Death at the Berlin Wall

During its 28-year existence, the Berlin Wall was the foremost symbol of the Cold War division of Germany - and of Europe as a whole. But it was also a very concrete site of separation and suffering that claimed the lives of at least 136 people. Taking these deaths at its point of departure, this book reconstructs twelve individual tragedies that occurred at the Wall between 1961 and 1989. They include deaths of escapees from the GDR, by far the largest sub-category of the Wall's victims, as well as those of West Berliners who made an unauthorized entry into the border zone and of East German border guards killed in the line of duty. Ahonen connects these fatalities to larger political processes between the two Germanys, linking micro- and macro-historical perspectives in innovative ways. Within a comparative East-West framework, he examines how the deaths became politicized and instrumentalized in the two states' Cold War battles over legitimacy and power. At the same time, he provides a broader narrative history of the Berlin Wall and of German-German relations during the last three decades of the Cold War. He also extends the analysis into the post-1989 context, exploring post-unification Germany's efforts to come to terms with the problematic legacies of the Wall and of national division more generally, thereby adding new perspectives to the ongoing analysis of contemporary German memory politics.

Pertti Ahonen is Senior Lecturer in European History at the University of Edinburgh. A native of Finland, he compelted his Ph.D. in Modern European History at Yale University in 1999, and taught at the University of Sheffield before moving to Edinburgh in 2005. He is the author of After the Expulsion: West Germany and Eastern Europe, 1945-1990 (OUP, 2003) and a co-author of People on the Move: Forced Population Movements in Europe in the Second World War and Its Aftermath (Berg, 2008).