The Berlin Wall Research Paper

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Great Walls that Separate Nations
In a utopia, a land that many have strived for but none have succeeded in creating, the citizens of Earth would all come together and live in a peaceful harmony. However, this is an unobtainable dream, and there are bound to be tensions between nations. With that being said, many feel the need to build a wall to shut the nations out, which has been successful in few occasions but a complete failure in many others. The Berlin Wall was created in 1961 to stop emigration from the east to the west. It had originally been easy to cross the border, for many people from East Berlin started doing just that, but it eventually got harder. The book The Berlin Wall: How It Rose and Why It Fell states:
The crossers received …show more content…

For many years, Turkey was letting Syrians come to the country freely, but this led to many problems. Dasha Afanasieva claims, “Turkey has started building a new wall along a fragment of its southeastern border with Syria as it struggles against smuggling, illegal migration, and the threat from al Qaeda fighters among Syria’s rebel banks…Turkey has kept an open-border policy throughout Syria’s three-year civil war and has vowed to maintain it, providing a lifeline to rebels battling President Bashar al-Assad by allowing supplies in and refugees out. But the policy has had its costs”(huffpost.com). This open-border policy is the reason smuggling and numerous other problems have thrived in Turkey, and the wall was built to help secure its border with Syria. Focusing back on the Berlin Wall, it has many purposes and factors to be …show more content…

The East feared that its people would leave for the West side and learn about democracy, and this would mess up their communist propaganda, as I said in the previous paragraph the east was getting more and more nervous about its citizens crossing the border. Doris M. Epler states, “The Berlin Wall was erected by the Communist government of East Germany to keep East German citizens from escaping to the West”(11). The entire reasoning behind this wall was to prevent migration from happening, so East Germany could keep its citizens in to participate in its Communist government. These two sides of Germany had been separated for a while, but it took several years until there was a physical barrier between the two countries. Epler says, “This is what happened in the city of Berlin, once the proud capital of Germany. In 1961, the Berlin Wall was erected… It stood for twenty-eight years… The division of Germany and Berlin was to be only a temporary situation. However, it would be only forty-four years until reunification would take place” (11,27). This explains that the East and West were isolated from each other sixteen years before the wall even went up. The wall was an epic failure, as it did not prevent people from migrating from the East. Also stated by Doris, people still tried to cross even though their chances were slim, and ingenious people still managed to get to the

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