History of the Berlin Wall
Berlin Wall will be recalled in history not as a building or a wall but a symbol of cold war. It remains the sign of Russian control over Eastern Europe which, of German powerlessness in the post World War II world but also the sign of freedom in the last decade of the twentieth century.
After the World War II Germany was occupied and divided into four zones of control. Berlin itself was encircled by the Soviet zone and as the location of the Control Council, was divided itself into four occupation zones with the Soviet sector being the largest of the four. Despite this, earlier planning expected that Germany should be divided among the Allies inside 1947 borders, the early Cold War saw zones run jointly by France, Britain and America amalgamate into the Federal Republic of Germany (and West Berlin in 1949), eliminating the Soviet zone where it formed the German Democratic Republic (and East Berlin) in the same year. The border between the Eastern and western part of Germany was shut in 1952 despite the fact that it was still open in berlin.
It was the East German administration of Walter Ulbricht who proposed to build a wall and the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev sanctioned the idea. The Wall was erected for the goal to prevent this outflows of workers and to alter the economic equation for daily movement of a large number of professionally skilled workers between East and West Berlin and for escape which had political and economic implications in East Berlin. This wall reduced emigrate from 2.5 million between 1949-1961 to 5000 between 1962-1989.
Construction of the wall began on August 13th 1961 and was carried out in four separate phases:
1) old wire fence, they left in the base in 1961
2) Better wire fence (1962-1965)
3) Concrete wall (1965-1975)
4) Border wall “75” (1975-1989).
Wall was 155 km in length and it was constructed by the East German troops and the workers but the actual Soviet. The wall separated the two cities and encircled West Berlin from all sides. There were eight border check points between East and West Berlin that allowed persons from West Germany, western nationals and members of allied forces into East Berlin or East German citizens into West Berlin , if they had the right permit. Officially the demolition started on November 9th of 1989, this was a structure that was 28 years old redblanket control in Europe after the World War II as well as ideologo-political and military confrontation of East and West.
In this respect, while at one point Europe was able to play its leadership role on the planetary level after the downfall of the Berlin Wall, it no longer could. Currants Eurocentric world culminated in the demise of the “wall to shame”. Since the discovery of America until the two world wars in the last century, European powers ruled the world almost half a millennium; after World War II the Old Continent became the scene for clashes of the two new planetary powers: it is still related to countries such as the United States and the Soviet Union. The main states collapsed with the physical demising of the Berlin Wall: the Soviet communist empire was no more and the United States asserted the planetary dominance.
What is striking and again and again was once again found to be true is the fact that despite the reunification of Germany twenty five years after knocking down the berlin wall individuals can still assess cultural differences between eastern and western Germans. Some call it ‘wall in the head’ phenomenon and as the survey conducted few years ago indicated that over 20 % of the west germans and over 10% of the east germans would still prefer Germany with the Berlin Wall.
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