BERLINER MAUER, THE WALL: PEACEFUL REVOLUTION

Berliner Mauer, The Berlin Wall, in an old picture

Today, The Bonds are going to visit The Berliner Mauer aka The Berlin Wall and the East Side Gallery. It will be an exciting visit full of feeling and emotions because this wall has determined the lives of millions of people and when it fell the Cold War gave another step to the end. 

The Wall wasn't only a construction of bricks but the line that separate two manners of understanding economy, commerce and free expression. Firstly, this German fact changed the recent history of many countries like Romania, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland, Belorussia, Ukraine, Moldavia, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia or Bulgaria and prepared another one in Yugoslavia (Balkan War), Albania, China or Cuba.

Berliner Mauer or The Berlin Wall was a barrier that divided Berlin from 1961 to 1989. 

More information: History.com

Constructed by the German Democratic Republic, GDR, East Germany, starting on 13 August 1961, the Wall completely cut off  by land West Berlin from surrounding East Germany and from East Berlin until government officials opened it in November 1989. 

Its demolition officially began on 13 June 1990 and was completed in 1992. The barrier included guard towers placed along large concrete walls, which circumscribed a wide area, later known as the death strip, that contained anti-vehicle trenches, fakir beds and other defenses. 

More information: BBC

The Eastern Bloc claimed that the Wall was erected to protect its population from fascist elements conspiring to prevent the will of the people in building a socialist state in East Germany. In practice, the Wall served to prevent the massive emigration and defection that had marked East Germany and the communist Eastern Bloc during the post-World War II period.

Some children playing next to the Berlin Wall

After the end of World War II in Europe, what remained of pre-war Germany west of the Oder-Neisse line was divided into four occupation zones, as per the Potsdam Agreement, each one controlled by one of the four occupying Allied powers: the United States, United Kingdom, France and the Soviet Union. The capital of Berlin, as the seat of the Allied Control Council, was similarly subdivided into four sectors despite the city's location, which was fully within the Soviet zone.

Within two years, political divisions increased between the Soviets and the other occupying powers. These included the Soviets' refusal to agree to reconstruction plans making post-war Germany self-sufficient and to a detailed accounting of the industrial plants, goods and infrastructure already removed by the Soviets. Britain, France, the United States and the Benelux countries later met to combine the non-Soviet zones of the country into one zone for reconstruction and to approve the extension of the Marshall Plan.

More information: History.com

On 15 June 1961, First Secretary of the Socialist Unity Party and GDR State Council chairman Walter Ulbricht stated in an international press conference, Niemand hat die Absicht, eine Mauer zu errichten!, No one has the intention of erecting a wall!. It was the first time the colloquial term Mauer, wall, had been used in this context.

Conrad Schuman jumping the Berliner Mauer

The transcript of a telephone call between Nikita Khrushchev and Ulbricht on 1 August in the same year, suggests that the initiative for the construction of the Wall came from Khrushchev. 

However, other sources suggest that Khrushchev had initially been wary about building a wall, fearing negative Western reaction. What is beyond dispute, though, is that Ulbricht had pushed for a border closure for quite some time, arguing that East Germany's very existence was at stake.

Khrushchev had been emboldened by US President John F. Kennedy's tacit indication that the US  would not actively oppose this action in the Soviet sector of Berlin.

More information: History Today

On Saturday, 12 August 1961, the leaders of the GDR attended a garden party at a government guesthouse in Döllnsee, in a wooded area to the north of East Berlin. There Ulbricht signed the order to close the border and erect a wall.

The line of the Berlin Wall nowadays

Hungary effectively disabled its physical border defenses with Austria on 19 August 1989 and, in September, more than 13,000 East German tourists escaped through Hungary to Austria. This set up a chain of events.

This was followed by mass demonstrations within East Germany itself. Protest demonstrations spread throughout East Germany in September 1989. This was the start of what East Germans generally call the Peaceful Revolution of late 1989. The protest demonstrations grew considerably by early November. 

The movement neared its height on 4 November, when half a million people gathered to demand political change, at the Alexanderplatz demonstration, East Berlin's large public square and transportation The fall of the Berlin Wall began the evening of 9 November 1989 and continued over the following days and weeks, with people nicknamed Mauerspechte, wall woodpeckers, using various tools to chip off souvenirs, demolishing lengthy parts in the process, and creating several unofficial border crossings.

More information: Berlin Wall Memorial

Television coverage of citizens demolishing sections of the Wall on 9 November was soon followed by the East German regime announcing ten new border crossings, including the historically significant locations of Potsdamer Platz, Glienicker Brücke, and Bernauer Straße. Crowds gathered on both sides of the historic crossings waiting for hours to cheer the bulldozers that tore down portions of the Wall to reinstate ancient roads. While the Wall officially remained guarded at a decreasing intensity, new border crossings continued for some time, including the Brandenburg Gate on 22 December 1989. 

The Bonds visiting East Side Gallery

In some European capitals at the time, there was a deep anxiety over prospects for a reunified Germany. In September 1989, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher pleaded with Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev not to let the Berlin Wall fall and confided that she wanted the Soviet leader to do what he could to stop it.

We do not want a united Germany. This would lead to a change to postwar borders and we cannot allow that because such a development would undermine the stability of the whole international situation and could endanger our security, Thatcher told Gorbachev.

More information: East Side Gallery

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, French President François Mitterrand warned Thatcher that a unified Germany could make more ground than Adolf Hitler ever had and that Europe would have to bear the consequences. 

Nowadays, Berlin is a symbol of peace and reconciliation, a modern city, capital of one of the more powerful European countries. The East Side Gallery is an international memorial for freedom. It is a 1316 m long section of the Berlin Wall located near the centre of Berlin on Mühlenstraße in Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg. The actual border at this point was the river Spree. The gallery is located on the so-called hinterland mauer, which closed the border to West Berlin.

More information: Berlin. de

The Berlin Wall wasn't the only barrier to fall after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. Traditional barriers to the flow of money, trade, people and ideas also fell.

Fareed Zakaria