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In Ian McEwan's (1948- ) Black Dogs (1992), Bernard, a prominent English politician, present at the fall of the wall, suffers a severe beating at the hands of a group of neo-Nazi skinheads. He is rescued by the efforts of his son-in-law, Jeremy, and by a woman who bears a strong resemblance to Bernard's late wife, June. June and Bernard were married in 1946, right after the end of World War II. While on their honeymoon hiking in a remote area of the Midi section of France, June is separated from Bernard and finds herself confronting two huge, ravenously hungry black dogs. One of the dogs attacks her, and in defense she repeatedly stabs the animal with a pocket knife until he finally retreats. Shortly after, she and Bernard learn from a local resident that the dogs had belonged to a Gestapo unit stationed in the area. The animals had been left behind when the Gestapo troops were ordered to frontline duty.
June is profoundly affected by this incident. Prior to it, she and Bernard had been ardent young communists, committed to social justice as the highest good. Now she becomes increasingly spiritual in her concerns, withdrawing from the world of politics and ideology. She and Bernard, although still very much in love, separate since neither can accept the other's point of view. Even after her death, Bernard is embittered by what he views as her destruction of their marriage. For June, the black dog incident had been a revelation, an expression of the afterlife of evil--in the case of the dogs, the legacy of Nazism, but this persistent wickedness is not limited to Nazism:
The evil I'm talking about lives in us all. It takes hold in an individual, in private lives. . . . And, when conditions are right, in different countries, at different times, a terrible cruelty, a viciousness against life erupts, and everyone is surprised by the depth of hatred within himself. . . . It is something in our hearts.
As the attack on Bernard demonstrates, the evil that the wall embodied did not entirely disappear on November 9. Its residue taints the hearts of the people of the city. But Bernard's rescue, by someone who looked like June, also suggests the final triumph of love over hate.
John Marks's (1943- ) The Wall (1998) focuses on the dilemma that followed the collapse of the wall, which in effect ended the Cold War. The decades-old confrontation of superpowers had created a relatively simple and straightforward standoff, both sides handcuffed by the knowledge that because each side had nuclear weapons, neither side could use them. The Berlin Wall stood as a symbol of that reassuring assumption. Its sudden collapse upset all the rules by which the superpowers played and opened the field up to individual entrepreneurs and hard-line fanatics on both sides. This is the situation explored in The Wall, a novel that combines elements of the spy thriller with a probing examination of a serious historical dilemma. The novel opens at an Allied listening post in Berlin on November 9, 1989. A few hours before the celebration at the wall, Captain Nester Cates, an American intelligence officer, hears two members of an enemy intelligence unit discussing him, when the computer next to him suddenly catches fire and a programmer working on the machine is killed. Cates's friend Stuart Glemnik is a suspect, and Cates is ordered to find him. The search, weaving its way through a diverse group of people, including Douglas, Stuart's brother, leads to Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Romania, as those nations are in the throes of revolt against the local communist regimes. Douglas eventually finds Stuart, dying in a Romanian prison cell, who tells him the complex, involved story of a planned terrorist act in Berlin that misfired because it had been scheduled on November 9, the day that the wall came down. The Wall is a superior thriller, adroitly fusing its action to the collapse of communist world.
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