The Berlin wall was a symbol of life behind the Iron Curtain for nearly 28 years. It was a rigorously guarded barrier to keep citizens of East Germany under the Communist German Democratic Republic. In The Fall of the Berlin Wall, William F. Buckley Jr. details the events leading to the construction of the Berlin Wall, and the effects the wall and it's demise had on the people of Berlin, the other Eastern Bloc countries, and the rest of the world.
After the second World War, the 1945 Yalta Conference determined the fate of Germany. It was divided into four sectors, as was Berlin, with each sector being ruled by a World War II victor. Great Britain, France, the United States controlling West Germany and West Berlin and the Soviet Union controlling East Germany and East Berlin. The powers were to make policy decisions together. The Soviet Union, however, stopped sending representation to the joint occupation meetings, and in 1949 gave power to the German Democratic Republic. This government became a satellite nation of the Soviet Union. Although he wasn't the actual premier or President of the German Democratic Republic, Walter Ulbricht had the most power due to his strong ties to Soviet leadership.
Apparently, Walter Ulbricht had a plan to divide Germany back in 1952, and in July of 1960 his actions started to appear suspicious. He claimed that a polio epidemic was plaguing West Germany, so travel would have to be restricted between East and West Germany. The day he announced this epidemic, he secretly traveled to Moscow to meet with the leaders of the Warsaw Pact. His main concern was receiving their aid in controlling the refugees from East to West Germany. He revealed his plan for a "secret seal-off matter", a concret...
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...as huge. People were dancing and singing in the streets and on top of the wall. East Berliners came into West Berlin, astonished at their shops and goods.
The fall of the wall inspired countries in the Eastern Bloc. Soon the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, completely changed their government. Soon Bulgaria and Romania followed. The fall of the wall also led to the reunification of Germany, which was thought of as a fantasy just a short time before. The fall of the Berlin Wall seemed to represent the fall of the Iron Curtain. The Allies did not stop the construction of the wall. The fear of the Cold War prevented the use of military force by the United States. The changes for these countries came from within. However, when the wall fell, it signified the end of the Cold War which had struck fear into the hearts of Americans and Soviets for over 50 years.
The feud between the United States of America (USA) and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) lasted from the end of World War II until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. The fuel that powered their feud was the desire to be the greater superpower. After World War II ended, the USSR gained control of Eastern Germany. On the night of August 13, 1961, a wall was constructed that divided the already separate East and West Berlin. This wall would become what was known around the world as the Berlin Wall. It stood as a barrier to freedom from the East Berliners. The Berlin Wall in Germany caused the USSR to lose the Space Race to the United States in 1969 because the USSR was communist, they alone had control of East Germany, and the United States was tough competition. With the Berlin Wall making tensions high in Germany during the 1960s, the USSR had a lot more business to take care of than they had thought.
Following the conferences during World War Two, Germany was split up into two zones. Occupying West Germany and West Berlin was France, Britain and The United States, while the Soviet Union occupied Ea...
In the year 1961, the building of Berlin Wall called upon disasters in Germany. United States controlled the west of Berlin while German Democratic Republic held the East. Being stuck under the rule of day to day terror, people from East Berlin were making their way to the West Berlin. West Berlin was a safe spot and freedom checkpoint in the middle of terror. To stop the moving of East Berliners, the East German government decided to build a barrier that limited and halted the East Berliners from leaving. 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
June 5: Supreme power passed to the victorious countries: USA, UK, France and the Soviet Union. (Kettenacker L, 1997) Their main purpose, according to the London Protocol of September 12, 1944 and subsequent agreements, was the implementation of complete control over Germany (Douglas R, 2013) At the heart of this policy lay partition of the country into three zones of occupation, section of Berlin into three parts and the creation of a joint Supervisory Board of three commanders. The division of Germany into zones of occupation had ever recaptured her desire for world dominance.
In addition, East Germany began to allow its people to pass freely to West Berlin through the Berlin Wall, and the East Germans soon began to tear the wall down. Germany was reunified in 1990, when East Germany united with West Germany (Walker 388). In 1991, the Soviet Communist Party lost control of the Soviet government. Later that year, the Soviet Union was dissolved, and the republics that made up the nation became independent states. Russia was by far the largest of these states.
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;...
Walls are built up all over the world. They have many purposes and uses. The most common use of a wall is to divide a region. One of these famous walls is the Berlin Wall, which was constructed in 1961. This Wall was erected to keep East Berlin out of West Berlin, and even America had its own wall well before this one. There were a few major differences though. America’s wall, in contrast, was not a physical one that kept capitalism from communism. America’s wall was of a psychological variety, and it spread across most of the nation. America’s wall was more of a curtain in the fact that one could easily pull it aside to see what behind it, but if one didn’t want to they didn’t. This curtain was what separated whites and blacks in America, and one famous writer, James Baldwin, felt there was a need to bring it down. He felt that one should bring it down while controlling his or her emotions caused by the division. One of the best places to see the bringing down of the curtain and the effects that it had on the nation is where the curtain was its strongest, in Birmingham, Alabama.
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.
Even though Berlin lay deep within the Soviet sector, the Allies thought it would be the best to divide this capital. Therefore Berlin was also divided into four parts. Since the Soviet Union was in control of the eastern half of Germany, they made East Berlin the capital of East Germany. The other three counties were each in control of a small part of what was to be West Germany. The Allies decided that they would come together to form one country out of their three divided parts. Those three divided parts formed West Germany. 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.
THESIS: From research and historical analysts, we can conclude that in many cases the people of Germany have been effected socially and economically by the building and construction of the Berlin Wall.
The Berlin Wall was put up for one of the most historically common reasons any country would do anything radical: political and economical gain. East Germany was controlled by communist Russia. In contrast, West Germany was controlled by the U.S., France, and Great Britain. Germans who lived in East Germany wanted to move to West Germany to seek better living styles. Approximately 2.7 million Germans escaped from East Germany to West Germany. As a result, East Germany had an astonishing lack of population. Of course, that was a detrimental blow to the economy of East Germany, including a scarce work force. To put a stop to escaping Germans, East Germany constructed the 103 mile, 12 foot high Berlin Wall. To increase East Germany’s population, people were allowed entry into East Germany by means of the Berlin Wall. However, people were not allowed to depart from East Germany by means of the Berlin Wall. Basically, once people entered East Germany, they were not departing. Building the Berlin Wall was a complete violation of the Germans’ right to freedom, all for political gain.
In 1947, the Western portion of Germany instituted a government under the watchful eyes of the Western Allies. The Soviet sector followed suit in 1949. During this period, the elaborate governance structure of greater Berlin broke under the strain of Cold War tensions. What emerged was West Berlin, which took up ties with West Germany, known as the Federal Republic of Germany. East Berlin, which comprised the ruins of the old and historic center of Berlin and outlying districts to the East, became the capital of the German Democratic Republic. After World War II, the Americans pumped capital into West Germany through the Marshall Plan, which resulted in one of the world's strongest economies, enormous prosperity and a stable democracy. Germany has been divided ever since and though at every opportunity, lip service was paid by all western nations to its eventual reunification, no one took the matter seriously.
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.
German people were unused to a democracy and blamed the government “November criminals”, for signing the Treaty of Versailles. From the very beginning, the new Weimar government faced opposition from both sides of the political spectrum. The Left wing Spartacist group, lead by Liebknecht and Luxemburg, looked up to the new Soviet councils in Russia, wanted to place Germany into a similar system.
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.