Fred's Book Club: Another Brick.

Welcome to Wednesday, or whatever it is when you see this. It's Wednesday here, and that means it's Hump Day, and time for the Humpback Writers, who don't actually have humps, unless they have some around that they haven't shown me. Nobody tells me anything.

Today we delve into recent history to have another look at "real" communism in action.

British journalist Christopher Hilton, who was a sportswriter for most of his career, compiled an amazing collection of stories of the Berlin Wall in 2001's The Wall: The People's Story. It's a street-level view of the rise and fall of the famous barrier that came crashing down in 1989. For almost forty years it was at the eye of the Cold War, and by the start of the eighties it felt as if all the world was watching, as if Berlin was at the very center of the world. Not the Middle East, nor Kabul, nor Tokyo, nor even New York City, where I lived, but that bisected German city, one half of which was an outpost of freedom in a desert of communism.

Hilton seems to have talked to a lot of people; in fact, he seems to have talked to everybody. After summarizing the tensions between the East and West in the postwar period, he describes the origins of the wall that began in the city and spread its arms across Germany. Prior to that, thousands of East Berliners traveled to the western half every day to work, the half that had shops filled with goods. Many tried to move permanently, leading to worker shortages, particularly of the smarter workers (the "brain drain"). For that reason and a number of others, the East Germans, despite prior assertions to the contrary, decided that a wall must go up.

It didn't start with bricks at mortar; on the night of August 13, 1961, it started with wire. The East German Factory Fighters, a kind of civilian reserve, began the installation.

Two Factory Fighters in shirt sleeves walked with a coil of the wire wrapped in a ball round a stout stick, a Fighter holding each end of the stick. As they walked, the wire automatically uncoiled and another Fighter, kneeling, lifted a strand of it and hammered it into a concrete post using cleats, gathered another strand and hammered that in, then another -- row upon row, neatly spaced -- until the wire was head high. An elderly couple were escorted from the wire by a policeman, the sadness and the powerlessness expressed by the stoop of their shoulders.

That very night, illegal crossings began.

At 10.30, a crowd of 4,000 lingered on the Western side of the Brandenburg Gate but for an insurrection to occur would mean bursting past their own police, then the cordon of Factory Fighters, then the armoured personnel carriers with the water cannons, then the Eastern police, before reaching Unter den Linden; and Unter den Linden had been cleared, anyway. At 10.45, a report came in that ‘a male person’ had swum the Teltow Canal.

They would continue into 1989.

Part of the new wall ran right along apartment buildings, and East Berliners started jumping out the windows to escape to the West.

In Bernauer Strasse workmen swarmed the ground floors of the apartment buildings, bricking up windows from the inside. Residents called to people in the West for help and clambered onto window ledges to drop to the pavement. The West Berlin Fire Brigade hurried there with safety nets anticipating that, when the bricklayers reached the upper floors, residents might jump.

Hilton does a minute-by-minute reconstruction of the night the wall rose and the days that followed, when the United States and its allies tried to determine the best course of action against this surprise move. Three hundred trucks towing artillery were sent, and to many it looked like the wall was the spark that would begin World War III.

Hilton's book spends many riveting pages on the period following the initial wall construction, but goes on to tell the stories of those living in its shadow for decades, those who risked everything to escape, and those present when they tore the damned thing down.

Anyone interested in history would find this a fascinating read, I think, and for those of us who grew up in the Cold War, it's crucial knowledge. We are faced with a real possibility of Cold War II, thanks to the actions of the Chinese Communist party, and we have a generation that has no idea what communism really looks like, or why someone would risk death and torture to flee it. Hilton, who passed away in 2010, strives to be fair to the East German and Soviet leadership, and yet the bald, brutal face of communist dictatorship cannot be prettied up.

Maybe our youngsters now would say that it wasn't "real communism." But it's always real communism. This is what it always is.