The Wall: The People's Story

East Berlin, Sunday 13 August 1961: Reuters journalist Adam Kellett-Long sat in front of his typewriter trying to compose the day-lead. 'I suppose I was in the third sentence when the phone rang. I picked it up and a man's voice I didn't recognise said in German "don't go to bed this night". At that moment the ADN service closed for the night as usual, End of Transmissions, but because of this extraordinary call I stayed there wondering.' At 1.11, the ADN teleprinter in Kellett-Long's office suddenly opened up again and began to run a generalised Warsaw Pact communique from Moscow. It read '...In the face of the aggressive aspirations of the reactionary forces of West Germany and its NATO allies, the Warsaw Pact proposes reliable safeguards and effective control be established around the whole territory of West Berlin.' The unthinkable had actually the border was being closed and the city permanently divided in half. Berlin, writes Christopher Hilton, 'is positively heaving with extraordinary personal memories' like this one. Across a twelve-foot wall and the width of a white painted line at Checkpoint Charlie, East and West confronted each other for nearly thirty years, yet it is the individual stories that are perhaps most telling. Astonishingly, these memories are largely untapped, so until now the complete story of the Berlin Wall - the people's story - has remained untold. Hilton, a journalist and writer, has been captivated by Berlin's unique past for three decades, conducting hundreds of interviews there since the Wall came down. Leading world politicians, the American military, the British military, East German border guards and ordinary people on both sides all feature in the book, their memories expertly interwoven into a remarkable, seamless narrative. The result is an extraordinarily vivid, occasionally harrowing, sometimes touching story - the best real-life novel you'll ever read.