CHECKPOINT CHARLIE
THE COLD WAR, THE BERLIN WALL AND THE MOST DANGEROUS PLACE ON EARTH
IAIN MACGREGOR
Constable, 340pp, £20
The Berlin Wall was built to stop East Germans ‘voting with their feet’. And very effective it was. What had once been a torrent was reduced to a trickle. President Kennedy might declare, ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’, but his rhetoric altered nothing. No wonder Khrushchev boasted, ‘Berlin is the testicles of the West. When I want the West to scream, I squeeze on Berlin.’
Astonishingly, given the profusion of spies operating in Berlin at the time, the arrival of the Wall took the West by surprise. Or did it? In the Observer, Neal Ascherson, who was there at the time, claimed the
Americans knew 13 days in advance. ‘As a reporter I learned that most of the spying in the city was not so much cold war drama as simply a black market in information, less profitable than petrol or blue jeans, but safer.’
In the New Statesman William Boyd, whose Berlin Cold War thriller, Spy City, will be broadcast later this year, praised Macgregor’s ‘great fluency and drive. A curious sideeffect of reading his history is that, as the story steadily unspools, the reader vicariously encounters all the complex gamut of emotions that the Wall itself generated, almost as if you were a witness to the history being enacted, from the shock and consternation of its sudden presence in 1961, to the grim and fatalistic resignation of its endurance through the Sixties and Seventies, to the growing hopes and eventual euphoria of its demise and destruction in 1989. It is a powerful and moving experience.’