The Berlin Wall Research Paper

Of the list of famous walls built around the world, very few were built with the purpose of keeping people in, the most famous of which being the Berlin Wall. Built in 1961, the Wall became a worldwide symbol for a complicated conflict between two superpowers with Berlin trapped in the middle. People did not stay quite about their opposition to these circumstances and with great pushback from the people in East Berlin, the Wall was eventually taken down and Germany reunified. The Berlin Wall came to show that no wall can be built to keep people in.

In the times following World War II, the countries involved held a particular animosity to Germany. Part of Germany’s punishment is that it was divided into four parts and put into

the political control of the countries Great Britain, France, the United States, and the Union of Socialists Soviet Republic, later known as Russia. Shortly after, the western powers combined their spheres of influence to create West Germany, or the Federal Republic of Germany, and from that moment on the country was divided into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization controlled West Germany and the Soviet controlled East Germany, or the German Democratic Republic. During this time, the Union was under a communist leader while the United States was under capitalist leadership, because of this the world was plunged into forty-four years of tension called the Cold War, which was “a struggle of ideas and economic systems.” (14) While splitting up Germany, the capital Berlin was separated in a similar fashion to its country. Berlin was in Eastern Germany, so the separation of the city caused a small area of Capitalist influence surrounded by Communist influence. People who were discontent in East Germany used this area as a means to escape the Soviets by travelling to Berlin, crossing into West Berlin, then driving to the Federal Republic using the autobahn. The amount of people leaving created economic problems for Eastern Germany, " the country was bleeding to death; and it was braindrain above all that in August 1961 led Ulbricht...to build the Wall and so block the easy escape route via West Berlin." (22) It was in an effort to halt the mass exodus that the Berlin Wall was built, for once not to keep people out, but to keep people in.
The Berlin Wall is often viewed as a physical manifestation of the separation between Western and Eastern ideals as it shows effects capitalism and communism in two areas that previously had been the same.

In August of 1989, President Bush gave a statement where he said "the barbed wire that severed a great city also proclaimed in stark, inhuman terms the unnatural division of Europe…the Berlin Wall has affronted the free world with an alien vision of closed societies where basic freedoms are denied." (23) Either side took the construction of the Wall differently, “While the West openly called it a wall and a barrier to freedom and even encouraged graffiti as an expression of protest, the East referred to it as the "antifascist protective rampart." Citizens in East Berlin were told to ignore its existence, to look the other way.” (17) In other words, the Westerners found it offensive and sought to have the wall brought down for the sake of the people trapped in East Germany while people in East Germany felt that it was constrictive of their rights. John Rodden quotes someone he talked to in his essay Report card from East Germany,” " only one opinion on any given topic reigned in east Germany and I never took into account any other opinions. there were never really any other opinions to take into account." People in East Germany weren’t allowed to express a different opinion about the governing powers. Another school teacher in the same essay is quoted "I can't

believe I just said all that to you. Oh, but I guess I'm safe! After all, the Wall's down now." The Wall came to symbolize the corrupt nature that Communism fosters and the oppressiveness felt in East Germany.
In the beginning, protesters in East Berlin had little hope of actually making any changes, it wasn’t about the unification of Germany or even shaking the Communist influence but trying to get Germany “to live up to its own ideals.” (26) The people of the German Democratic Republic instead pushed for peace, against the idea of nuclear warfare they protested the United States build up of weapons the same as the Union of Socialists Soviet Republic.

The protests were peaceful, chants about how there should be no violence, and marching in front of government buildings. One such march was done while people held candles because "it was a great sign of hope. to hold a candle, you need both hands--one to hold the candle, and the other to keep it from being blown out; you can't hold a rock in your other hand" (33) In a more local dispute, the people of East Germany wanted what West Germany had access to. Jens Schone in quoted by Andrew Curry to say that people “didn't want to wait 15 years for a car, they didn't want to work in a factory; they wanted to be able to travel and buy things." In one such case, teens protested the wall because they couldn’t attend a David Bowie concert in West Berlin and the police of East Berlin struggled to silence their chants of “The wall must go” (29) When the wall finally was taken down, there was celebration all over the world. People where relieved and celebrations took to the now shared streets of

Berlin.
Berlin goes on to suffer through problems with the now dramatically different cultures of the East and West, along with the crumbling and booming of each economy respectively. In the city of Berlin, someone would be hard pressed to follow the path the Wall once traced as nearly all marks of its existence have been erased. The symbol for oppression completely dismantled and allowing for the city to push on and look to the future. The Wall was great in its time, it was a physical symbol of the Iron Curtain, it gave people in the West a goal to fight against, and it rallied people in the East to push back against the corruption of the state. Though it’s mostly gone now, it lives on in the memory of those who celebrated the fall with people they hadn’t seen on the other side for years and of those who still look over their shoulders when voicing an opinion. The Wall will live on through history as the only great wall that couldn’t do the job of keeping people in.