The two Berlins and the hated structure

History:A glance through the German history section of most English-language bookshops is a depressing business, with endless variations on one theme: the Nazis.

Even the standard works on the Third Reich have been squeezed for shelf-space in recent years by a new wave of pseudo-historical works with titles like "I was Hitler's Secretary/Chauffeur/Masseuse".

One man making a huge contribution to correcting this imbalance is the historian Frederick Taylor, who follows up his outstanding Dresden with The Berlin Wall, and manages once again to combine serious historical research with an assured, gripping narrative. Some 16 years after it vanished, he manages to add new layers to our understanding of a structure so complex and deadly that, as he points out, the term "wall" is completely inadequate.

At the centre of this story is Walter Ulbricht, the first World War veteran who joined the fledgling German Communist Party in 1920 and who rose to become East Germany's de facto head of state.

In 1945, after 12 years of exile in the Soviet Union, Stalin sent Ulbricht to the ruins of Berlin. He went to work immediately, forcing the merger of the Social Democrats with the Communist Party to form the Social Unity Party (SED) and creating a puppet political system where loyal communists pulled the strings of seemingly independent parties.

Ulbricht emerged as the perfect apparatchik, forcing through ideology with Soviet muscle and imprisoning nearly 150,000 opponents in the former Nazi concentration camps between 1945 and 1949, tainting the ideological experiment from the beginning.

For Taylor, Ulbricht believed that political fantasy, when reinforced by fear, could constitute a power stronger than any reality.

Decades on, it seems an oddly familiar premise, when US neo-conservatives snigger at White House critics they consider left behind in a "reality-based world".

Ulbricht got his puppet state in 1949 but by 1961 the German Democratic Republic (GDR) had lost a sixth of its population to West Germany and in particular the shortage of doctors and engineers was acutely felt.

The SED blamed the drain entirely on the wicked West because, as Taylor wryly points out, it was scarcely going to blame itself for the GDR's poor economic recovery.

SED officials stoked resentment towards "border crossers", who worked in West Berlin but lived and shopped with their strong west marks in the east, preparing popular opinion for a more permanent division.

In Ulbricht's eyes, people's gripes with the GDR were not an indication of problems with the system but a sign that the complainers lacked the proper political consciousness.

In Taylor's eyes it is this ideological blindness - combined with huge ambition - that drove Ulbricht and made him tug at the leash held by Stalin and then Khrushchev to expand and consolidate his power, particularly over East Berlin.

Taylor's extraordinary narrative skill - with the pacing of a thriller and the immediacy of reportage - is at its best as he knits together into a seamless narrative numerous eye-witness accounts of August 12th and 13th, 1961, when soldiers divided the sleeping city.

He draws the conclusion that the Berlin Wall, while a human tragedy, suited the West perfectly. As President John F Kennedy put it, "A wall is better than a war".

Taylor suggests that one of the most interesting facts is not how many people died at the Berlin Wall - up to 227 by the highest estimate - but how few died, particularly when compared to other long-term conflicts such as in Northern Ireland.

By 1962, the first big wave of escapes had passed and the reinforced concrete wall had attained an abnormal normality, at which point Taylor's book begins to run out of steam.

Putting Ulbricht to the fore leaves others in the shade, particularly his successor, Erich Honecker, who co- ordinated the top secret construction of the Berlin Wall and defended to the end the shoot-to-kill policy that said "a firearm may be used to the extent that is required for the purposes to be achieved".

Taylor's great strength, his narrative skill, will be seen by some as a weakness, for excluding the baggage of alternative interpretations of events in the interests of pacing.

In an otherwise complete work it seems odd to ignore the controversial memorial politics that continue to swirl around the Berlin Wall - how to remember it and why. That is an important and urgent task in a city where one of the ruling parties is the political successor to the architects of the hated structure.

Derek Scally writes from Berlin for The Irish Times

The Berlin Wall By Frederick Taylor Bloomsbury, 486pp. £20