Checkpoint Charlie

On August 13 1961, work started on erecting an eleven-foot-high concrete barrier that would ultimately cost a billion dollars and would come to serve as the physical and symbolic division between Eastern and Western Europe. Over the next twenty-eight years, thousands would attempt to scale the Berlin Wall and flee communist East Germany - and more than 100 people would perish.

Checkpoint Charlie stood at the confluence of the arterial routes that ran through the heart of Berlin and was the epicentre of global conflict for nearly three decades, until the fall of the Wall in November 1989.

Published to coincide with the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of the Wall, and capturing the mistrust, oppression, paranoia and fear that gripped the world during the era of the Wall's existence - as well as the indomitable spirit of those many people who risked their lives to escape tyranny - Checkpoint Charlie will draw on interviews with key eyewitnesses to tell the heart-rending story of the Berlin Wall and the lives that it changed irrevocably.