Frederick Taylor - The Berlin Wall

I have a personal connection with the Berlin Wall. My mother took part in protests when the East German government built it, and travelled there to see it fall. We spent many a childhood visit to Berlin looking at the imposing edifice, and I recall my Uncle, in the summer of 1989 telling me and my best friend that the Wall would "always" be there. A few months later it was open, and a year later the place we were standing when we had that conversation was a massive building site as the Potsdamer Platz was rebuilt. I spent New Year's Eve between 1989 and 1990 at the Brandenburg Tour - too lacking in confidence to climb onto the Wall as thousands of other revellers did, I did swig champagne and swap bits of the Wall we'd chipped off with fellow celebrants.

A trip to Germany this year offered the opportunity to read more about the background to my family interactions with the wall through Frederick Taylor's book. Unfortunately, while there is much of interest, the book itself is an indulgent and overlong mess. Taylor begins his account of the Wall with the founding of the city in ancient times and only reaches the end of the Second World War, and the division of the city among the Allied Powers around page fifty. This tendency to over burden the reader with information and detail is a major flaw of the book, which helps push the page count to over 600 and have the effect of numbing the reader.

Another problem is the focus of the story. Taylor frames the history of the Wall mostly through an account of the machinations of East Germany, which means that his point of view is very much that of politicians. This is important when he is explaining the big picture (for instance when he shows the interaction between East Germany and the Soviet Union's interests). It helps the reader to understand why the Wall was built and so on. But it means that much of the human picture is lost. The account is at its best when it draws on interviews and personal accounts - but there is too little of this, and too much about the infighting between Eastern Bloc politicians and others.

I don't know Taylor's particular politics, but there is also a tendency to see the British, French and Americans as generally "good" and the Russians and then the East German's as "bad". This stems from Taylor's critique of the Eastern regimes as being socialist. Unfortunately Taylor makes no real attempt to interrogate what is meant by socialist, so he simply draws a continuous line between (say) Marx and Lenin and Erich Honecker and Gorbachev. Because what was done in the name of socialism by these regimes is abhorrent, he then implies that what was being done in opposition was thus positive. So those protesting against both the East German regime and its wall, as well as US imperialism in Vietnam are dismissed as being naive, or simplistic. Taylor isn't a socialist, so he probably isn't aware of Marxist debates about the nature of the (post Revolution) Soviet Union or the East European regimes. This is a shame - not for point scoring reasons - but actually because understanding the dynamic of those regimes' economies would have helped him explain why the various countries went into crisis in the late 1970s and why the collapse was so rapid.

Sadly the account of the fall of the Berlin Wall (and the rest of the East European regimes) is the weakest part of the book. Here we really are given the impression that the crisis arose out of the machinations of various politicians and the failure of the East German government to manage the economy properly. There's no real sense of the mass protests across East Europe driving a systemic political crisis that forced the politicians' hands. The key point of this, when Hungary opens its borders, is described as something that just happens - rather than being the result of a mass movement. Oddly, given Taylor's discussion of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, there's no mention of the 1988 reburial of Imre Nagy's remains as a focus of this discontent. In fact, the story of the collapse of the East German regime really deserved more about the bravery of the masses than Taylor offers. He's more keen on praising Ronald Reagan, than exploring the ideas and motivations of the people of Leipzig, for instance.

This isn't to say there aren't real gems of interest in this book, but they tend to get lost in the mass of detail. A good editor would have cut back Taylor's digressions (do we need a three page account of the Maginot Line in World War Two to explain the metaphor Taylor uses for the way the Berlin Wall was eventually bypassed?) You do get a good sense of how the US in particular, and the West German's to a lesser extent, did see the Wall's existence as beneficial in the sense of providing stability in the 1950s situation. But readers looking for an overview will probably find this book useful, but it needed a sharper analysis of the regimes and more detail on the protest movements to make it more than a superficial read.

Related Reviews

Dale – The East German Revolution of 1989
Harman - Class Struggles in Eastern Europe 1945-83