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Berlin Wall

By: History.com Editors

Updated: November 16, 2023 | Original: December 15, 2009

On August 13, 1961, the Communist government of the German Democratic Republic (GDR, or East Germany) began to build a barbed wire and concrete “Antifascistischer Schutzwall,” or “antifascist bulwark,” between East and West Berlin. The official purpose of this Berlin Wall was to keep so-called Western “fascists” from entering East Germany and undermining the socialist state, but it primarily served the objective of stemming mass defections from East to West. The Berlin Wall stood until November 9, 1989, when the head of the East German Communist Party announced that citizens of the GDR could cross the border whenever they pleased. That night, ecstatic crowds swarmed the wall. Some crossed freely into West Berlin, while others brought hammers and picks and began to chip away at the wall itself. To this day, the Berlin Wall remains one of the most powerful and enduring symbols of the Cold War.

The Berlin Wall: The Partitioning of Berlin

As World War II came to an end in 1945, a pair of Allied peace conferences at Yalta and Potsdam determined the fate of Germany’s territories. They split the defeated nation into four “allied occupation zones”: The eastern part of the country went to the Soviet Union , while the western part went to the United States, Great Britain and (eventually) France.

Even though Berlin was located entirely within the Soviet part of the country (it sat about 100 miles from the border between the eastern and western occupation zones), the Yalta and Potsdam agreements split the city into similar sectors. The Soviets took the eastern half, while the other Allies took the western. This four-way occupation of Berlin began in June 1945.

The Berlin Wall: Blockade and Crisis

The existence of West Berlin, a conspicuously capitalist city deep within communist East Germany, “stuck like a bone in the Soviet throat,” as Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev put it. The Russians began maneuvering to drive the United States, Britain and France out of the city for good. In 1948, a Soviet blockade of West Berlin aimed to starve the western Allies out of the city. Instead of retreating, however, the United States and its allies supplied their sectors of the city from the air. This effort, known as the Berlin Airlift , lasted for more than a year and delivered more than 2.3 million tons of food, fuel and other goods to West Berlin. The Soviets called off the blockade in 1949.

Did you know? On October 22, 1961, a quarrel between an East German border guard and an American official on his way to the opera in East Berlin very nearly led to what one observer called "a nuclear-age equivalent of the Wild West Showdown at the O.K. Corral." That day, American and Soviet tanks faced off at Checkpoint Charlie for 16 hours. Photographs of the confrontation are some of the most familiar and memorable images of the Cold War.

After a decade of relative calm, tensions flared again in 1958. For the next three years, the Soviets–emboldened by the successful launch of the Sputnik satellite the year before during the “ Space Race ” and embarrassed by the seemingly endless flow of refugees from east to west (nearly 3 million since the end of the blockade, many of them young skilled workers such as doctors, teachers and engineers)–blustered and made threats, while the Allies resisted. Summits, conferences and other negotiations came and went without resolution.

Meanwhile, the flood of refugees continued. In June 1961, some 19,000 people left the GDR through Berlin. The following month, 30,000 fled. In the first 11 days of August, 16,000 East Germans crossed the border into West Berlin, and on August 12 some 2,400 followed—the largest number of defectors ever to leave East Germany in a single day.

The Berlin Wall: Building the Wall

That night, Premier Khrushchev gave the East German government permission to stop the flow of emigrants by closing its border for good. In just two weeks, the East German army, police force and volunteer construction workers had completed a makeshift barbed wire and concrete block wall –the Berlin Wall–that divided one side of the city from the other.

Before the wall was built, Berliners on both sides of the city could move around fairly freely: They crossed the East-West border to work, to shop, to go to the theater and the movies. Trains and subway lines carried passengers back and forth. After the wall was built, it became impossible to get from East to West Berlin except through one of three checkpoints: at Helmstedt (“Checkpoint Alpha” in American military parlance), at Dreilinden (“Checkpoint Bravo”) and in the center of Berlin at Friedrichstrasse (“Checkpoint Charlie”). (Eventually, the GDR built 12 checkpoints along the wall.) At each of the checkpoints, East German soldiers screened diplomats and other officials before they were allowed to enter or leave. Except under special circumstances, travelers from East and West Berlin were rarely allowed across the border.

The Berlin Wall: 1961-1989

The construction of the Berlin Wall did stop the flood of refugees from East to West, and it did defuse the crisis over Berlin. (Though he was not happy about it, President John F. Kennedy conceded that “a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.”) Almost two years after the Berlin Wall was erected, John F. Kennedy delivered one of the most famous addresses of his presidency to a crowd of more than 120,000 gathered outside West Berlin’s city hall, just steps from the Brandenburg Gate . Kennedy’s speech has been largely remembered for one particular phrase. “I am a Berliner.”

In all, at least 171 people were killed trying to get over, under or around the Berlin Wall. Escape from East Germany was not impossible, however: From 1961 until the wall came down in 1989, more than 5,000 East Germans (including some 600 border guards) managed to cross the border by jumping out of windows adjacent to the wall, climbing over the barbed wire, flying in hot air balloons, crawling through the sewers and driving through unfortified parts of the wall at high speeds.

The Berlin Wall: The Fall of the Wall

On November 9, 1989, as the Cold War began to thaw across Eastern Europe, an East German Communist Party spokesman announced a series of new policies regarding border crossings. When pressed on when the changes would take place, he said “As far as I know... effective immediately, without delay.” East Berliners flocked to border checkpoints, some chanting “Tor auf!” (“Open the gate!”). Within hours, the guards were letting the crowds through, where West Berliners greeted them with flowers and champagne.

More than 2 million people from East Berlin visited West Berlin that weekend to participate in a celebration that was, one journalist wrote, “the greatest street party in the history of the world.” People used hammers and picks to knock away chunks of the wall–they became known as “mauerspechte,” or “wall woodpeckers”—while cranes and bulldozers pulled down section after section. Soon the wall was gone and Berlin was united for the first time since 1945. “Only today,” one Berliner spray-painted on a piece of the wall, “is the war really over.”

The reunification of East and West Germany was made official on October 3, 1990, almost one year after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

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The Rise and Fall of the Berlin Wall         

November 1, 2019

Posted by: David Morris

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The Berlin Wall came down on the evening of November 9, 1989, during a hastily arranged international press conference in East Berlin. Günter Schabowski, an official in East Germany’s ruling Socialist Unity Party, ambled to the podium clutching some papers. Neither he nor the assembled journalists had got much sleep. Both had been preoccupied with the changes convulsing Communist Europe in the wake of Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev’s liberal reforms summarized under the buzzwords Glasnost  (openness) and Perestroika (restructuring). Over the summer, East German tourists in Hungary had already taken advantage of that country’s newly relaxed border controls to evade their country’s ban on travel to the West and poured through the border to Austria. More crowds of East Germans had been gathering at West German embassies in Budapest, Prague, and Warsaw to demand passage to West Germany. By the time Schabowski mounted the podium, nearly 200,000 East Germans had made their way to West Germany by these routes. In East Germany itself, the regime teetered as mass demonstrations demanded Gorbachev-style reforms. This protest movement continued to grow despite the resignation the previous month of Erich Honecker, the leader of East Germany since 1971, and the entire East German Politbüro only the day before. It was clear that East Germany was facing a crisis, but no one in the room that evening could have foreseen the historic drama that was about to unfold.

Schabowski opened the conference, which was broadcast live on East German television, with a dull recounting of a recent Central Committee meeting. About an hour into the proceedings, an Italian journalist named Riccardo Ehrman asked a question about East Germany’s travel ban. Under the circumstances the question might have been expected, but Schabowski seemed caught off guard. He fumbled through his papers, familiarizing himself with their contents on the spot. Other journalists sensed his vulnerability and began to pepper him with questions. Finally, reading haltingly from a paper he said he had just received on his way to the conference, Schabowski seemed to say that East Germans were free to travel via all transit points from East to West Germany, including West Berlin, “ ab sofort ” (effective immediately). Then he adjourned the conference.

Clamoring reporters trailed Schabowski as he left the room. Was the Wall now truly open? Would East German border guards no longer shoot at those attempting to leave, as in the past? Would East German citizens be allowed to return after they left? Within hours such questions were swept aside by the tide of events Schabowski’s comments unleashed. Aided by recent advances in cable and satellite technology, the international media soon broadcast the news, along with scenes of joy at the Berlin Wall as people began to cross it unhindered for the first time in nearly thirty years. Near the streetcar stop of Friedrichstrasse, some in the crowd recognized Ehrman and hoisted him onto their shoulders, proclaiming him the Maueröffner , the man who opened the Wall. In less than a year, East Germany would crumble along with its Wall, and Germany would be reunified.

To understand why the Wall fell it is necessary to understand why it was built. After World War II the victorious allies, known as the Four Powers, set up occupation zones in Germany—the Soviets in the East, the Americans, British, and French in the West. A special status was accorded to Berlin. It was located deep in the Soviet zone, but, like the country as a whole, was administered by the Four Powers. Originally conceived as a provisional arrangement until occupation ended, this division of Germany and Berlin soon solidified as the expedient wartime alliance between the Soviet Union and the Western powers gave way to the ideological and military confrontation of the Cold War. After the founding of two German states in 1949—the Federal Republic of Germany in the West and the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in the East—Germany’s erstwhile capital of Berlin became the neuralgic heart of the Cold War, its western half an outpost of freedom while its eastern half languished under the Soviet Union’s repression of freedom in central and eastern Europe.

Unlike their fellow subjects elsewhere in Soviet-dominated Europe, East Germans could look next-door to a free and prosperous counterpart, with a shared culture and language, perhaps even with relatives now separated from them by their country’s division. These affinities and contrasts grew more acute over time as radio and television broadcasts from West Germany reached the East, and divided Berlin was where they were most painfully apparent. Massive migration to the West was the result, especially through West Berlin. In 1960 alone nearly 200,000 East Germans left the GDR for West Germany. This added to the over 2.5 million that had left since the war. As always in such movements, it was mostly the young and the skilled who risked the wrath of the authorities to seek their freedom. The GDR, meant to be a showcase of the Soviet model in the middle of Europe, was being drained of brains and bodies, and East Berlin, the self-styled “capital of the GDR,” was the center of the hemorrhage.

The Wall was East Germany’s answer to this existential threat. On August 13, 1961, at one o’clock in the morning, the boundary between both halves of Berlin and the checkpoints between West Berlin and the surrounding region of Brandenburg were sealed off. At first, rolls of barbed wire were installed, guarded by soldiers of the East German army and police. These were soon replaced by two-meter-high barbed-wire fences. In the densely built-up center of Berlin, windows and doors of buildings bordering the western sector were bricked up as guards prevented residents (and the laboring masons) from escaping. Despite the growing Wall, the number of those attempting to flee to the West continued to climb. Many paid with their lives. On August 23, the Wall claimed the first of over 130 victims in its lifespan. Ida Siekmann lived directly on the sector boundary; her house could only be entered from the West Berlin side. Only days earlier she could cross the street to visit friends and family in the French sector. As the Wall went up, she died after jumping from her third-floor apartment in her attempt to join them.

The Wall met with little more than verbal protest from the Western powers. U.S. President John F. Kennedy’s visit to Berlin in June 1963 and his stirring proclamation, “Ich bin ein Berliner,” could not disguise the West’s accommodation of Soviet and East German actions. This fact was bitterly noted by Germans at the time but demonstrated the modus vivendi of the victorious allies after their failure to agree on a policy for all of Germany. The West would defend its rights in West Germany and West Berlin, but by the same token it would not interfere with Soviet and East German actions in “their” portions of Germany. Thus was Berlin a microcosm of the global Cold War standoff between the superpowers.

By the mid-1970s, the Wall had acquired the mechanized brutality familiar to observers in later years. Entire blocks of houses and other structures were bulldozed to make way for moats, security perimeters, lighting and alarm systems, watchtowers, and dog runs. By the time it finally came down, the Wall was a technologically sophisticated, virtually impenetrable concrete and steel barrier with an elaborate infrastructure, guarded by a special unit of the East German army. Its official designation in East Germany’s Orwellian phrase was “anti-fascist protective barrier.” For the free world, it was a stark monument to the GDR’s illegitimacy and repression.

That such a monstrous structure could crumble overnight after some awkward remarks by a Communist official at a press conference seemed surreal to observers at the time. In retrospect it’s easier to see that the Wall fell because the conditions for the GDR’s survival had already vanished by the time Schabowski made his remarks. Gorbachev had ripped them away when he revoked the so-called Brezhnev doctrine of intervening militarily to quash popular opposition in Moscow’s satellites, as in Budapest in 1956 and Prague in 1968. In his last days in power Honecker hoped Gorbachev would do just that as protests engulfed East Germany and thousands were fleeing the country. Gorbachev refused. In one of the most surreal and ironic moments in recent European history, Gorbachev chose the festivities of the fortieth anniversary of the founding of the GDR in October 1989 to warn Honecker: “Life punishes those who arrive late.” Moscow left its satellites to their own devices; East Germany, as became clear within a month, had none. It had never succeeded in establishing a unique identity sufficient to win the loyalty of its subjects in the constant comparison with its western counterpart. Aside from Communism’s valiant resistance to Nazism in World War II, it had no independent cultural foundation. While West Germany saw itself as the only free representative of the entire German people and anchored the goal of a peaceful and united Germany in its constitution, East Germany’s reason for existence derived solely from the exactitudes of the Cold War and the projection of Soviet power. These existential deficiencies were why the Wall was built in the first place. With Gorbachev’s famous warning, both it and the state it had isolated were doomed.

The fall of the Wall did not entirely end Germany’s division. Germans still speak of a Mauer in den Köpfen, a wall in people’s minds. Thirty years after joining one of the world’s most advanced economies practically overnight, many eastern Germans continue to feel like second-class citizens as they grapple with rapid social and economic change. This sense of alienation has contributed to the growing appeal of populist movements in the region. In the West, many have long resented the billions of euros in subsidies that have flowed to the East since reunification and wonder if it was a good thing after all. These mutual doubts and resentments show that Germans continue to struggle with the trauma of national division and the legacy of the Wall that so brutally reinforced it.

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What caused the fall of the Berlin wall?

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Wish it had more detail on the events leading up to the wall, and the aftermath of it in later years.

What happened to the Berlin wall and germany

Nice post, keep it up. Hope you are well.

Nicely done article and interesting information. Thanks for your hard work on such a topic.

Good content, hope you are well and keep it up.

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The Berlin Wall: A Historian‘s Perspective on Its Purpose and Impact

• by history tools
• May 26, 2024

Introduction

The Berlin Wall, a symbol of the Cold War and the division of Germany, stood as a stark reminder of the ideological differences that shaped the latter half of the 20th century. Constructed overnight on August 13, 1961, the wall‘s primary purpose was to stem the tide of East Germans fleeing to the West in search of a better life. In this blog post, we‘ll delve into the historical context and reasons behind the construction of the Berlin Wall, as well as its impact on the city and its people, from a historian‘s perspective.

Historical Context: The Division of Germany and Berlin

The division of Germany and Berlin can be traced back to the aftermath of World War II. At the Yalta Conference in February 1945, the Allied powers (the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union) agreed to divide Germany into occupation zones following its surrender. The subsequent Potsdam Conference in July-August 1945 further solidified these plans, with Berlin, located within the Soviet zone, also divided into four sectors.

As tensions between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union escalated, the differences in their political and economic ideologies became increasingly apparent. In 1948, the Soviet Union imposed a blockade on West Berlin, cutting off all land and water routes to the city. The Western Allies responded with the Berlin Airlift, supplying the city with food and supplies by air for nearly a year until the blockade was lifted in May 1949.

The division of Germany was formalized in 1949 with the establishment of the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) in the Western-controlled zones and the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) in the Soviet zone. The formation of NATO in 1949 and the Warsaw Pact in 1955 further entrenched the Cold War divide between the capitalist West and the communist East.

Life in East and West Germany: A Stark Contrast

The differences in living conditions and political systems between East and West Germany were stark. West Germany experienced rapid economic growth, known as the "Wirtschaftswunder" (economic miracle), thanks to the Marshall Plan and its adoption of a social market economy. Citizens enjoyed a higher standard of living, political freedom, and access to consumer goods.

In contrast, East Germany struggled with a centrally planned economy, resulting in lower productivity, shortages of goods, and a lower quality of life for its citizens. The GDR government maintained strict control over society, employing a vast network of informants (the Stasi) to monitor and suppress political dissent. East Germans faced travel restrictions, limited access to information, and political repression.

These disparities led to a growing number of East Germans fleeing to the West. Between 1949 and 1961, an estimated 3.5 million people, or roughly 20% of the East German population, had left the GDR, with many of them being young, educated, and skilled workers [1]. This brain drain had a significant impact on the East German economy, costing an estimated 22.5 billion Deutsche Marks (equivalent to $6.3 billion in 1961) [2].

The Berlin Crisis and the Construction of the Wall

The ongoing exodus of East Germans through Berlin, which remained the easiest crossing point between East and West, led to a series of events known as the Berlin Crisis of 1961. On June 4, 1961, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev issued an ultimatum to the Western powers, demanding the withdrawal of all armed forces from Berlin within six months and the establishment of a "free city" of West Berlin. Failure to comply, he warned, would result in the Soviet Union signing a separate peace treaty with East Germany and handing over control of access routes to Berlin to the GDR.

U.S. President John F. Kennedy, who had taken office just months earlier, met with Khrushchev in Vienna on June 3-4, 1961. During these tense discussions, Kennedy made it clear that the U.S. would defend West Berlin and its access routes, but he also expressed a willingness to compromise on issues such as the recognition of East Germany and the presence of Western troops in West Berlin. Khrushchev, interpreting Kennedy‘s stance as a sign of weakness, increased pressure on the city in the following weeks [3].

Meanwhile, the East German government, led by Walter Ulbricht, had been planning to seal off the border between East and West Berlin. On August 12, 1961, Ulbricht signed an order to close the border and begin constructing the wall. That night, in an operation codenamed "Rose," East German soldiers and police began erecting barbed wire fences and barriers along the border. Within days, construction of a more permanent concrete wall began, complete with guard towers, landmines, and orders to shoot anyone attempting to escape [4].

The international community reacted with shock and condemnation to the wall‘s construction. U.S. Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson visited West Berlin on August 19, 1961, and declared, "We have a solemn obligation to defend this city. The commitment of the United States to the freedom of West Berlin is unshakable" [5]. Despite these strong words, the Western powers ultimately accepted the wall‘s presence, focusing instead on maintaining their access rights to West Berlin.

The Impact and Legacy of the Berlin Wall

The Berlin Wall had a profound impact on the city and its residents. Families and friends were separated, and East Berliners were cut off from the economic opportunities and freedoms of the West. The wall also became a flashpoint for Cold War tensions, with U.S. and Soviet tanks famously facing off at Checkpoint Charlie in October 1961.

Despite the wall‘s formidable presence, many East Germans still attempted to escape. Between 1961 and 1989, an estimated 5,000 people successfully defected, while at least 140 people lost their lives trying to cross the border [6]. The most famous casualty was 18-year-old Peter Fechter, who was shot and left to bleed to death in the "death strip" on August 17, 1962, in full view of Western media and onlookers.

The Berlin Wall remained a symbol of oppression and division until November 9, 1989, when, amid growing protests and a rapidly changing political landscape in Eastern Europe, the East German government announced that citizens could freely travel to the West. Thousands of jubilant East and West Berliners gathered at the wall, chipping away at the concrete with hammers and chisels in a powerful display of unity and the triumph of freedom over tyranny.

The fall of the Berlin Wall paved the way for German reunification, which was formally achieved on October 3, 1990. The reunified Germany has since become a leader in the European Union and a symbol of the continent‘s post-Cold War integration and prosperity.

The Berlin Wall, built to prevent the mass emigration of East Germans to the West and to protect the GDR‘s faltering economy, stood as a powerful symbol of the Cold War divide for nearly three decades. Its construction had a profound impact on the lives of Berliners and served as a stark reminder of the ideological differences that shaped the post-World War II era.

From a historian‘s perspective, the Berlin Wall represents not only the physical division of a city and a nation but also the human cost of political ideology and the struggle for freedom and self-determination. Its legacy serves as a reminder of the importance of unity, cooperation, and the ongoing fight against oppression and division in all its forms.

As we reflect on the history of the Berlin Wall and its impact on the world, we must strive to learn from the past and work towards a future where the ideals of freedom, democracy, and human rights are upheld and protected for all.

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The Berlin Wall as a political symbol

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“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” — U.S. President Ronald Reagan

Dividing a nation and a city

Constructed overnight, a political symbol, the fall of the wall, where is the berlin wall.

• The two cities had been gradually separating their systems of governance as well as services (like police departments) and infrastructure (phone lines and transportation) since the end of the war, but the construction of the Wall in 1961 required that this process be swiftly and thoroughly completed.
• After East and West Germany reunited, it was still not clear whether the capital of the nation would be located in Bonn or Berlin. The parliament voted to locate the new capital in Berlin in 1991.
• The artists of the murals that make up the East Side Gallery have had to make numerous requests for additional funds from the city to clean and restore the murals because of frequent vandalism, and nearby development has resulted in the demolition of a few parts of the wall.

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The Rise and Fall of the Berlin Wall

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A Divided Germany and Berlin

The economic differences.

• Mass Emigration From the East

What to Do About West Berlin

The berlin wall goes up, the size and scope of the berlin wall, the checkpoints of the wall, escape attempts and the death line, the 50th victim of the berlin wall, communism is dismantled, the fall of the berlin wall.

• B.A., History, University of California at Davis

Erected in the dead of night on August 13, 1961, the Berlin Wall (known as Berliner Mauer in German) was a physical division between West Berlin and East Germany. Its purpose was to keep disaffected East Germans from fleeing to the West.

When the Berlin Wall fell on November 9, 1989, its destruction was nearly as instantaneous as its creation. For 28 years, the Berlin Wall had been a symbol of the Cold War and the Iron Curtain between Soviet-led Communism and the democracies of the West. When it fell, the event was celebrated around the world.

At the end of World War II , the Allied powers divided conquered Germany into four zones. As agreed at the July 1945 Potsdam Conference , each was occupied by either the United States, Great Britain, France, or the Soviet Union . The same was done in Germany's capital city, Berlin. 

The relationship between the Soviet Union and the other three Allied powers quickly disintegrated. As a result, the cooperative atmosphere of the occupation of Germany turned competitive and aggressive. One of the best-known incidents was the Berlin Blockade in June of 1948 during which the Soviet Union stopped all supplies from reaching West Berlin.

Although an eventual reunification of Germany had been intended, the new relationship between the Allied powers turned Germany into West versus East and democracy versus Communism .

In 1949, this new organization of Germany became official when the three zones occupied by the United States, Great Britain, and France combined to form West Germany (the Federal Republic of Germany, or FRG). The zone occupied by the Soviet Union quickly followed by forming East Germany (the German Democratic Republic, or GDR).

This same division into West and East occurred in Berlin. Since the city of Berlin had been situated entirely within the Soviet Zone of Occupation, West Berlin became an island of democracy within Communist East Germany.

Within a short period of time after the war, living conditions in West Germany and East Germany became distinctly different.

With the help and support of its occupying powers, West Germany set up a capitalist society . The economy experienced such a rapid growth that it became known as the "economic miracle." With hard work, individuals living in West Germany were able to live well, buy gadgets and appliances, and travel as they wished.

Nearly the opposite was true in East Germany. The Soviet Union had viewed their zone as a spoil of war. They pilfered factory equipment and other valuable assets from their zone and shipped them back to the Soviet Union.

When East Germany became its own country in 1949, it was under the direct influence of the Soviet Union and a Communist society was established. The economy of East Germany dragged and individual freedoms were severely restricted.

Mass Emigration From the East

Outside of Berlin, East Germany had been fortified in 1952. By the late 1950s, many people living in East Germany wanted out. No longer able to stand the repressive living conditions, they decided to head to West Berlin. Although some of them would be stopped on their way, hundreds of thousands made it across the border.  

Once across, these refugees were housed in warehouses and then flown to West Germany. Many of those who escaped were young, trained professionals. By the early 1960s, East Germany was rapidly losing both its labor force and its population.

Scholars estimate that between 1949 and 1961, nearly 3 million of the GDR's 18 million populace fled East Germany.   The government was desperate to stop this mass exodus, and the obvious leak was the easy access East Germans had to West Berlin.

With the support of the Soviet Union, there had been several attempts to simply take over the city of West Berlin. Although the Soviet Union even threatened the United States with the use of nuclear weapons over this issue, the United States and other Western countries were committed to defending West Berlin.

Desperate to keep its citizens, East Germany knew that something needed to be done. Famously, two months before the Berlin Wall appeared, Walter Ulbricht, Head of the State Council of the GDR (1960–1973) said, " Niemand hat die Absicht, eine Mauer zu errichten ." These iconic words mean, "No one intends to build a wall."

After this statement, the exodus of East Germans only increased. Over those next two months of 1961, nearly 20,000 people fled to the West.  

Rumors had spread that something might happen to tighten the border of East and West Berlin. No one was expecting the speed—nor the absoluteness—of the Berlin Wall.

Just after midnight on the night of August 12–13, 1961, trucks with soldiers and construction workers rumbled through East Berlin. While most Berliners were sleeping, these crews began tearing up streets that entered into West Berlin. They dug holes to put up concrete posts and strung barbed wire all across the border between East and West Berlin. Telephone wires between East and West Berlin were also cut and railroad lines were blocked.

Berliners were shocked when they woke up that morning. What had once been a very fluid border was now rigid. No longer could East Berliners cross the border for operas, plays, soccer games, or any other activity. No longer could the approximately 50,000–70,000 commuters head to West Berlin for well-paying jobs.   No longer could families, friends, and lovers cross the border to meet their loved ones. 

Whichever side of the border one went to sleep on during the night of August 12, they were stuck on that side for decades.

The total length of the Berlin Wall was 96 miles (155 kilometers).   It cut not only through the center of Berlin, but also wrapped around West Berlin, entirely cutting it off from the rest of East Germany.

The wall itself went through four major transformations during its 28-year history. It started out as a barbed-wire fence with concrete posts. Just days later, on August 15, it was quickly replaced with a sturdier, more permanent structure. This one was made out of concrete blocks and topped with barbed wire. The first two versions of the wall were replaced by the third version in 1965, consisting of a concrete wall supported by steel girders.

The fourth version of the Berlin Wall, constructed from 1975 to 1980, was the most complicated and thorough. It consisted of concrete slabs reaching nearly 12-feet high (3.6 meters) and 4-ft wide (1.2 m).   It also had a smooth pipe running across the top to hinder people from scaling it.

By the time the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, there was a 300-foot No Man's Land established on the exterior, and an additional inner wall.   Soldiers patrolled with dogs and a raked ground revealed any footprints. The East Germans also installed anti-vehicle trenches, electric fences, massive light systems, 302 watchtowers, 20 bunkers, and even minefields.  

Over the years, propaganda from the East German government would say that the people of East Germany welcomed the Wall. In reality, the oppression they suffered and the potential consequences they faced kept many from speaking out to the contrary.

Although most of the border between East and West consisted of layers of preventative measures, there were little more than a handful of official openings along the Berlin Wall. These checkpoints were for the infrequent use of officials and others with special permission to cross the border.

The most famous of these was Checkpoint Charlie , located on the border between East and West Berlin at Friedrichstrasse. Checkpoint Charlie was the main access point for Allied personnel and Westerners to cross the border. Soon after the Berlin Wall was built, Checkpoint Charlie became an icon of the Cold War, one that has frequently been featured in movies and books set during this time period.

The Berlin Wall did prevent the majority of East Germans from emigrating to the West, but it did not deter everyone. During the history of the Berlin Wall, it is estimated that about 5,000 people made it safely across.  

Some early successful attempts were simple, like throwing a rope over the Berlin Wall and climbing up. Others were brash, like ramming a truck or bus into the Berlin Wall and making a run for it. Still others were suicidal as some people jumped from the upper-story windows of apartment buildings that bordered the Berlin Wall. 

In September 1961, the windows of these buildings were boarded up and the sewers connecting East and West were shut off. Other buildings were torn down to clear space for what would become known as the Todeslinie , the "Death Line" or "Death Strip." This open area allowed a direct line of fire so East German soldiers could carry out  Shiessbefehl , a 1960 order that they were to shoot anyone trying escape. At least 12 were killed within the first year.  

As the Berlin Wall became stronger and larger, escape attempts became more elaborately planned. Some people dug tunnels from the basements of buildings in East Berlin, under the Berlin Wall, and into West Berlin. Another group saved scraps of cloth and built a hot air balloon and flew over the Wall.

Unfortunately, not all escape attempts were successful. Since the East German guards were allowed to shoot anyone nearing the eastern side without warning, there was always a chance of death in any and all escape plots. At least 140 people died at the Berlin Wall.  

One of the most infamous cases of a failed attempt occurred on August 17, 1962. In the early afternoon, two 18-year-old men ran toward the Wall with the intention of scaling it. The first of the young men to reach it was successful. The second one, Peter Fechter , was not.

As he was about to scale the Wall, a border guard opened fire. Fechter continued to climb but ran out of energy just as he reached the top. He then tumbled back onto the East German side. To the shock of the world, Fechter was just left there. The East German guards did not shoot him again nor did they go to his aid.

Fechter shouted in agony for nearly an hour. Once he had bled to death, East German guards carried off his body. He became a permanent symbol of the struggle for freedom.

The fall of the Berlin Wall happened nearly as suddenly as its rise. There had been signs that the Communist bloc was weakening, but the East German Communist leaders insisted that East Germany just needed a moderate change rather than a drastic revolution. East German citizens did not agree.

Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev (1985–1991) was attempting to save his country and decided to break off from many of its satellites. As Communism began to falter in Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia in 1988 and 1989, new exodus points were opened to East Germans who wanted to flee to the West. 

In East Germany, protests against the government were countered by threats of violence from its leader, Erich Honecker (served 1971–1989). In October 1989, Honecker was forced to resign after losing support from Gorbachev. He was replaced by Egon Krenz who decided that violence was not going to solve the country's problems. Krenz also loosened travel restrictions from East Germany.

Suddenly, on the evening of November 9, 1989, East German government official Günter Schabowski blundered by stating in an announcement, "Permanent relocations can be done through all border checkpoints between the GDR [East Germany] into the FRG [West Germany] or West Berlin."

People were in shock. Were the borders really open? East Germans tentatively approached the border and indeed found that the border guards were letting people cross.

Very quickly, the Berlin Wall was inundated with people from both sides. Some began chipping at the Berlin Wall with hammers and chisels. There was an impromptu and massive celebration along the Berlin Wall, with people hugging, kissing, singing, cheering, and crying.

The Berlin Wall was eventually chipped away into smaller pieces (some the size of a coin and others in big slabs). The pieces have become collectibles and are stored in both homes and museums. There is also now a Berlin Wall Memorial at the site on Bernauer Strasse.

After the Berlin Wall came down, East and West Germany reunified into a single German state on October 3, 1990.

Harrison, Hope M. Driving the Soviets up the Wall: Soviet-East German Relations, 1953-1961 . Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011. 

Major, Patrick. “ Walled In: Ordinary East Germans' Responses to 13 August 1961 .” German Politics & Society, vol. 29, no. 2, 2011, pp. 8–22. 

Friedman, Peter. " I was a Reverse Commuter Across the Berlin Wall ." The Wall Street Journal , 8 Nov. 2019.

" Berlin Wall: Facts & Figures ." National Cold War Exhibition , Royal Air Force Museum. 

Rottman, Gordon L. The Berlin Wall and the Intra-German Border 1961–89 . Bloomsbury, 2012. 

" The Wall ." Mauer Museum: Haus am Checkpoint Charlie. 

Hertle, Hans-Hermann and Maria Nooke (eds.). The Victims at the Berlin Wall, 1961–1989. A Biographical Handbook . Berlin: Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung Potsdam and Stiftung Berliner Mauer, Aug. 2017.

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East German Perspectives: The Berlin Wall and its Evolution as Cultural Heritage

In a Tortoiseshell: In her paper examining changing perceptions of the Berlin Wall in the aftermath of the Cold War, Annabelle Mauri mines an extensive field of primary and secondary sources , including archives, statistics, and existing scholarly discussions. Annabelle skillfully weaves these sources together to build her own argument, which highlights the strategic political erasure of East German perspectives on the Wall in the process of reunification, and how that erasure contributed to the West German-led redefinition of the Berlin Wall as a symbol of unity and peace. In doing so, she boldly establishes her unique voice in a conversation about an oft-studied historical monument.

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Excerpt / annabelle mauri.

The disappearance of East German experiences from the public awareness affected how the Berlin Wall was viewed, and without this disappearance, our current understanding of the Wall would likely have been much different. Scholar Frederick Baker sees an important distinction between the two sides of the Wall, distinguishing between the Western ‘Wand,’ a word that means simply ‘wall,’ and the Eastern ‘Mauer,’ which refers specifically to the heavily guarded border between East and West Germany that restricted freedom for so many years. 1 The ‘Wand’ existed for West Germans, of course, but it did not represent their oppression or lack of opportunity the way the ‘Mauer’ did for East Germans. This distinction suggests that the effects of the Wall on Germans’ everyday life differed greatly between East and West, making it impossible for the Wall to be perceived and represented in media in the same way in both countries. This difference also casts new meaning on the Wall’s seemingly strange evolution as cultural heritage. The image of the Wall as a symbol of unity makes more sense for those who experienced it as the ‘Wand.’ But for those for whom the Wall was the ‘Mauer,’ it must be difficult to overlook the decades when the Wall meant the exact opposite of freedom. But how exactly did the Western, ‘Wand’ perspective come to dominate the Eastern, ‘Mauer’ perspective?

The push during reunification to forget certain no-longer-desired aspects of the past had far greater consequences than simply promoting unity: it also served to suppress East German perspectives on their own history. Dirk Kurbjuweit, a writer for Der Spiegel, outlined the grim expectations that some East Germans held for their future as a part of West Germany:

It is clear that, had East German perspectives been given more weight, the legacy of the Wall would have been different. Hope Harrison explains that “the last session of the East German parliament, the Volkskammer, voted on 2 October 1990 to grant the one-block-long section of remaining Wall at Bernauer Strasse…landmark historic preservation status,” which was in stark contrast with the unified Berlin Senate, who voted in 1992 not to preserve remnants of the Wall 9 . The decision to ignore the remains of the Wall was part of the push after reunification to promote unity at the expense of acknowledging the past, and this difference in opinion shows another instance in which West Germans was able to decide how to deal with the Wall.

Author Commentary / Annabelle Mauri

When I began writing this paper, I was completely overwhelmed by the sheer amount of available information about and sources pertaining to the Berlin Wall. I found a mountain of scholarly articles, interviews, biographies, newspaper articles, photographs, encyclopedia entries, movies, and books from across a period of decades that dealt with the Wall from many different perspectives, from political to artistic to personal and more. Needless to say, I had no idea where to begin.

Luckily, my Writing Seminar professor, Dr. Emma Ljung, was there to help me. She helped me choose specific types of source material to focus on in the beginning: articles and photographs related to the Wall that appeared in German magazines and newspapers around the time of the Mauerfall and the following few years. Through the University library, I had access to a number of databases of historical newspapers, and many current newspapers have made their archives accessible online, such as Die Zeit.

First, though, I had to do a lot of background reading in order to understand the topic I was researching. To start, I had found the call number of one book that I was interested in and went to find it in the stacks. I ended up staying there long after I’d found my book because there were so many other books on my topic on the same shelf, some of which were even more pertinent to my research question. Once I had accumulated a number of sources and was ready to read through them, I started keeping a research journal, which was a suggestion from one of the presenters at the Mary W. George Freshman Research Conference. In addition, for each book or scholarly article, I would put a sticky note on the cover with a few notes about what each author’s main points or arguments were, as well as interesting statistics or facts that I hadn’t seen in other sources and intriguing quotes. This tactic ended up being extremely helpful as I began to draft my paper, both in terms of being able to cite easily and accurately, and also in terms of finding a way to engage in a conversation with my sources. As a result, I was able to create and then revise my thesis since my evidence was well-organized.

Once I’d developed a basic understanding of my topic and looked at many newspapers and images from the time period, Dr. Ljung encouraged me to incorporate different types of sources that could add something new to my argument. This included current newspaper articles about the commemoration of the Mauerfall today or statistics about the lingering disparities between former East and West German citizens. It also included current opinion pieces about the Fall and an autobiography of a woman who grew up in East Germany.

Throughout the entire writing process, Zotero, a program that creates citations and helps organize sources, was extremely helpful, and it made creating a Works Cited really easy. All in all, I learned that finding and using a variety of sources, as well as thinking about how to keep them organized, made my paper more interesting and fun to write.

Editor Commentary / Catherine Wang

Days after returning from a trip to Berlin, I read Annabelle’s essay for the first time. What I realized immediately was that she had identified a question about the Berlin Wall that I had not thought to question, nor seen others question. This, to me, was the sign of an exciting research question for a paper on a universally recognizable historical moment. In her essay, Annabelle analyzes the changing perception of the Berlin Wall after the Cold War, examining why an object that signified death and division can now be a symbol of unity and freedom. However, this question is a research challenge for any writer to take on. How can perceptions of the Wall be measured and compared? A writer would need to find a way to examine both East and West German perspectives during the Cold War as well as in the aftermath of the Cold War, a daunting task to cover in just a ten page research paper.

However, Annabelle’s essay takes on this challenging scope with dexterity, effectively synthesizing a broad range of primary and secondary sources to support a rich and nuanced argument. In this excerpt, which focuses on perspectives in the transition period around the fall of the wall, she starts by bringing in a scholar, Frederick Baker, to support her argument about how the wall was viewed differently between West and East Germany. As she points out using Baker, the West Germans and East Germans’ linguistic differences when referencing the wall (‘Wand’ vs. ‘Mauer’) reflect different perceptions of the wall. She asks, if the West Germans used the broader term ‘Wand,” while East Germans used ‘Mauer’ to specifically reference the heavily guarded border between East and West Germany, why the ‘Wand’-perspective became the dominant perspective in the aftermath of the fall of the wall. This question allows her to effectively transition from referencing other scholarly sources to bringing in unique primary sources.

Annabelle calls upon her extensive research to answer her own question about the dominance of the ‘Wand’-perspective, incorporating newspaper archives to trace themes of East German disillusionment with reunification as well as statistics about voting decisions and political appointments in the aftermath of reunification. These sources allow her to build an argument that highlights the strategic political erasure of East German perspectives on the Wall in the process of reunification, and how that erasure contributed to the West German-led redefinition of the Berlin Wall as a symbol of unity and peace. Her thorough research and source use ultimately allows her to build an argument that adds significant nuance to the existing scholarly explanations for changing perception of the Berlin Wall, which had broadly referenced the economic benefits of tourism and the Wall’s political potential.

In taking on a question of such challenging scope, and then zooming up close in her research by piecing together narratives from archives, statistics, and other scholarly discussions, Annabelle boldly establishes her unique voice in a conversation about an oft-studied historical monument.

Professor Commentary / Emma Ljung, Princeton Writing Program

Research Beyond Walls

Historically, walls have been built to keep animals in and humans out. They have also been built to demarcate space: to separate this place from that place, and to make visible to any viewer that this place is not that place, no matter their numerous similarities. Historically, many walls have failed to achieve these lofty goals. For that reason alone, the Berlin Wall is an anomaly. Before its erection in 1961, 3.5 million East Germans defected to the West, a number that dwindled to a mere 5,000 in the period 1961 to 1989. This wall – this Mauer – so successful in restricting movement, has become a symbol of divided Germany and its unification. But despite the Wall being an East German creation, current narratives that surround it predominantly advocate a Western perspective: concepts of liberation, of unification, of freedom. Such slogans, Annabelle noticed, are at odds with East German experiences. And even more strangely, East Germany wanted to preserve the physical structure almost immediately after Mauerfall , but the West – for whom the structure eventually became a symbol of unity and power – had no interest in doing so. Why would the people for whom the Wall represented oppression want to preserve the structure? What has happened between Mauerfall in 1989 and today that has enabled the narrative of unification to completely suppress the narrative of loss? The Berlin Wall, despite the wealth of research on these 140 kilometers of fencing, seems oddly misunderstood. In her research, Annabelle had to not only overcome research walls – few late 1980s East German newspapers are accessible in the US – but also a series of scholarly walls, especially in terms of tacit assumptions. The vast majority of her sources simply assumed that East and West German perspectives were the same – German. But to Annabelle, the more interesting questions were the ones that no one seemed to ask: the questions that forced her to go beyond those scholarly walls to a place most scholars did not even know existed. And it is because of that impetus that this research paper is not only successful, but important. Annabelle shows us that this Wall that kept people in, that divided this place from that place, is in fact not simply a wall at all, but both Mauer and Wand : a single structure embodying a multiplicity of identities.

Works Cited

Baker, Frederick. “The Berlin Wall.” In Borders and Border Politics in a Globalizing World, edited by Paul Ganster and David E. Lorey, 21-50. Lanham, MD: SR Books, 2005.

“East Germany – New World Encyclopedia.” Accessed December 14, 2018. http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/East_Germany.

Knight, Ben. “East Germans Still Victims of ‘cultural Colonialism’ by the West | DW | 01.11.2017.” DW.COM. Accessed December 18, 2018. https://www.dw.com/en/east-germans-still-victims-of-cultural-colonialism-by-the-west/a-41199804.

Harrison, Hope M. “The Berlin Wall and Its Resurrection as a Site of Memory.” German Politics and Society 29, no. 2 (June 1, 2011): 78–106. https://doi.org/10.3167/gps.2011.290206.

Hensel, Jana. After The Wall : Confessions from an East German Childhood and the Life That Came Next. New York :Public Affairs, 2004.

Kurbjuweit, Dirk. “The Merkel Effect: What Today’s Germany Owes to Its Once-Communist East.” Spiegel Online , October 2, 2014, sec. International. http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/how-east-germany-influences-modern-day-german-politics-a-994410.html.

“West Germany – New World Encyclopedia.” Accessed December 14, 2018. http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/West_Germany.

ANNABELLE MAURI

Annabelle Mauri ’22 is a first year from Massachusetts. She enjoys traveling, learning foreign languages, and spending time with her friends. She wrote this essay as a freshman in a Writing Seminar called “The Fragmented Past.”

Catherine Wang ’19 is a senior in the Operations Research and Financial Engineering department. When she’s not coding or doing psets, she’s writing. She is a Writing Center Head Fellow, former Editor-in-Chief of Tortoise , and current managing editor of Unfound: The Asian American Studies Journal .

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The rise and fall of the Berlin Wall and why it matters today.

The Berlin Wall stood for 10,316 days. As of Feb. 5, 2017, it has now been breached for over 10,316 days. From now on, Berlin will live with the memory of the wall for longer than it lived with the wall itself.

For the generations that grew up in a divided Berlin, the fact that the young will not experience such a life must be seen as evidence of the city’s achievement. Still, there is something lost as the hard-won lessons and perspectives of living in the shadow of the wall begin to recede. The editors at America were hard at work, observing and commenting on developments from around the world, throughout the 10,316 days the Berlin Wall stood. And as with most people around the world, for most of that period the editors seldom noted the wall’s existence. It was a fact of life, a physical manifestation of the Cold War and its underlying ideological conflict. But at its rise and then at its fall, America ’s editors took note. Their writings help us understand the continued relevance of the physical symbol of the Iron Curtain.

The wall rises

On June 10, 1961, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev presented President John F. Kennedy with an ultimatum: The Western Allies must leave their zones of occupation in West Berlin or the Soviets would take unilateral action to seize the city. America ’s editors were not impressed, writing in the June 14, 1961, issue: “Anyone who has followed the Berlin question for the past three years knows that the West cannot accept any of the choices offered by the Soviet memorandum. If we do, we throw away the key to the defense of Western Europe and the key to our own security. Khrushchev knows in advance that we must reject his proposals, no matter how often he shouts that West Berlin is like a cancer on his face or a bone in his throat.”

Berlin was indeed a problem for the Soviets. An outpost of freedom behind the Iron Curtain, West Berlin provided not only a ready example of a political alternative for East Germany’s oppressed population but also a practical means of escape. Voting with their feet, millions of East Germans were condemning communism in the clearest terms by using West Berlin as an escape hatch. Khrushchev intended to close the hatch. From now on, Berlin will live with the memory of the wall for longer than it lived with the wall itself. The editors next weighed in on the escalating crisis in the Aug. 12, 1961, issue: “As we start out down this snaky and dangerous road of ‘negotiating’ the Berlin crisis with Khrushchev, the President’s thinking is undoubtedly dominated by considerations as those that follow. We must somehow buy time on Berlin without backing down on our commitments to that city or selling out some other vital interest of the free world. How is this to be accomplished?” For the editors the main consideration was a military one: “Despite the modest buildup we plan for our conventional forces, we are and shall remain overwhelmingly outfaced by the conventional forces of the Soviet Union. True, we have our stockpile of H-bombs, but Khrushchev is convinced that, so long as he fights with conventional weapons, we would never be morally callous enough to push the big nuclear button. Our military position, therefore, is weak. This makes our bargaining position weak.” Yet the editors were clear that despite Soviet pressure, the United States must not back down: “Whatever political ‘accommodations’ we make with the Soviet Union, they must not lead us onto the slippery path of appeasement. Once we set our feet on that road there will be no place left on which to make a stand. This thought must be uppermost in Mr. Kennedy’s mind.”

On Aug. 13, 1961, the day after the issue including that editorial, construction on the Berlin Wall began. In a sense the wall can be said to have prevented a military confrontation, as it represented the Soviets’ giving up any hope of reuniting Berlin under communist control. They would solve their problem of emigration with a border wall instead. Peace would be maintained, but it was the citizens of Berlin that would pay the price. Over the course of the next 10,316 days, at least 140 people would lose their lives as a result of the wall.

By the Oct. 14, 1961, issue, the editors were suggesting that the world need not be so single-mindedly following the events Berlin, writing: “World attention is focused on Berlin these days to the exclusion of almost all else. Yet, as President Kennedy reminded his listeners during his recent UN address, Berlin is not the only place where peace is imperiled. There is an insidious ‘creeping war’ in South Vietnam. Because of its ‘creeping’ character, it may not strike us as a deadly serious affair. Nevertheless, as the President pointed out, aggression is no less real when men are knifed in their homes rather than shot on the battlefield. And aggression anywhere is a threat to all.” At least 140 people would lose their lives as a result of the wall.

The nation’s Cold War attention would indeed soon turn away from Berlin and toward Southeast Asia, driven there by a war that America would at first support . For Berlin, the wall would become a fact of life, occasionally thrust into the spotlight when used a stage by President Kennedy in 1963 or President Reagan in 1987 (or David Bowie in 1987 and Bruce Springsteen in 1988 for that matter) but otherwise an accepted, if resented, part of life for West Berliners. It was among East Berliners that the seeds of the wall’s collapse were being sown.

The wall falls

On Nov. 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall “fell,” as the East German government suddenly allowed its citizens to pass through to the Western side Rarely has such a major development taken the world so completely by surprise. America addressed the momentous implications of in an editorial titled “Glasnost as a verb: to open a wall,” run in the Nov. 25, 1989, issue: “Now that we have all had a chance to pinch ourselves and rub our eyes, the momentous implications of Nov. 9 are coming clear.” The main question the opening of the wall raised was German reunification, which at the time was not a foregone conclusion: “The speed and the force with which the topic of German reunification came rushing to the fore have been breathtaking and inevitable—the speed matched that of the wall’s collapse, and the force came from the wall’s having functioned as a symbol of artificial, enforced division. Not everyone is pleased at that prospect. Margaret Thatcher, whose party and Government have seemed content to live with a divided Ireland (in no rush, at any rate, to solve the “Irish question”), said predictably that any talk of German reunification was much too fast.”

Walls are not a thing of the past. The democratic optimism ushered in by the end of the Cold War has been significantly tempered. Refugees today continue to flee communist regimes such as North Korea, which has built a border that rivals even the Iron Curtain in brutality and efficiency. In Europe, developments such as Brexit, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the construction of a Hungarian border wall have marked the return of hard borders to a Europe that for the past two decades seemed to be moving in the opposite direction. In the United States, the proposal to build a massive border wall has become a major flashpoint in our politics. While building a wall to keep people in certainly reflects worse on a society than building one to keep people out, the idea shares the delusion of the Berlin Wall, which is that force can forever contain human aspirations. The circumstances that led to both the rise and the fall of the Berlin Wall remind us that the instinct of the human animal is always to move, to be free and to seek better, regardless of any divisions of race, class, nationality or creed. Remembering the Berlin Wall, for all its horrors, also represents remembering this enduring and universal truth.

Antonio De Loera-Brust is a Joseph A. O'Hare Fellow at  America .

This whole article is about open borders. The article ends with a non-sequitur, a bait and switch. The horrors of socialism/communism get diverted in the end to allow an endless stream of migrants into societies that are successful because they have a different culture, one amenable to individual freedom.

Maybe the author should be recommending free market capitalism for the countries where the migrants come from. The United States and Western Europe cannot handle them all especially those who are hostile to western civilization of which many are.

Everyone should watch the movie, "The Lives of Others" to see the tragedy that was East Germany.

But maybe there is another alternative. According to the Vatican in the last couple days the United States is a bad place for migrants. They are recommending China as the ideal country to live according to Catholic social principles. I kid you not. From U.K. Catholic Herald.

China is the best implementer of Catholic social doctrine,’ says Vatican bishop

So I suggest thr author investigate how to get the world's migrants to China. This would be in sync with another America editorial by Kenneth Clarke that the United States is a bad place to live. Maybe the wall should be built to protect any migrants who may mistakenly want to come here.

I saw the headline....I saw the author's name and based on his prior articles in America this article's last paragraph was as predictable as the sun rise. What a piece of overwrought nonsense!

In the spirit of this essay, I suggest the author remove the locks from his doors. Better yet, remove his doors.

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Why Did the Wall Fall, 30 Years Ago?

N ovember 9 marked the 30th anniversary of the peaceful breach of the Berlin Wall—the symbolic high point of the Revolution of 1989, which would be completed seven weeks later by the fall of the Czechoslovak communist regime and Václav Havel’s election as that country’s president. A few days before the actual anniversary, German foreign minister Heiko Maas penned a brief essay on the reasons why the Wall came down, which was striking for what Mr. Maas didn’t mention.

He did not mention NATO's steadfastness against a vast Soviet campaign of agitation and propaganda over western military modernization in the 1980s.

He did not mention President Ronald Reagan or Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher—he didn’t even mention West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. 

From my point of view, however, the most glaring omission in Mr. Maas’s essay was his complete lack of attention to the pivotal figure in the Revolution of 1989, Pope St. John Paul II. Just as oddly, the foreign minister neglected to mention the moral revolution—the revolution of conscience—that John Paul II helped ignite and that gave the Revolution of 1989 its unique human texture. This is bad history. And bad history always raises warning flags about the future.

Professor John Lewis Gaddis of Yale University is America’s most distinguished historian of the Cold War. He is not a Catholic, so he could not be accused of special pleading or sectarian bias in writing that “when John Paul II kissed the ground at the Warsaw Airport on June 2, 1979, he began the process by which communism in Poland—and ultimately everywhere—would come to an end.” My friendly amendment would be to note (as the Polish pope did) that a lot had been happening in east central Europe before John Paul’s June 1979 pilgrimage to Poland; so the pope did not so much begin, as he did accelerate, the process of dismantling European communism through an effective nonviolent resistance based on the assertion of basic human rights. And he did that in part by giving the Catholic components of the resistance new courage, rooted in the conviction that “Rome” now had their backs (as it hadn’t in the 1970s).

But I will happily accept Professor Gaddis’s citation of June 2, 1979, as a signal moment in this process. What happened that day? Unbelievably, after more than 30 years of communist repression, a pope from behind the iron curtain celebrated Mass in Warsaw’s Victory Square. And during that hitherto unimaginable event, a vast crowd chanted, “We want God! We want God!” 

That dramatic scene was the curtain-raiser on nine days of national renewal in which John Paul, in dozens of speeches and addresses, never mentioned politics or economics once and ignored the Polish communist government completely. Rather, he played numerous variations on one great theme: “ You are not who they say you are. Remember who you are—reclaim the truth about yourselves as a nation formed by a Christian history and a vital faith—and you will eventually discover tools of resistance that communism cannot match.” The demand for religious freedom, in other words, was at the center of the John Paul II-inspired Solidarity movement in Poland, even as it became an increasingly prominent part of the human rights resistance to communism in Czechoslovakia, Lithuania, and what was then the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.

Getting this history straight is important, not just as a matter of intellectual hygiene but for the future. Public officials who do not grasp the centrality of religious freedom to the collapse of European communism and the emergence of new democracies in central and eastern Europe are unlikely to appreciate the centrality of religious freedom to free and virtuous 21st-century societies and to 21st-century democracy. It is a sadness to note that Foreign Minister Maas is not alone in his ignorance, and in what one fears may be his insouciance about the first freedom.

A few days before the 30th anniversary of the Wall coming down, former Irish president Mary McAleese gave a lecture at Trinity College in Dublin. Did she celebrate her Church’s role in liberating a continent? No. Instead, she made the bizarre claim that infant baptism and the consequent obligation of parents to raise their baptized children in the faith may violate the U.N.’s Covenant on the Rights of the Child.  

Hard to believe, but true—and an urgent reminder that bad history makes for bad public policy. 

George Weigel  is Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washington, D.C.’s Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he holds the William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies.      

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The Great Wall of China Descriptive Essay

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
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• As a template for you assignment

Introduction

The Great Wall of China is a long continuous wall which was erected with the sole intention of securing the Chinese border in the northern border against intruders (Man 103). The Great Wall consists of several walls which were built over a lengthy period of time.

The construction is claimed to have began during the dynasty of Emperor Qin Shi Huangi who ruled the country in the early 200 BC to the 16 th century during the Ming dynasty.

The essay will take the form of an informative speech whose intention is to further shed light on who built the Great Wall of China, when it was built, the reason behind building it and how wide and long the wall is as well as how it has been built.

The Chinese were among the first countries to experience civilization in the world. During the civilization period, they acquired the art of building houses and other structures and this helped greatly during the construction of the Great Wall.

As early as 8 th century BC, various states such as Wei, Qin, Yan, Qi, and Zhao constructed extensive walls in an attempt to defend their territorial borders from their warring neighbors (Yamashita and Lindesay 53).

However, all these efforts were better noticed during the reign of the Qin dynasty that after conquering the states which had been opposing him, he embarked on the building of the great wall so as to connect and enclose all the states that now belonged to him and protect them from external intruders.

During the Ming Dynasty, after the Oirats had defeated the Ming army in 1449 (in what was famously referred to as the Battle of Tumu), the Great Wall idea was revived.

The Great Wall proved quite useful to the Ming Dynasty, especially towards the end of its reign because it ensured that the empire remained protected against possible invasion by the Manchu (this was around 1600).

At this time, the wall had a total length of 5,000 kilometers, starting at the Gansu Province in Linyao all the way to the Liaoning Province (Man 105). As we talk today, the great wall is estimated to stretch 4,163 miles (about 6,700 kilometers).

It starts in the Gansu Province at the Jiayuguan Pass and stretches all the way to the Hebei Province in the Shanhaiguan Pass. The wall runs through the large plains in the northern border of the country. Although people have come up with several discussions as to how the wall came to be, it is widely believed that it was the efforts emperor Qin that the wall was extensively built.

The construction formation of the Great Wall also differed at different historical periods. For example during the Qin dynasty the pass gates were not constructed using stone and the wall lacked any fortresses.

However, during the construction of the Han Greta Waal that passes through the Gobi Region, the main fortification was moats (Roland and Jan 67). A beacon tower was also constructed at intervals of 1.25 kilometers along these moats. The beacon towers were used during the time of war.

When one column was lit, this was a sign that the advancing troops were less than 500.When two columns were lit, it meant that the advancing troops were less than 3,000. By using the columns of smoke, the defenders were always aware on the magnitude of what to expect.

Laborers who took part in the construction of the wall included the common people, soldiers, and criminals (Waldron 18). Different construction materials found use during the constructions process of the wall, over the centuries. Compacted earth was used in the construction of the original Great Wall.

Local stones were then used to surround the compacted earth. In a bid to ensure that the construction costs of the wall remained down, there was extensive use of local construction materials. In the later years, bricks were used to construct the Ming wall.

Where the Great Wall passed through the Rocky Mountains, builders made use of the stones found on these mountains. However, they were forced to use rammed earth in the planes, while juniper tamarisk and sanded reeds found use in the desert.

Scientists have now revealed that the remaining section of the Great Wall in the Gansu Province, consist of several layers of rammed earth (Waldron 18).

Between 202 BC and 220AD, during the Han Dynasty period, the most popular construction materials were crude stones and earth while between 1368 and 1644, during the Ming Dynasty, bricks had substituted stone and earth as the construction material of choice, thanks to their light weight and size; it was easier to make and carry them.

From statistical records, it is estimated that some 500,000 common people and 300,000 soldiers took part in the construction process of the initial Great Wall during the reign of Emperor Qin. Over 1,000 individuals are believed to have lost their lives in the process of constructing the Great Wall during the Din Dynasty.

The construction of another section of the great wall under the Northern Qi Dynasty took place in 555 A. D., and the entire section consisted of 450-kilometre. It started from Nankou, all the way to Shanxi, passing through Datong and Beijing.

During this time, the labor force is estimated to have been approximately 1.8 million people (Roland and Jan 71). The construction and living conditions were also extremely poor during this time and as a result, high number of workers lost their lives.

Works Cited

Man, John. The Great Wall . London: Bantam Press, 2008. Print.

Roland, Michaud and Jan, Michel. The Great Wall of China . New York: Abbeville Press, 2001. Print.

Waldron, Arthur. The Great Wall of China: From History to Myth . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Print.

Yamashita, Michael and Lindesay, William. The Great Wall – From Beginning to End . New York: Sterling, 2007. Print.

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Home — Essay Samples — Geography & Travel — Berlin — Fall of the Berlin Wall

Fall of The Berlin Wall

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History Of The Berlin Wall

After all the land was divided the Soviet Union controlled East Germany. Just like the Soviet Union, the economy in East Germany was struggling to get back on its feet after the war. While West Berlin became a lively urban area like many American cities, East Berlin became what many thought of as a Mini-Moscow. In East Germany there was literary almost nothing. The shelves in the stores were practically bare, and what was there was not in very good quality. At first, the divisions between East and West Berlin were uncertain. There was nothing that divided the city.

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• DOI: 10.3126/craiaj.v6i2.60252
• Corpus ID: 265865225

Wall Painting of Pujari Math of Bhaktapur: An Exploration

• Lok Nath Dulal
• Published in Contemporary Research An… 5 December 2023

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Election latest: Sunak admits he got job 'because of a mistake'

Rishi Sunak and Sir Keir Starmer have faced the latest Q&A of this year's election, this time hosted by The Sun. Scroll through the Politics Hub to catch up on our updates and analysis from the event.

Tuesday 25 June 2024 02:34, UK

• General Election 2024

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• Sunak: I got this job as the result of a mistake
• PM reveals Tories are investigating betting scandal
• The party leaders who  do   still want to talk about Brexit
• Farage attacks Johnson in defence of Ukraine war comments
• Chancellor deletes pic of wife's ballot which broke electoral rules
• Live reporting by Faith Ridler

Expert analysis

• Paul Kelso: Are parties being honest about tax and spend plans?
• Sophy Ridge: PM running out of time to get his message across
• Sam Coates: Tories braced for more names in betting scandal

Election essentials

• Manifesto pledges: Alliance Party | Conservatives | DUP | Greens | Labour | Lib Dems | Plaid Cymru | Reform | SNP | Sinn Fein | Workers Party
• Trackers:  Who's leading polls? | Is PM keeping promises?
• Campaign Heritage: Memorable moments from elections gone by
• Follow Sky's politics podcasts: Electoral Dysfunction | Politics At Jack And Sam's
• Read more:  Who is standing down? | Key seats to watch | What counts as voter ID? | Check if your constituency is changing | Guide to election lingo | Sky's election night plans

We'll be back from 6am with all the latest from the election campaign.

We're in the last few days of the race for Number 10 - and parties from across the House of Commons are accelerating their efforts.

Join us in the morning for more live updates.

Reducing knife crime will be a "moral mission" for Labour if it wins the election on 4 July, Sir Keir Starmer will say on Tuesday.

The party leader will outline his plan to halve knife crime over the next 10 years, including creating a new cross-government "coalition" to work on solutions - bringing in families of victims and survivors of knife crime, along with tech companies and relevant organisations. 

Sir Keir will also promise to chair an annual knife crime summit to "track progress" on the target, and appeal to all parties to work together on the issue. 

"Knife crime is an issue above and beyond party politics," he will say. "For the parents grieving sons and daughters who never came home, action to end this scourge cannot wait.

"Far too often we hear the same stories from grieving families who have been subject to these brutal murders carried out by children. 

"It is our duty as political leaders of all stripes to work together to end knife crime and keep our young people safe."

Figures from Labour showed knife-related offences had risen by 81% since 2015 across England and Wales. 

The party's pledges for after the election include increasing the penalties for carrying a knife - including custody in the most serious cases, as well as extending the list of banned knives. 

Its 10pm - here's your late night general election bulletin.

We're into the last full week of the election campaign, with just 10 days left until polling day - and things are heating up.

Here's a run down of everything you may have missed:

• Rishi Sunak  today said he is not being investigated by the Gambling Commission over the betting scandal;
• He confirmed the Conservative Party is carrying out its own investigation - and will pass its findings on to the Gambling Commission ;
• The prime minister later took part in an election Q&A with The Sun, in which he insisted he only took the top job "as the result of a mistake" made by Liz Truss ;
• He also failed to confirm whether he called a summer election to avoid potential legal trouble over Rwanda flights taking off in July;
• Meanwhile, economists have lambasted a "conspiracy of silence" from the main parties over their tax and spending plans - read more below:
• Over to Labour, which has offered to meet Harry Potter author JK Rowling to provide her with "assurances" over the protection of women-only spaces; 
• Sir Keir Starmer also took part in the election Q&A, and he admitted that he "understands" why people are confused by his shift in stance on Jeremy Corbyn;
• And Lord Richard Dannatt, the former head of the army, has said Nigel Farage is "not worth listening to about anything" - particularly relating to the war in Ukraine;
• The Reform leader said last week the West had contributed to the invasion of Ukraine;
• He has launched a blistering attack aimed at his one-time ally Boris Johnson - highlighting a front page showing Mr Johnson holding a similar stance on Russia back in 2016.

A flurry of general elections since 2015 has brought an unprecedented churn in our parliamentary representatives.

This year, two in five MPs aren't seeking re-election and the picture for the Conservatives is record-breakingly grim.

An unparalleled total of 23% of Conservative MPs are calling it a day in 2024, more than the previous high of 22% of Tories who quit in 1997, another year of boundary changes.

In contrast, only 15% of Labour MPs are resigning.

There are many reasons MPs quit: from retirement, family commitments and health concerns to career change, abolished constituencies, and the prospect of defeat.

But their decision to depart can reveal much about life in Westminster and have a significant impact on parliament's mix of experience, demographics, and the direction of political parties.

Dr Sofia Collignon, associate professor in Comparative Politics, analyses the churn in our representatives here:

Wales is a Labour heartland, but it's clearly in the sights of other parties during this election campaign.

Reform UK even launched its manifesto in a town in the south of the country, Merthyr Tydfil.

Although Wales has its own parliament and makes most of its own decisions, they still elect MPs who stand in Westminster.

Sky's Wales reporter Tomos Evans explains how the cost of living, steel industry and nuclear energy will be key issues for voters.

By David Blevins , senior Ireland correspondent

Northern Ireland's first and deputy first ministers have condemned the Conservative Party for the impact of Brexit on the region.

Sinn Fein's Michelle O'Neill told Sky News the current government had "played fast and loose" with the Good Friday Agreement.

Emma Little-Pengelly, of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), said Northern Ireland was the victim of the Tories having "botched Brexit".

Doug Beattie, the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) leader, accused the "chaotic" Tory government of "destroying the cohesion of the United Kingdom".

Tactical voting is a talking point at every election - but it could play a particularly big role this time round.

The polls suggest huge public discontent with the Tories, but there are many seats where Labour - widely projected to form the next government - are not the main challengers.

It's contests like these where the Lib Dems, Reform UK, and the Greens might hope to make gains.

Below, Sky's political correspondent  Serena Barker-Singh explains what tactical voting is when it comes to an election and how it could impact parliament's makeup come 5 July.

Our live poll tracker collates the results of opinion surveys carried out by all the main polling organisations - and allows you to see how the political parties are performing in the run-up to the general election.

It shows a drop in support in recent days for Labour and the Tories - with a jump for Reform and the Liberal Democrats.

Read more about the tracker here .

Tonight on Politics Hub With Sophy Ridge , both our Tory and Labour guests faced questions over a report suggesting neither party are being honest with voters about their tax and spending plans.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies launched its report on their election manifestos this morning, warning public services will have to be cut over the next parliament, unless government debt or taxes rise further.

Labour and the Tories have both ruled out tax rises on working people, but also downplayed the risk of cuts to key public services.

So, are they being honest? Our business correspondent Paul Kelso takes a closer look at the numbers...

That concludes our coverage of tonight's Politics Hub With Sophy Ridge  - the show will return tomorrow at 7pm. Stick with us here for more updates and analysis throughout the evening.

Five years ago it was indisputably the Brexit election, but this time round it's become something of an elephant in the room.

But in Northern Ireland, none of the party leaders are shy of talking about the impact of Britain leaving the EU.

Our  senior Ireland correspondent  David Blevins   has spoken to them all about the legacy of the 2016 referendum - and how a new government at Westminster might change things.

As David notes, to "get Brexit done" the Tory government put a trade border in the Irish Sea between Northern Ireland and Great Britain - something that was once unthinkable.

Michelle O'Neill, Sinn Fein:

"I think there's an opportunity now with what potentially looks like a Labour government coming into play to reverse the damage of Brexit. 

"And actually, I would hope we get to the point where actually we reverse the Brexit decision altogether. 

"That may not be where Labour are headed, but I think there is an opportunity to reset relationships, critically between London and Dublin, because those have been very much fractured."

Emma Little-Pengelly, DUP: 

"The Conservative Party and the UK government botched Brexit and Northern Ireland was the victim of that. 

"We called out the Conservative Party on this at every single stage. 

"We had to fight incredibly hard to try to undo the damage made by the decisions made by the Conservative Party in government. 

"But of course it was us fighting for that, while others were agitating and pushing for rigorous implementation of that really bad deal."

Naomi Long, Alliance: 

"What we need to do looking forward is say... how do we make the benefits of the Windsor Framework work in our advantage? 

"We have a unique position in Northern Ireland in terms of trade: we can trade freely into GB, we can trade freely with the Irish Republic, but more than that, we are a foot in the European Union."

Colum Eastwood, SDLP:

"Brexit has been a disaster for the whole of the UK, I would argue, economically and in many other ways, but we felt it much more keenly here because we share a border with the European Union.

"We had to do an awful lot of work to put things back together after the mess that was made by Brexit and Boris Johnson and the DUP. 

"From our perspective, there's no better outcome than actually being back in the European Union lock, stock, and barrel."

Doug Beattie, UUP:

"Brexit was a defining moment. 

"It absolutely undermined the cohesion of the United Kingdom, and I think we can see the out workings of that even today. 

"And whatever government gets in - and we all think it's going to be a Labour government - I think they're going to have to work on that cohesion as one of their main outputs."

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