note, a spokesman's careless words, a border officer who chose to open a gate rather than order a massacre, and the crowds who danced atop the concrete with hammers in their hands. Sweeping, humane, and grounded in the latest scholarship and the voices of the people who lived it, this is the complete and gripping story of how a great city was divided — and how, one extraordinary night, it was made whole again.