Almost 35 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, many younger people can no longer imagine what cruel monstrosity separated the people of East and West Berlin for 28 long years, and later also the people of East and West Germany.
If anyone still has pictures of the Berlin Wall in their mind’s eye, these are usually pictures of the Wall after it fell on 9 November 1989. By then, artists from all over the world had already decorated the remains of the Wall with more or less amusing paintings. The most famous of these is certainly the ‘Brotherly Kiss’ between the Soviet dictator Brezhnev and the GDR (German Democratic Republic) dictator Honecker.
Not very many people, however, will remember 13 August 1961. That was a truly dramatic day in German and also in European history.
Now the ‘Iron Curtain’, of which Winston Churchill had spoken much earlier, was really cemented:
On the orders of the communist rulers in the GDR and with the necessary backing from Moscow, East German workers and soldiers sealed off West Berlin almost completely from its surroundings on that Sunday.
A little later, walls were also erected on the border between East and West Germany.
Many people seeking freedom in West Germany were shot or imprisoned at the wall.
In the cynical language of the East German communists, the wall was called the ‘anti-imperialist protective wall’. But this wall only served to protect the GDR regime.
It was always clear to all people in East and West who could think what it was really about:
The Berlin Wall was the last desperate and inhumane attempt of the East German communists to save their system by using brutal force to prevent their citizens from living where they wanted to live.
You can find more about the Berlin Wall here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Wall