Before the Wall

by George Clare

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 052524896X
• ISBN13: 9780525248965
• Release Date: September 1990
• Publisher: Dutton Books
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 0.25 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Well Written Record of Berlin, Just After the War.

"Before The Wall", by George Clare, Sub-titled, "Berlin Days, 1946-1948", Dutton, New York, October 1990. This is short, well written record of the author's service as a translator and part of the British occupying forces in Berlin, directly after the Second World War. George Clare was born as Georg Klaar in Vienna before the Nazi take-over. As a young man, he saw the "Anschluss" and the end of Austria as an independent country. His father worked to get visas for emigration to the Republic of Ireland (the Irish Free State, as Mr. Clare then termed it), but things were fouled up and the family of father, mother and son were stuck in Nazi Germany's capital, Berlin. Clare uses this stay as a basis for comparison when he returns to bombed-out Berlin, after the war. In a poignant passage, the author remarks on the lack of noise in cold and windy post-war Berlin, where once he had heard the noise and sounds of a busy city. Much of the front of the book is devoted to his memories of this bombed-out city becoming alive as he works in the British occupying forces. The details of simple breakfast, when the Berliners were going hungry (if not starving) and the details of the deference given a British uniform during a subway rush hour, mundane as it would seem, brings alive the occupation of Berlin. You had to be there to write out such recollections. Clare's writing is excellent.Towards the end of the book, the author semi-analyzes Nazi Germany and its cousin state, Austria. He quotes Primo Levi in saying that the Germans were lacking the courage to speak out against the concentration camps. Clare speaks of Goethe and Schiller strolling the woods where "... the SS implanted the hell it called Buchenwald". (p. 275). Clare doubts that A. Hitler, in 1928, when he was dictating "Mein Kampf", "..could have had the Final Solution in his conscious mind", (p. 277) but, clearly, from the paragraphs just preceding, Clare shows, by recounting Hitler's acquiescence to the killing of 380 Jews, that Hitler knew what was happening. Read the book just for this section alone.This is an excellent book, well written and a worthy personal story that documents the history of the few years between the end of the war and the building of wall.