Top Ten Books About The Berlin Wall: An Insider's POV

The photo accompanying this inaugural "Essential Reading," our new booklist feature, is of me in 1989, doing my very weak-armed part to help hammer down what Berliners called "Die Mauer" -- "The Wall" separating East Germany from West Germany, and enclosing West Berlin in a sort of isolation cell from the rest of the free world. 

The Wall went up in 1961, but to truly understand its genesis, you have to go back to World War II at the very least. Deciding on a ten-title "Essential Reading" list for this centuries-old city is not an easy task -- and I expect some of you out there to argue with my choices, or at least add to them. I'm including the books that have helped me understand the city where I lived for nearly four years and that I believe will contribute to your own understanding of it, too. 

I've put the titles not in alphabetical or chronological order, but in the order I discovered them pre- and post-Wall. My descriptions are about the books themselves and about what I learned from them. 

Books I Read Before The Wall Fell

The Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood -- When I knew I'd be moving to West Berlin, this was the first book I read. It's actually a compilation of two long stories: "The Last of Mr. Norris" and "Goodbye to Berlin," the latter about doomed Sally Bowles and the basis for the famous musical and film "Cabaret." Isherwood's acutely observed ("I am a camera with its shutter wide open" is his oft-quoted first line) scenes of the decadent last days of the Weimar Republic in Berlin show the seamy underside of the city's highly polished sophistication that has existed through all its incarnations.

Berlin Diaries by Marie Vassilchikov -- If you watched Tom Cruise's ill-received "Valkyrie," you may have noticed a dark-haired secretary in the office that the men who formed the "20 July" plot shared, a character based on White Russian Princess Marie "Missy" Vassilchikov. She worked for an official named Dr. Adam von Trott zu Solz and when he became involved in Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg's plot, so did she. Her diaries are extraordinary not just for her attention to detail, but for her story's arc -- from sharing champagne on the Ku'damm to starving as a field laborer in Vienna -- that helped me "see" a pre-Battle of Berlin capital.

Berlin Diary by William Shirer -- If there were no other reason to read this book (and there are many reasons to read it; Shirer was an excellent writer), it would be important to read it for the day-by-day reportage that offers as close to a "real time" account of World War II-Berlin in the early 1940s as we have. (He also had a huge journalistic coup in being the only Allied reporter present at the French surrender at Compiegne in 1940.) He did write with an eye to publication: The book isn't wholly neutral. Still, Shirer taught me, living in my first big city, to look in all places, institutions, and people for clues about the ways the wind is blowing in any particular era. 

Berlin Game by Len Deighton -- No, Deighton isn't the world's finest literary author, and this may not even be his finest novel, but it is one that demonstrates a truth about Cold War Berlin: The spy who betrays you may later save your life. Cynical and weary British MI6 agent Bernard Samson is caught in a web of deceit when a double agent decides he wants to defect to the West. As I arrived in West Berlin in 1986 while the Cold War was still raging, Deighton's book underscored the fact that not all battle scars come from guns and ammo, and the heroes of those battles don't necessarily wear uniforms. Berlin, by nature of its geography and history, is a city of shadow warriors.

Wall: The Inside Story of Divided Berlin by Peter Wyden -- While this energetic account of the author's native city is quite good, its main claim to fame on my list is its publication date. Wyden's popular history of Berlin's Wall was released in 1989 with a thesis that German reunification was not likely to happen for a long, long time. No one can blame Wyden for thinking that The Wall was set in stone (pun very much intended, and I'm sorry), especially since we now know how unexpected its fall was -- but that now makes this book a period piece. I'm happy to have it on my bookshelf as such, a reminder that even the saddest stories can have happy endings.

Books I Read After The Wall Fell

Berlin: City of Stones, Volume I and Berlin: City of Smoke, Volume II by Jason Lutes -- I picked up Lutes's first of a planned trilogy early on after its 2000 release because although I'm no graphic-novel expert (you'll have to see my friend John about GNs), I already knew and loved Art Spiegelman's "Maus" and heard people comparing "Berlin: City of Stones" to it. Kurt Schering and Marthe Müller's story begins in 1928 Weimar Berlin; eight years later, Lutes published "Berlin: City of Smoke," which recounts their lives after the 1929 May Day demonstrations. I don't know at the moment what the third volume will cover, but these spare, affecting pages are a "way in" to Berlin's shady, pre-Nazi days unlike any other I know.

Berlin Noir: March Violets, The Pale Criminal, A German Requiem by Philip Kerr -- I have a hard time believing that I missed these books when they came out in the late 1980s and early 1990s until I remember that right after The Wall fell I was busy getting into the groove of graduate school and reading mostly Chaucer...This 1994 compilation from Penguin of Kerr's trilogy is now a small classic of fiction about Nazi history, covering policeman Bernie Gunther's negotiations through a city landscape that changes more frequently than a kaleidescope. Even after spending years in Berlin, I tended to have a mental picture of Berlin during this era as a kind of single entity before I read Kerr's hardboiled prose. 

A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City by Anonymous and Philip Boehm -- Unavailable in translation until 2006, "A Woman in Berlin" is a stunning portrait of what a person can and will do to survive during the hardest times. The author was a 34-year-old journalist whose 1945 rape convinces her to find "a wolf to keep away the pack" -- she needs one Russian soldier to help her survive. One a personal note, I knew a woman in Berlin who, with her mother and sister, had survived the fall of the city and the Soviet rapes, and her eyes were like funhouse mirrors; she had never recovered, and never would. This anonymous woman's diary shows a side of war that many people, and certainly official histories, too often ignore. 

Berlin: Portrait of a City by Hans-Christian Adam -- This fantastically gorgeous and large book from German art publisher Taschen is about all of Berlin. I can sit and page through it for hours, looking at images from the 19th-century dawn of daguerreotypes all the way to 21st-century art photos. There's plenty of architecture and topography, but the most stunning images are of people: workers, soldiers, models, trümmelfrauen, politicians, artists, and most of all? Children, whose faces show a range of emotions but are most remarkable in being happy whether in food-deprived Weimar days or simply letting their skirts blow up over an East German subway grate. This is a book about Berlin, the city that lived.

Berlin Now by Dagmar von Taube -- A Eurostyle art volume that's just been released and is eye and mind candy at once. Unlike Adam's historical collage, this is glorious art photography showing off a city once again at its peak as Germany's capital. What does that teach me? That the city I once called home will never be lost -- to history, or to me. Today, on the 20th anniversary of day the world changed, I know that Ich hab' noch eine Kaufer in Belrin (I'll always have a suitcase in Berlin).