Pertti Ahonen, Death at the Berlin Wall
Abstract
JCHspjchJournal of Contemporary History0022-00941461-7250SAGE PublicationsSage UK: London, England10.1177/0022009411432223m10.1177_0022009411432223mBook ReviewsPertti Ahonen, Death at the Berlin WallHarrisonHope M.George Washington University42012472474476© The Author(s) 2012 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav2012SAGE PublicationsPertti Ahonen, Death at the Berlin Wall, Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 2010; x + 309 pp.; £57.00 hbk; ISBN 9780199546305Strange though it may be to say about a book about death – or murder – this is a wonderful book to read. In a manner worthy of a detective story and having scoured reams of archival documents and other sources, Pertti Ahonen grippingly pieces together the details of how 12 people under various circumstances (including East Germans trying to escape, border guards caught in the middle and people from the West) came to be killed at the Berlin Wall. He then goes on to clearly analyze how communist East Germany and democratic, capitalist West Germany told the stories of those deaths (or kept them secret in some cases, particularly on the Eastern side), creating hero-victims of different types and seeking to cast their Germany in the best possible light and the other Germany in the worst possible light (often employing analogies to Nazi Germany in the latter case). Published in