Death at the Berlin Wall by Pertti Ahonen, and: Behind the Berlin Wall: East Germany and the Frontiers of Power by Patrick Major (review)

The recent anniversaries related to the Berlin Wall—twenty years since its fall in 1989 and fifty years since its construction in 1961—have generated several new publications about the infamous edifice, both in German and in English. Pertti Ahonen and Patrick Major contribute to this literature respectively by analyzing the human tragedies caused by the GDR’s border regime (Ahonen) and by exploring the “invisible frontiers of power staked out behind the literal walls” (Major, 4). Ahonen reads the Wall and its victims as a barometer of inter-German relations and shows how both German states instrumentalized the border, and those who died in its shadow, in their Cold War competition for political legitimacy. Major, by contrast, focuses exclusively on the GDR and charts the consequences of the border—first open, then closed—for the lives of ordinary East Germans.

The Berlin Wall, argues Ahonen, constituted the focal point of the propaganda war between the two German states. The need of Walter Ulbricht’s government to build such a monstrosity in order to stop the ongoing hemorrhage of its population gave the West Germans an instant leg up in the competition for political prestige, both at home and abroad. Nazi analogies, depicting the GDR as a huge concentration camp, were quickly drawn to discredit the socialist rival. East German authorities, for the most part in reactive mode, did their best to return the favor by justifying the building of the Wall as a last-ditch effort to thwart western preparations for military aggression. As incompatible as the western and eastern Wall narratives remained, Ahonen points to their “striking similiarities in content and objectives” (26), as both aimed to mobilize intangible resources such as prestige and legitimacy.

Those who died at the Wall were invariably drawn into these publicity battles. The victims were not only East Germans trying to escape the GDR but also West Berliners who had accidentally infringed upon East Berlin territory, GDR border guards caught in the crossfire (at times their own), and one child who drowned in a border canal. For the West German side, any civilian harmed by East German border guards constituted “the strongest potential trump” (41) over the GDR. Conversely, any such case was a publicity disaster for East Berlin. From the first fatal shooting, the GDR developed strategies to minimize its vulnerability. The primary objective was a cover-up: officials fabricated a course of events for public consumption and even government files, kept the names of the victims anonymous, spread lies about them, and harassed the families into silence. This worked least well when western observers had witnessed the crime, as in the case of Peter Fechter, who bled to death in plain view of western cameras near Checkpoint Charlie. As Ahonen shows, the lack of assistance for a wounded escapee was not an isolated incident but rather a consequence of the priority given to covering up what had transpired. For example, the escapee Michael-Horst Schmidt died in November 1984 because no one tended to his injuries. For GDR officials Schmidt was “mere collateral damage” (230).

Cover-ups could be utterly successful, as in the case of Dieter Beilig. The West Berliner had scaled the Wall in reverse direction in some hot-headed protest action in 1971. He was shot while already in GDR custody, and his corpse simply disappeared without a trace. On the western side, he remained one of many missing person cases until after 1990 and the opening of the East German archives. In view of this patent disregard for the victims’ humanity and because of the posthumous character assassinations, Ahonen made another aim of his book the restoration of “a face and at least...