By Mike Kubic
2016
Mike Kubic is a former correspondent of Newsweek magazine. In this article, Kubic explains how for three
decades, the Berlin Wall stood as a symbol of the Cold War, separating families and forcing a comparison
between socialist and capitalist ideals. When the wall came down in 1989, the process of German reunification
was more complicated than simply re-drawing boundaries. As you read, identify the key events that led to the
creation and fall of the Berlin Wall.
When the bitterly fought World War II ended in
Europe in May, 1945, scores of cities of Hitler’s Third
Reich1 were in ruins and the rest of the country was
desolate.2
Fourteen years later, the Nazi regime’s
successor in the eastern part of the country – the
German Democratic Republic (GDR) – added to the
ravaged3
landscape another eyesore: a scar called
The Berlin Wall. It immediately became a major flash
point4
of the Cold War.
A hideous testimony to the total failure of Europe’s
most rigid Soviet-style dictatorship, the Wall
separated two halves of pre-war Germany, each of
which became a state in 1951.
The bigger half, west of the Wall, combined the
former American, British and French occupation
zones into the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). It
was a democratic country closely allied with the U.S.
and Western Europe. GDR, established in the Red
Army-occupied Soviet zone, was a Moscow satellite, run under Soviet tutelage5
by the East German Communist
Party.
The Berlin Wall, which was built by GDR in 1959, consisted of two parallel-running, 97 mile-long, 12 foot-high
concrete enclosures with 116 watchtowers and 20 bunkers for the border guards. With barbed wire extensions
at each end and a so-called “death strip” between the outer enclosure and the West German border, the
complex effectively made East Germany – at first, a country of 18.3 million people – into a prison.
[1]
- Nazi Germany (1933-1945) was also known as the Third Reich.
- Desolate (adjective) deserted of people and in a state of bleak and dismal emptiness
- Ravaged (adjective) severely damaged; devastated
- A “flash point” refers to a place, event, or time at which trouble, such as violence or anger, flares up.
- Tutelage (noun) helpful influence or guidance
1
For the Communist regime, the Wall was an existential6
necessity. GDR was not only a dictatorship with no
freedoms of elections, press or speech; it had a Marxist, centrally-controlled “command” economy that kept the
country hopelessly backward.
Even worse, the GDR’s system was failing, and keeping the country’s standard of living abysmally7
low, in plain
sight of the thriving West Germany, which was fast becoming one of the most prosperous countries in Europe.
And what topped the Communist boondoggle,8
the 1951 division into two states left a big part of Berlin under
the control of the Western Allies. Within five years, this blunder9
became so obvious that Mikhail Pervukhin, the
Soviet ambassador to East Germany alarmingly reported to the Kremlin:10
“[T]he presence in Berlin of an open and essentially uncontrolled border between the socialist and capitalist
worlds unwittingly11 prompts the population to make a comparison between both parts of the city, which
unfortunately, does not always turn out in favor of [what he called] the Democratic Berlin.”
Thanks to this opening, all that East Germans had to do to flee their poverty and regimented existence was to
walk into Berlin’s American or British sector, and take a train or a flight to the booming West Germany.
Which they did, in such growing numbers that East Germany was rapidly losing its professionals – engineers,
technicians, physicians, teachers, lawyers and skilled workers. The GDR’s “brain drain” was so heavy that in 1958
Yuri Andropov, another high-ranking Soviet official, wrote an urgent letter to the Central Committee of the
Soviet Communist Party complaining about a 50 percent increase in the number of East German intelligentsia
fleeing to West Germany.
He added that while the East German leadership claimed that they were leaving for economic reasons, the
refugees testified that the reasons were “more political than material.” Andropov warned, “the flight of the
intelligentsia has reached a particularly critical phase.”
By 1961 – ten years after its foundation – GDR had lost to the West 3.5 million East Germans, or approximately
20% of its population, and its leaders acknowledged that the flight of its young, well-educated citizens was so
serious it threatened the regime’s existence.
In June of the year, GDR’s top Communist, Walter Ulbricht, still denied that “anyone considered building a wall”
to close the escape route to West Germany. But two months later, after he received an O.K. from Soviet premier
Nikita Khrushchev, Ulbricht ordered – typically, in a cabinet meeting disguised as a Saturday night garden party
– the construction of the Berlin Wall.
At midnight on August 12, East German police and army closed the border and by Sunday morning, East
German troops and workers had begun to tear up streets and install barbed-wire entanglements and fences.
[5]
[10] - “Existential” refers to something that is vital to a group’s existence.
- Abysmal (adjective) extremely bad; appalling
- A “boondoggle” refers to a poorly designed project or initiative.
- Blunder (noun) a bad mistake
- “The Kremlin” often refers to the Russian or (formerly) Soviet government.
- Unwitting (adjective) not done on purpose; unintentional
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Brazen12 as it was, the subsequent construction of the parallel concrete walls was carefully located inside East
Berlin to ensure that the complex did not encroach13 on the Allied sectors.
John le Carré, the author of the classical spy novel, “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold,” witnessed the rise of
the Berlin Wall as a young British diplomat. He later wrote,
“And the Wall stayed up. It was strengthened and heightened. It was protected by mined strips and earth
brushed so fine you could trace a rabbit’s paw across it. Occasionally, someone climbed over it, or
crashed through it, or dug under it, or made himself a glider and flew [over] it.”
About 5,000 East Germans had managed to flee, and at least 136 had been shot dead while trying to escape, by
the time the Wall came down in 1989. In the meantime, West Berlin became an isolated enclave14 with only
four roads on which the Western powers were authorized to travel to and from the city through the hostile East
Germany.
The U.S. Response
The American answer to the abrupt closure of the East German border was designed to avoid an outright clash
with the Red Army stationed in GDR while accomplishing two main goals: maintain a free access to, and
presence in, Western sectors of Berlin; and keep up the pressure for the removal of The Berlin Wall.
To assert its right of access, the U.S. used on August 20, 1961 – only eight days after the border was closed –
one of the authorized East German highways to move into its West Berlin sector 491 military vehicles and 1,500
troops in full combat gear.
The defiant15 gesture – a 110 mile-long convoy – was closely watched by East German police, but it did not
provoke any immediate response. The Soviets, however, began tightening up their control of who entered East
Berlin and in October 1961, GDR border guards – in clear violation of the agreement the divided the former
German capital – refused to allow the entry of a senior U.S. diplomat.
Once again, the U.S. response was measured but unmistakably serious: the army moved a tank unit to
Checkpoint Charlie, the crossing point to the American sector of Berlin. After the Soviets did the same on their
side of the checkpoint, American and Soviet tanks were facing each other, as John le Careé described it, “across
a hundred yard strip of road, their guns trained on one another’s turrets.16 Now and then they roared at each
other with their engines, supposedly to keep them warm and ready to advance, but in reality they were
psyching each other like boxers before the big fight.”
After 16 hours of this standoff, the Russian tanks pulled back on order from Moscow, and from then on, there
[15]
[20] - Brazen (adjective) bold and without shame
- Encroach (verb) to go beyond the usual or proper limits; to gradually intrude on the rights or property of
others - Enclave (noun) a place or group that is different in character from those surrounding it
- Defiant (adjective) boldly resistant or challenging
- A “turret” is a small tower that projects vertically from the wall of a building.
3
was no interference with U.S. diplomats visiting East Berlin. The U.S. army, however, kept every three months
asserting the Allies’ rights by sending a battalion of troops along the same East German route to the divided
city.
Washington also kept up the pressure on the Soviets by reminding them the Berlin Wall was unacceptable to
the East German people and the U.S. Less than two years after the Wall was built, on June 26, 1963, President
John F. Kennedy visited West Berlin and, speaking to a rally of 450,000 Berliners, declared America’s solidarity
with the East Germans:
“Two thousand years ago, the proudest boast was ‘civis romanus sum’ [‘I am a Roman citizen’],” the president
said. “Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is ‘Ich bin ein Berliner!’… All free men, wherever they
may live, are citizens of Berlin, and therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words ‘Ich bin ein Berliner!’”
Twenty-five years later, President Ronald Reagan visited Berlin to deliver to the crumbling Soviet Union another
vehement17 protest against the Berlin Wall. Speaking on June 12, 1988 at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, the
president challenged Mikhail Gorbachev, the new, more moderate leader of the Soviet Union, to open the East
German border:
[25] “There is one sign the Soviets can make that would … advance dramatically the cause of freedom and peace,”
the president said. “General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union
and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization,18 come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr.
Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”
Seventeen months later, during which tens of thousands of East Germans demonstrated against their
increasingly shaky government and used the relaxed rules to flee their country, the gate was finally ordered
open. On November 9, 1989, a lowly East Berlin Communist Party boss announced the lifting of the ban on
travel to West Germany.
The huge crowd that promptly surged into West Berlin furiously turned on the Wall and began to destroy it,
piece by piece.
The exodus19 of emigrants from East Germany presented two minor potential benefits: an easy opportunity to
smuggle East German secret agents to West Germany, and a reduction in the number of citizens hostile to the
communist regime. Neither of these perks, however, proved particularly useful.
© 2016. The Berlin Wall by CommonLit is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
Unless otherwise noted, this content is licensed under the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license - Vehement (adjective) showing strong feeling; forceful, passionate, or intense
- “Liberalization” refers to a relaxation of government restrictions, usually in such areas of social, political
and economic policy. - Exodus (noun) a mass departure of people
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Discussion Questions
Directions: Brainstorm your answers to the following questions in the space provided. Be prepared to share
your original ideas in a class discussion. - The Berlin Wall divided East and West Berlin for nearly thirty years, and led to two very different
cultures existing in a small geographic area. Imagine you had lived in East Berlin your entire life.
What challenges would you face after the wall came down? - The Berlin Wall was in part a response to the end of World War II. In the context of this article, how
are we changed by war? Cite evidence from this text, your own experience, and other literature, art,
or history in your answer. - Throughout history, walls have been built to help separate groups of people. When you think
groups of people should build walls and when do you think that it is an inappropriate measure?
