At this point in time, seniors at Mira Costa feel trapped, as if they can't get out of Mira Costa and Manhattan Beach soon enough. Imagine being physically trapped in their city, surrounded by nothing but a big concrete wall holding them hostage. The Berlin Wall kept half a city hidden behind, what was known as, the iron curtain. The wall was “...a symbol of oppressive and divisive government, not only to the East Germans it contained, but to the rest of the world as well.”("Transitional Justice.") The people of Germany were separated from their jobs, their loved ones, and were forced to live under communist rule.
Before the wall was built, the city was split, given no notice on Sunday, and “overnight brutally severed streets” (Heilbrunn) became known as ‘Stacheldrahtsonntag’, barbed wire Sunday. Shortly after, the creation of the concrete wall began. During the construction of the wall, there was outrage in West Berlin over the new barbed wire wall that ran through their city. There was outrage in East Berlin as well but it was quickly controlled by their secret police who made many arrests for any who did not want to follow the communist rule and spoke out about it. Unlike other walls built around the world to keep enemies out, this wall was designed by communists to keep people in. 11-13 feet high and was a total of 28 miles long the wall encircled East Berlin. Surrounded by “towers, guards, and dogs stood watch over a barren no man's land. A pipe, too large in diameter for a climber's grip, ran along the top of the wall.”(“Newseum:Berlin Wall”) Aside from the wall construction, there was other damage to East Berlin, “Buildings...were demolished, and the wide open area became known as "no man's land" or the "death strip," wh...
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... the concrete prison. Soon after the wall fell, most of the East Berlin cabinet resigned and the remaining member were removed. East Berlin and West Berlin were finally reunited and renamed, The Federal Republic of Germany. “The world watched the celebrations on television. After 28 years, the Berlin Wall had fallen.” ("NEWSEUM: Berlin Wall.") The people of East Germany finally saw the light on the other side of the wall, and escaped the concrete nightmare.
Imagine, literally being trapped inside of your hometown, behind the iron curtain of communism. Thousands of people lived that way for twenty-eight years, forced to live unseen and unheard. Some were born directly in the East side and some died, never to see the curtain lift from them. Life in the 1980’s in America was guided by the truth of real life, which real life was taken away from those trapped in Berlin.
He describes the physical wall in Berlin and the wall of restrictions that divides the rest of the country as a scar, insinuating that it is ugly, unnatural, and undesirable. In the third paragraph, he creates a connection between the people of the east and west by describing them as, “fellow countrymen,” and then by saying, “Es gibt nu rein Berlin. [There is only one Berlin.]” This connection poses an enthymeme that the people on both sides of the wall have common goals: freedom, security, and prosperity. Reagan then links these goals to the rest of the world by saying, “Standing before the Brandenburg Gate, every man is a German separated from his fellow men. Every man is a Berliner, forced to look upon a scar.” Until this point, Reagan’s audience appears to be limited to Germans. By unifying these groups, he compels the world to empathize with their German brethren. The pain and suffering felt by the German people becomes that of mankind, encouraging the rest of the world to understand wanting the wall to fall on a personal level. This is further exemplified in the next paragraph when Reagan declares, “As long as this gate is closed, as long as this scar of a wall is permitted to stand, it is not the German question alone that remains open, but the question of freedom for all
But the battle to control Berlin between, the United States and the Soviet Union, had been taking place since after the division of Germany. The German Democratic Republic wanted better control over its people to spread its communist ideas and tried taking its way around to get control of East Berlin by building the Berlin Wall. The creation of this “concentration camp” on a much larger scale, gave the GDR total control over the people. The reasoning that the German Democratic Republic provided for the creation of this gigantic wall was that many of its skilled labor were leaving to the “free land” or the West, causing an economic downfall in the East.
In the fall of 1989, people all around the world were watching unbelievable scenes on their televisions. Thousands of people in eastern Europe were meeting in the streets and squares and demanding the end of the communist rule. For the first time in history, opposition to communism was publically voiced. Barbed wire border fences in Hungary were being torn down. East Germans were fleeing to the West. Overnight the Berlin wall collapsed. The start of these historical events was the Polish Revolution of 1989.
Notably, before the walls creation, Germany was a political mess. It was a mess for many reasons, but the main being that “West Germany (governed by the Allied powers- the United States, the United Kingdom, and France) and East Germany (governed by the Soviet Union)” (“Cold War”). Of course, the Allied Powers and the Soviet Union were polar opposites; the Soviet Union was Communist while the Allies were anything but, and despised the very idea of Communism. Therefore, The Wall was constructed in 1961 by the East German government. The walls main purpose was to stop the emigration of East German citizens, because in “1953, the number of refugees doubled- more than 400,000 people left”, all of whom were heading to West Germany (Dowling). They wanted to stop the “skilled workers and professionals”, which were in high demand at this time, from leaving (“Berlin Wall”). These young men were valuable to the economy, because of the various products and services they could provide. However, they were trapped against their will in East Berlin;...
To conclude both the Berlin Wall and the Holocaust were similar in many ways. In both they were fighting for freedom. As for the soldiers all they wanted was an opportunity to kill with no regrets but just orders from their leaders. For everyone today is still talking and researching about the history made in the past and talking about the impacts that they both made.
The end of World War II was the beginning of the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States. The Soviet Union had control over East Berlin, which was governed by a communist government and the United States had control over West Berlin, which was regulated by a democratic government. Both countries wanted full control over Berlin, so the Soviet Union set up a blockade on the West but was unsuccessful. The Berlin Wall was then built to stabilize the economy of East Berlin, which meant that fewer people could escape the east to live in the west. In the article “The fall of the Berlin Wall: what it meant to be there,” by Timothy Garton Ash, he highlights the feelings of no longer having a “iron curtain” segregating both sides of Berlin.
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 precipitated the Reunification of Germany in 1990. Negotiations and talks between East German’s Lothar de Maiziere and West German’s Helmut Kohl and the four occupying powers of United States, United Kingdom, France, and Soviet Union resulted in the Unification Treaty or the “Two plus Four Treaty” recognizing the sovereignty of the newly unified German state. The five states of German Democratic Republic or East Germany united with Federal Republic of Germany or West Germany and Berlin became a unified city on October 3, 1990 marking the die wende or Turning Point. “By early 1991, however, not much more than a year after the barricade surrounding the Brandenburg Gate was actually removed, most Germans, East and West, were asking themselves whether the Wall’s absence was, by itself sufficient to bring the nation together again” (McAdams 199).” Zealous attempts to restructure East Germany’s economy after reunification in 1990 led to massive debt and high taxation, sparking disillusionment and frustration among German citizens, which resulted in a divided and unequal economy.
In conclusion Berlin Wall was an important milestone in the growth of the Cold War. It was the expansion that represented the thinking of a determined Communist system. Western Capitalism, which was more powerful, eventually defeated the system. The massive wall that did so much harm to a country was finally destroyed, and the people of Germany could now live the way they all wanted to live. They could live the life of freedom. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall East Germany has went through a lot of changes, and it still is not easy for all of the people in East Germany. But no matter how hard it is for the people of East Germany now, it is better than being alone and separated from their families, friends and rest of Europe.
In the last fifty years the German Democratic Republic has been a nonstop changing country. In Germany, the terms “East” and “West” do not just represent geographically regions. It runs much deeper than that, and there is still a large gap in the way of life, and political and social conditions of the whole country. While most German’s were sleeping on the night of August 13, 1961, the East German government began closing its borders. In the early morning of that Sunday, most of the first work was done: the border to West Berlin was closed. The East German troops had begun to tear up streets and to install barbed wire entanglement and fences through Berlin. Between 1961 and today, the Berlin Wall saw many changes, and so did the people that it entrapped.
The Berlin Crisis reached its height in the fall of 1961. Between August and October of that year, the world watched as the United States and the Soviet Union faced off across a new Cold War barrier, the Berlin Wall. In some ways, the Wall was Khrushchev’s response to Kennedy’s conventional buildup at the end of July, and there were some in the West who saw it that way. However, as Hope Harrison has clearly shown, Khrushchev was not the dominant actor in the decision to raise the Wall, but rather acquiesced to pressure from East German leader Walter Ulbricht, who regarded the Wall as the first step to resolving East Germany’s political and economic difficulties. The most pressing of these difficulties was the refugee problem, which was at its height in the summer of 1961 as thousands of East Germans reacted to the increased tensions by fleeing westward. But Ulbricht also saw the Wall as a way to assert East German primacy in Berlin, and thus as a way to increase the pressure on the West to accept East German sovereignty over all of Berlin.
Exploitation under the drives of oppression leads to exemplified emotions and an identification of core values for both the perpetrators and victims. Perpetrators of oppression continuously deal with the inner battle of humanity versus their designated obligation as part of the regime; oppressors are at least in the smallest amount aware of their degrading of humanity, and this calls for personal recognition of their moral standards. In Stasiland and “The Lives of Others,” perpetrators Wiesler and Koch become victims of the Stasi themselves, and it is under this circumstance when their values become apparent to the reader or viewer. It is apparent at first that Koch behaved as a Socialist Man as a way to secure a quality life. When drawing the line for the Berlin Wall, he explained to Funder, “I concentrated on the line, and not on what was happening around me.
After World War II, when Germany was defeated, it was divided into four zones, one for each of the Allies. The eastern part went to the Russians. The other Allied Powers, France, Britain and the U.S. divided the Western portion of the city among themselves.
Before the wall got built in1961, East German peoples could travel to West Berlin to visit there family’s. On May 8th, 1945 the World War II ended. June 24th, 1948 the Soviet Military started the Berlin Blockade. Germany was divided in four different parts after World War II. Each part was controlled by a different part of a country. Twenty- eight years and “Iron curtain” East and West Berlin got divided in the heart of Germany.
The Berlin Wall was constructed in 1961 by the GDR (German Democratic Republic - (East Germany) under the pretext of keeping out the fascist enemy infiltrating from West Germany. In actual fact, the wall was built to keep in the population of the GDR, many of whom were fleeing to a better life in West Berlin and other European Countries. Armed border guards were sworn to protect East Germany however they knew that a better life existed on the other side of the wall. The photographer, Peter Leibing, captured the moment in history, when the first GDR Border Guard , Conrad Schumann, finally got the courage to desert his post and leap over the barricade (at that point still a barbed wire fence).
The collapse of the Berlin Wall changed Western Europe as we know it today. The Iron Curtain which had split Europe had ascended and the once divided germans were reunited under one common nation. The causal factors which resulted in the fall of the Berlin Wall were internal — communism imploded upon itself—. Gorbachev attempted to reform communism through Glasnost and Perestroika, which were supposed to incorporate economic reforms and transparency, however, history illustrates that increased liberty is incompatible with communism. Dr. Schmidtke argued that structural deficiencies led along with poor economic growth which led to the collapse of communism in Europe, and consequently the collapse of the Berlin Wall. The alienation of intellectuals and the authoritative nature of communist regimes further contributed to the failure of communism in Europe. However, the collapse of the Berlin Wall would not have occurred had it not been for Gorbachev’s Glasnost, Perestroika, and the end of the Brezhnev Doctrine. Along with German official Schabowski whose actions were the catalyst for the mass exodus of persons from the GDR into West Germany. The Collapse of the Berlin Wall would not have occurred so swiftly had Gorbachev not tried to implement reforms to communism.