Rainer Laabs

This was a curiosity I unearthed at a secondhand book sale. It was written about a decade after the Berlin Wall fell and thus has a vividness about the events it retells. It talks about the circumstances leading up to the Wall’s construction, the construction, the ways in which the GDR attempted to keep East Germans from fleeing to West Germany, and how the Wall eventually fell. The narrative bounced around in time a bit, and the writing had some distractingly odd constructions (a bit translation-y perhaps; I am presuming it was originally written in German). The book contains lots of black and white photos of the period as well. It’s not a book I would go out of my way to recommend, but it was interesting.… (more)