The appearance of a hastily-constructed barbed wire entanglement
through the heart of Berlin during the night of 12-13 August 1961 was
both dramatic and unexpected. Within days, it had started to
metamorphose into a structure that would come to symbolise the brutal
insanity of the Cold War: the Berlin Wall. A city of almost four
million was cut ruthlessly in two, unleashing a potentially
catastrophic East-West crisis and plunging the entire world for the
first time into the fear of imminent missile-borne apocalypse. This
threat would vanish only when the very people the Wall had been built
to imprison, breached it on the historic night of 9 November 1989.
Frederick Taylor's eagerly awaited new book reveals the strange and
chilling story of how the initial barrier system was conceived, then
systematically extended, adapted and strengthened over almost thirty
years. Patrolled by vicious dogs and by guards on shoot-to-kill
orders, the Wall, with its more than 300 towers, became a wired and
lethally booby-trapped monument to a world torn apart by fiercely
antagonistic ideologies. The Wall had tragic consequences in personal
and political terms, affecting the lives of Germans and non-Germans
alike in a myriad of cruel, inhuman and occasionally absurd ways. The
Berlin Wall is the definitive account of a divided city and its
people.
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Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9781408835821
Publisert
2015
Utgave
1. utgave
Utgiver
Vendor
Bloomsbury Paperbacks
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter