“Death at the Berlin
by Pertti Ahonen
OUP, £60.00, 309pp, index,
notes, bibliography.
Nostalgia for aspects of life in the
GDR, it seems, it still current. In
modern Berlin one can buy any number of
products that one graced East Berlin
households; the Trabant has acquired cult status; even the humble Ampelmann –
who stood guard at pedestrian crossings in the East – has become an icon.
For all that apparently innocent
“Ostalgia”, Pertti Ahonen’s new book Death
at the Berlin Wall, is a powerful antidote.
Ahonen examines a selection of the 136 individuals killed at the wall in
its 28-year lifespan; from its earliest victim, Günter Litfin, in August 1961,
to its last, Chris Gueffroy, in February 1989, who was shot and killed just
nine months before the Berlin Wall fell.
Some of the stories that he relates
are well-known; such as that of Peter Fechter, whose fatal shooting in the
August of 1962 unleashed a wave of outrage in the west; or that of the Wall’s
youngest victim; 11-year-old Jörg Hartmann, who was killed trying to escape to
his father in the spring of 1966. Others
are much less prominent, at least in the west, such as the stories of the
“socialist hero-victims”; border guards Peter Göring, Reinhold Huhn or Egon
Schulz, who were killed in shootouts with West Berlin
policemen or desperate would-be escapers.
Aside from engagingly relating such
episodes, Ahonen seeks to analyse the popular and official reactions to the
deaths; the propaganda resulting from both sides and the effect that they had
on the ongoing politics of the Cold War and the division of Germany
His insights are fascinating. One is astonished, for instance, by the
breath-taking cynicism and mendacity of the GDR’s politicians in their attempts
to discredit those who would flee the ‘socialist paradise’, yet the story that
Ahonen tells is one which is much more nuanced than the simple one that might
be told by a latter-day Cold-Warrior.
Rather Ahonen places the undoubted
horrors that unfolded in the Wall’s shadow into a much wider context of
developing procedures for policing such an unprecedented physical division, as
well as question of the west’s recognition of the GDR itself. He also suggests that the reactions to the
deaths – on both sides of the divide – were as much an expression of the needs
of domestic consensus and identity-building as they were the products of simple
propaganda and ‘news-management’. In
many ways, he suggests, the Berlin Wall was not only a political icon and the
most visible symbol of the division of Europe ,
it also became a highly sensitive barometer of Cold War tensions.
Ahonen provides an admirable
combination of narrative and historical analysis, which skimps neither on the
human stories at the book’s heart, nor on the forensic and painstaking research
that serves to contextualise them. It
helps, of course, that Ahonen is a gifted writer, who is able to combine those
elements into a highly readable, coherent and compelling account, but it is
especially heartening to see an academic historian giving free rein to his
writing and indulging in some good old-fashioned storytelling.
Yet, aside from these necessary
nuances and complexities, it is the sheer inhuman contempt that the GDR had for
its would-be escapers that sticks most vividly in the reader’s mind. Those wounded would be denied prompt medical
attention, those killed could be anonymously cremated as “scientific material”,
and those family members left behind would be intimidated, spied upon and
persecuted. The case of Michael-Horst Schmidt
is one of the most shocking. Shot and
wounded in an escape attempt in 1984, the 20-year-old was dead on arrival at
hospital 3 hours later, by which time the East German authorities were already
beginning to weave a web of lies and obfuscations to blacken their victim’s
name and shamelessly exculpate themselves.
It is stories such as these that should make Ahonen’s excellent book required reading for all those who
still hanker for the ‘certainties’ of life in the GDR.
[This review first appeared in "History Today" in January 2012]
© Roger Moorhouse 2011
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