During the night of 12-13 August 1961, a barbed-wire entanglement was hastily constructed through the heart of Berlin. It metamorphosed into a structure that would come to symbolise the insanity of the Cold War: the Berlin Wall. Frederick Taylor tells the story of the post-war political conflict that led to a divided Berlin and unleashed an East-West crisis, which lasted until the very people the Wall had been built to imprison breached it on 9 November 1989. Weaving together history, original archive research and personal stories, "The Berlin Wall" is the definitive account of a divided city and its people in a time when humanity seemed to stand permanently on the edge of destruction.