The Wall: The People's Story

by Christopher Hilton

East Berlin, Sunday 13 August 1961: Reuters journalist Adam Kellett-Long sat in front of his typewriter trying to compose the day-lead. 'I suppose I was in the third sentence when the phone rang. I picked it up and a man's voice I didn't recognise said in German "don't go to bed this night". At that moment the ADN service closed for the night as usual, End of Transmissions, but because of this extraordinary call I stayed there wondering.' At 1.11, the ADN teleprinter in Kellett-Long's office suddenly opened up again and began to run a generalised Warsaw Pact communique from Moscow. It read '...In the face of the aggressive aspirations of the reactionary forces of West Germany and its NATO allies, the Warsaw Pact proposes reliable safeguards and effective control be established around the whole territory of West Berlin.' The unthinkable had actually the border was being closed and the city permanently divided in half.
Berlin, writes Christopher Hilton, 'is positively heaving with extraordinary personal memories' like this one. Across a twelve-foot wall and the width of a white painted line at Checkpoint Charlie, East and West confronted each other for nearly thirty years, yet it is the individual stories that are perhaps most telling.
Astonishingly, these memories are largely untapped, so until now the complete story of the Berlin Wall - the people's story - has remained untold. Hilton, a journalist and writer, has been captivated by Berlin's unique past for three decades, conducting hundreds of interviews there since the Wall came down. Leading world politicians, the American military, the British military, East German border guards and ordinary people on both sides all feature in the book, their memories expertly interwoven into a remarkable, seamless narrative. The result is an extraordinarily vivid, occasionally harrowing, sometimes touching story - the best real-life novel you'll ever read.

Genres: History, Germany

416 pages, Paperback

First published February 25, 2003

Reviews

[Caitlin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I recently had the priveledge to visit Berlin and see the remnants of the Wall. I took a wonderful walking tour with a passionate guide who shared stories of the Wall and people's often tragic escape attempts. I was quite moved and a little shaken by this. I obviously was aware of the Wall and what it did to people for 28 years, but I never understood what it meant, the true affect it had. While in Berlin I bought the ebook version of "The Wall: The People's Story" because it is always the human side of history that interests me.

I liked the book over all. Hilton did many interviews with survivor's of the wall, both those who escaped and those who were victims by its very existence. When that wall went up people were instantly cut off from their family, friends and often careers. The people on the East, already living separately in their communist country (the international community, even the U.S.A. eventually recognized the GDR as a sovereign nation) became isolated in their lifestyle. The West became a fantasy of better living and Hilton gives a nuanced view of this. After all, there were many terrible things about the GDR, especially the Stasi and border guards, but it was a functioning stable existence, to a point. A lot of Easterners confessed this to Hilton after the Wall came down. They did not like their lives being trivialized, even if the communist society did not work out how they planned. A lot of Easterners were for communism, but of course a lot of people just got trapped in it because they happened to live in what became East Germany after the war and had no choice.

The most moving parts of the book are the interviews with East and West Berliners about how they felt living under this absurd situation of having two countries in one city and being drastically cut off from each other. The West never forgot that East Germany was still made up of Germans, with inherent cultural and language commonalities, even as the East propagandized against the evil capitalism and materialism of the West and how they were dupes of the U.S. and Allies. Hilton captures the poignancy and heartbreak of the situation and constantly reminds the reader that these were real people that this happened to, and many people still suffer emotional repercussions. I was struck by how awful it must have been for parents who had lost children when the Wall finally came down, how ironic it must have felt that people could now go back and forth freely when their child was murdered for searching for a potentially elusive dream of freedom. (Hilton mentions that not all who made it flourished in this now alien society of the West, and many returned when they could to the East.)

There are two things that I did not like about the book. He spent a very long time describing the building of the Wall, which makes sense because of its enormous impact, but his writing was dry and it at times felt like I was slogging through. It was a sharp contrast to the passionate descriptions of the effect of the wall. And the other thing I did not like was he stops the book at the fall of the wall. I think he should have added a chapter or two about what caused the actual fall of the GDR and how the Germanys became one country again. It would have completed the context of the Wall, but I felt like something was missing at the end of the book.

[Ian MacIntyre · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing stories of the Berlin Wall told by the victims, the guards, the survivors, the family, through journals, historical documents, eye witness accounts, etc.

This is the history of the Wall through the eyes of those who were present. Phenomenal!

One of my favourite reads in 2021.

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

A rather fascinating book, since it does document a peculiar behavior of Germans to take a considerable unpopular and politically incorrect urban population and brick them up behind barbed wire, for some reason or other (as they did to a number of Polish and Lithuanian cities in the regime preceding this one, (most notably, Warsaw) and as the regime chronicled in this book did to fellow Germans.) What's even more fascinating is that it puts a human face on the building of the Wall, chronicling the building by stages from barbed wire to concrete cinderblock, to the boarding and bricking up of windows and doors) by naming (as far as might be recorded and remembered) the names of each victim of the Border Police charged with shoot-to-kill orders to prevent escapes out to the West over the 28 years the Wall was in existence.
Less at least one star though, for the author's incorrigible reliance on the word "brutelly"[sic]. That is what galley proofs are for! But maybe he just has bad spelling skills to begin with.

[Bartek · Rating 5 out of 5]

To jest dużo lepsze niż wcześniejsza rzecz o Berlinie Zachodnim, którą czytałem ("The Berlin Wall: A World Divided, 1961-1989" Fredericka Taylora), bo Taylor postanowił umieścić Mur w kontekście historii Niemiec od Fryderyka Wielkiego. I jak już opisał I wojnę światową i Hitlera, to mu się skończyło miejsce w książce. Hilton porozmawiał z mieszkańcami Berlina - i tymi, którzy odegrali ważną rolę w historii Muru, i przypadkowymi ludźmi, spotkanymi w metrze czy hotelu. Większość źródeł w przypisach to "interview with the author". Snuje się z tego fascynująca opowieść.