Escaping the Berlin Wall

On an August afternoon in 1961, a nineteen-year-old East German border guard who had been standing beside a single coil of barbed wire since before dawn ran at it and jumped into West Berlin, and a photograph taken in the instant he cleared the wire became the defining image of the Wall's first week.

Over the twenty-eight years that followed, thousands of others tried to follow him, some by climbing out of apartment windows and swimming canals, some through tunnels dug by hand beneath the border, and one group of eight in a balloon that two families had sewn together in secret, all while a vast state security apparatus worked to learn their plans before they could carry them out.

Escaping the Berlin Wall tells their stories as closely as the historical record allows: the overnight sealing of Berlin and the tense face-off between American and Soviet tanks at Checkpoint Charlie, the tunnel that brought twenty-nine people to the West in two nights, the death of eighteen-year-old Peter Fechter within sight of a watching crowd, and the documented cases in which Stasi informants betrayed the very people who trusted them. It also looks at the other side of the barrier, at the orders given to the guards and at how German courts judged those orders after reunification, and it follows the story through the autumn of 1989, when a muddled press conference and a crowd that refused to go home brought the Wall down.

Inside this book:

• Fifteen chapters of narrative history, written to be read like a story rather than studied like a textbook
• Escapes by tunnel, balloon, zip line, and ultralight aircraft, told through the people who attempted them
• A timeline, a who's who, a glossary, and a short guide to the Wall sites you can still visit in Berlin