Private Cold War Tours – Behind the Iron Curtain in East Germany

In 1946, Winston Churchill stood in Fulton, Missouri and named what had already begun: "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent." The speech gave a metaphor to a physical reality that millions of Germans were already living. The Iron Curtain was not a political abstraction. In Germany, it was a border of concrete, wire, watchtowers, and automatic shooting devices that ran through the middle of a continent – and through the middle of families, cities and lives.

For those who grew up in Britain or North America during the Cold War, Germany was the front line. In 1963, Kennedy stood at the Wall and said "Ich bin ein Berliner." In 1987, Reagan stood at the Brandenburg Gate and demanded that Gorbachev tear it down. Both speeches are still quoted. Neither man could have known that the Wall would fall – spontaneously, chaotically, because a bureaucrat read a press release incorrectly – less than three years after Reagan's speech.

George Orwell published Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1949, the same year the GDR was founded. At the time, reviewers called it speculative fiction. When the Stasi archives opened in 1990, historians found that Orwell had, in several respects, underestimated what a surveillance state could actually achieve. The Ministry for State Security employed one officer for every 63 East German citizens – a ratio unmatched by any intelligence apparatus in history, before or since.

John le Carré set his Cold War novels in the world of Berlin's divided intelligence services. His Berlin – grey, suspicious, morally compromised – was not a novelist's invention. It was a precise observation. A visit to the sites we cover makes his fiction read like reportage.