The Other Side of the Berlin Wall - Annamarie Vickers, Tim Heath

At midnight of 12 August 1961 East Germany became partitioned from the West by an ideological barrier that would remain a chancroid rash upon the political landscape of post WW2 Europe for some forty-five years. Initially little more than rolls of barbed wire, this barrier soon became the concrete monolith known the world over as the Berlin Wall. Prior to the construction of the wall an exodus of some 3.5 million East Germans circumvented the Eastern Bloc emigration restrictions in order to escape the socialist nightmare that many knew was now imminent. For those on the other side of the wall their lives would be characterized by fear, oppression, the denial of basic human rights and an abject paranoia coupled with endless ques of people outside shops with no goods to sell. This book tells the story of those who lived under the German Democratic Republic (GDR) where Marxism-Leninism and Russian language were compulsory for all schoolchildren. Although hatred and resistance towards the regime soon flourished it would take many decades for communism to choke upon its own poison, but would a re-unified Germany and the rest of Europe be any safer in the wake of its demise?