Nostalgia for aspects of life in the GDR, it seems, is still current. In modern Berlin one can buy any number of products that once graced East Berlin households; the Trabant car has acquired cult status; even the humble Ampelmann – which stood guard at pedestrian crossings in the East – has become an icon.

For all that apparently innocent ‘Ostalgia’, Pertti Ahonen’s book Death at the Berlin Wall, is a powerful antidote. He examines a selection of the 136 individuals killed at the wall in its 28-year lifespan; from its earliest victim, Günter Litfin, in August 1961, to its last, Chris Gueffroy, in February 1989, who was shot and killed just nine months before the Berlin Wall fell.

Some of the stories that he relates are well known; such as that of Peter Fechter, whose fatal shooting in August 1962 unleashed a wave of outrage in the West; or that of the Wall’s youngest victim, 11-year-old Jörg Hartmann, who was killed trying to escape to his father in the spring of 1966. Others are much less prominent, at least in the West, such as the stories of the ‘socialist hero-victims’, border guards Peter Göring, Reinhold Huhn or Egon Schulz, who were killed in shootouts with West Berlin policemen, or desperate would-be escapers.

Aside from engagingly relating such episodes, Ahonen seeks to analyse the popular and official reactions to the deaths, the propaganda resulting from both sides and the effect that they had on the on-going politics of the Cold War and the division of Germany.

His insights are fascinating. One is astonished, for instance, by the breathtaking cynicism and mendacity of the GDR’s politicians in their attempts to discredit those who would flee the ‘socialist paradise’, yet the story that Ahonen tells is much more nuanced than the simple one that might be told by a latter-day Cold-Warrior.

Instead he places the undoubted horrors that unfolded in the Wall’s shadow into a much wider context of developing procedures for policing such an unprecedented physical division, as well as the question of the West’s recognition of the GDR itself. He also suggests that the reactions to the deaths – on both sides of the divide – were as much an expression of the needs of domestic consensus and identity building as they were the products of simple propaganda and ‘news-management’. In many ways, he suggests, the Berlin Wall was not only a political icon and the most visible symbol of the division of Europe, it also became a highly sensitive barometer of Cold War tensions.

Yet aside from the necessary complexities of Ahonen’s account it is the sheer inhuman contempt that the GDR had for its would-be escapers that sticks most vividly in the reader’s mind. Those wounded would be denied prompt medical attention, those killed could be anonymously cremated as ‘scientific material’ and the family members left behind would be intimidated, spied upon and persecuted. The case of Michael-Horst Schmidt is one of the most shocking. Shot and wounded in an escape attempt in 1984, the 20-year-old was dead on arrival at hospital three hours later, by which time the East German authorities were already beginning to weave a web of lies and obfuscations to blacken their victim’s name and shamelessly exculpate themselves. It is stories such as these that should make Ahonen’s excellent, finely written book required reading for all those who still hanker for the ‘certainties’ of life in the GDR.

Roger Moorhouse is author of Berlin at War: Life and Death in Hitler's Capital 1939-1945 (Vintage, 2011).