Voices from the Berlin Wall

At the beginning of his classic spy novel The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, John le Carré sets the scene by mapping the lay of the land. We are in Berlin at the height of the Cold War and an East German double agent is about to defect. The obstacle in his way is the seemingly insurmountable Wall, “a dirty, ugly thing of breeze blocks and strands of barbed wire, lit with cheap yellow light, like the backdrop for a concentration camp.” Not that the surrounding landscape is any prettier: “East and west of the Wall lay the unrestored part of Berlin, a half-world of ruin, drawn in two dimensions, crags of war.”