After the Second World War ended, the victorious Allied powers—the United States, France, Britain, and the Soviet Union—split Germany into two halves. The Soviet Union took control of the east and quickly turned it into a strictly controlled communist state. The other three Allies occupied the west, helping to rebuild it as a capitalist democracy. The old capital, Berlin, lay two hundred miles inside East Germany, and it too was divided.
The western half of the city functioned as an island of West Germany surrounded by hostile territory. Many East Germans rejected their new communist way of life. They crossed into West Berlin and either settled there or fled to other countries. In East Germany itself, citizens lived under harsh repression.
Their rights and freedoms were stripped away, especially freedom of speech. The government decided what was true and what was false, what could be said and what could not. But the restrictions went even deeper. People were forbidden to practice any form of religion, and the communist rulers pushed state atheism relentlessly.
Many complied, but others stayed faithful to their beliefs and worshiped in secret. The regime reached into every corner of culture. Although the constitution supposedly guaranteed freedom of the arts, in reality the communist party kept a watchful eye on all cultural life. Any work that did not reflect the state’s views was banned.
Artists kept painting in private, hiding their canvases in their apartments and showing them only to trusted friends and family. Music was controlled too. For a while, people in the east could still pick up radio and television broadcasts from West Germany. But when rock music became popular, the government panicked.
They feared that decadent Western values would corrupt the youth and that rock songs would encourage criticism of institutions and the government. So they regulated the new music. Every new song had to carry an educational value that promoted socialist ideas. The authorities carefully reviewed lyrics for any anti-state tendencies.
State-approved bands received a performance permit that allowed them to play in clubs and festivals. Any group that played without showing this card could be forced to disband and even sent to prison. Books also fell under the same shadow. Many were banned for opposing communism or supporting capitalism.
Comics featuring Donald Duck and Scrooge McDuck, gangster stories, and romance novels were all labeled immoral. Officials went so far as to search children’s school bags to make sure they were not smuggling forbidden literature into class. News and articles faced strict censorship. Complaints about living standards, education, or pollution were not allowed.
The media had to paint a rosy picture of everything, even if that picture was a complete lie. Disobeying the law often meant prison, even for a first offense. The Ministry for State Security, known as the Stasi, was responsible for punishing offenders, and they had another important duty as well. They read people’s mail and tapped their phone calls.
Ordinary citizens were watched in these ways, but those who gave the government reason to distrust them received extra attention. The Stasi employed a vast network of unofficial informants who spied on people directly and filed reports. These spies worked at every level of society and had access to nearly every organization in the country. They were everywhere.
Citizens had no idea who was a secret informant and who was just an ordinary neighbor. By the end of the regime, more than one hundred thousand active informants were spying on the population of East Germany. People could face prison for many reasons: being caught with banned materials, criticizing the government, or trying to escape the country. Life behind bars in a communist state was brutal.
Prisoners were often tortured, and those considered internal enemies were executed. Misbehaving young people were sent to correctional institutions surrounded by five-meter walls topped with barbed wire and broken glass. Living conditions were unbearable, and the inmates were treated cruelly in every possible way. Teenagers who did not fit into society or defied authority were sent to these places to be re-educated into the proper mold.
Not everyone resisted the system. Many people obeyed the laws and did their best to keep the peace, but that did not mean they lived well. East Germany’s economy started weak because of the damage of the war, and the division of the country made matters even worse. The east had fewer consumer goods than the west.
Even into the 1960s, people suffered shortages of food, and consumers depended on friends and relatives in the west to send goods they could no longer get. Loyalty to the government was the main criterion for getting a job. The most devoted supporters received good positions, while those who lacked loyalty were given menial work no matter their qualifications. Meanwhile, the country’s infrastructure crumbled.
Highways, railways, sewage systems, and public buildings were neglected and fell into terrible condition. Over the years, the entire region slowly decayed. On June 26, 1953, tens of thousands of Berliners took to the streets. The demonstrations turned into a widespread uprising against the government, with more than a million people joining protests at six hundred locations across the country.
The protests began peacefully, but they quickly turned violent as arson and looting spread. In some areas, demonstrators took over local prisons and demanded the release of political prisoners. The East German government was in real danger of collapsing. So they responded with tanks.
Using brutal, violent force, the government declared martial law and regained control. More than 125 people were killed, many others were seriously injured, and more than ten thousand were detained. Many East German citizens decided it was time to leave. A huge number fled to the west, and some left the country entirely.
This did not just embarrass the government. It pushed the economy toward collapse, since most of those leaving were active, working members of society. Over the next few years, an estimated four million East Germans moved to the west. The government had to do something radical.
In the early morning hours of August 13, 1961, the people of East Berlin woke to the sound of heavy machinery rolling toward the dividing line between the eastern and western parts of the city. Wrecking balls destroyed buildings, and hydraulic hammers tore up sidewalks. Citizens stood watching in horror and confusion. Armed forces lined up at the construction sites and took positions at every crossing point between East and West Berlin.
By the next morning, the entire city was surrounded. Eventually, the citizens learned the truth: the government had decided that their only way to stop people from leaving East Berlin was to build a massive concrete barrier that physically prevented them from doing so. The Berlin Wall ran through cemeteries, followed canals, and snaked through the streets of the city. It included hundreds of guard towers and a terrifying area unofficially known as the death strip.
The death strip was a wide zone that ran the length of the wall. The space between the wall and a second concrete barrier contained anti-vehicle trenches, beds of spikes, broken glass, and rusty barbed wire. The ground was covered in sand that was deliberately laid to track footprints. The purpose of the death strip was to stop East Germans from escaping to the west, and it succeeded.
With the addition of deadly force, the government managed to stop nearly all emigration to the west. During this period, more than one hundred thousand people tried to escape, and only about five thousand made it to the other side. Several hundred lost their lives in tragic, brutal ways during their attempts. On the other side of the wall, West Germans called it the Wall of Shame, a reference to the way it restricted free movement.
Over the years, more and more barriers were added. Strict rules were put in place stating that anyone entering the death strip in the dark would be shot without warning. The East German government worked hard to close any remaining gaps in the wall, further restricting its own people. East Germans were now trapped, and they were still expected to follow the communist way of life.
The wall effectively cut off all access to the west. Many East Germans who had worked in West Berlin lost their jobs or were separated from their families. West Berlin became an isolated pocket in hostile territory, and many of its citizens protested against the wall. President John F.
Kennedy was furious at claims that the United States had not done enough. In the end, the Americans and the British came to regard the wall as the end of the military conflict over Berlin, which essentially meant they supported it. The Berlin Wall proved to be a public relations disaster for the communist bloc as a whole. The Western powers presented it as a symbol of communist tyranny, especially after border guards shot and killed citizens at every opportunity.
These deaths were later considered intentional killings. After all the negative attention the wall attracted, the East German government began to loosen its grip slightly. After 1963, West Germans were allowed to cross back into East Germany again. It started as Christmas visits only, and they had to obtain visas.
But East Germans were not so lucky. For most of the wall’s existence, East Germans were not allowed to enter West Germany at all. Exceptions were made only for serious family matters or specific work-related reasons. Watching their western neighbors enjoy more freedoms made things even worse on the eastern side.
Because of this, defectors became common again, and the East German government strengthened its shoot-to-kill orders. Guards were instructed that people trying to cross the wall were criminals and had to be shot. This included women and children. The government believed that defectors were deliberately using women and children to avoid death while fleeing.
In desperation, people tried to escape in many ways. Besides climbing the wall and the barbed wire, many people jumped from apartment windows, rammed the wall with vehicles, dug tunnels, and even used hot air balloons to try to fly over it. Some succeeded, including twenty-nine people who dug a tunnel under the wall without being detected. In 1987, David Bowie, who had previously lived and recorded in West Berlin, held a concert near the wall.
It gave East Germans a musical experience they had been denied, and it strengthened anti-wall feelings. In fact, it did more than Bowie could have imagined. Thousands of East Germans attended the concert, getting as close to the wall as possible. Although it ended in violent riots in East Berlin, that protest was the first in a series.
The following year, another famous figure joined the movement and truly raised the stakes. In 1989, American television actor and pop star David Hasselhoff was the main artist on the Freedom Tour musical tour. More than five hundred thousand people from both sides of the wall attended. During the concert, the crew helped people from both sides climb up and celebrate on top of the wall.
In the late 1980s, East Germany’s economy began to collapse again. Citizens were fully aware of the nature of life on the other side, and the government was losing control and influence. Not only that, but the neighboring communist states were starting to fall, and socialism in Eastern Europe was reaching its end. In April 1989, the communist government of neighboring Poland gave up its monopoly on power.
In June of that same year, the Hungarian government began dismantling the electrified fence along its border with Austria. Change was in the air. The East German government was losing control quickly, and then they started to give in. At first, they simply allowed people to leave, but only by train through East Germany.
East Germans who could not leave began to protest, chanting things like, We want to leave. But then the protests took a turn, and some demonstrators began chanting something different. Some East Germans started shouting, We are staying here. They realized that uprooting their lives was not the only way to end communism.
Instead of protesting for the right to leave, they protested for the right to stay. And so began what became known as the peaceful revolution of 1989. As the crowds grew, the long-time communist leader of East Germany, Erich Honecker, admitted defeat and decided it was time to step down. On October 18, 1989, he officially resigned.
He was replaced that very day by Egon Krenz. On November 4, half a million people gathered at Alexanderplatz to demand political change. Although the army was given permission to use force, it made no difference. More and more people kept gathering.
Krenz decided to allow people to leave directly through East Germany and West Germany. East Germans would now be allowed to travel freely between east and west. A government spokesman was assigned to announce the new regulations, but he had not been given all the information. At the end of the press conference, he read directly from the small piece of paper he had in his hand, effectively telling people that the wall would open and that their freedom was only steps away.
But that was not his biggest mistake. When a journalist asked when these regulations would go into effect, the spokesman was caught off guard. That information was not written in his notes. Instead of asking for clarification, he improvised and told the journalist, As far as I know, the decision takes effect immediately, without delay.
But that was not the plan at all. Krenz had wanted the new regulations to take effect the next day so border guards could prepare for anything that might happen. But this uninformed spokesman bypassed the plan and opened the wall immediately. Chaos broke out.
As soon as the media spread the news, East Germans rushed to the wall and gathered at the six checkpoints, demanding that the gates be opened. The public had learned before the border guards. This was completely unexpected, and the guards began to panic. Finally, at 10:45 p.
m. on November 9, the guards were given permission to open the gates and let people cross freely without checking passports or anything else. Shortly after that, young East and West Germans began climbing the wall, celebrating their new freedom and uniting with their neighbors. Today, not much of the Berlin Wall remains.
Most of it was destroyed in the years after it fell. Pieces of the wall were taken away, some sold around the world or placed in museums. For many years after reunification, people in Germany talked about the cultural differences between East and West Germans. Some Germans even felt that the east and west should still be separated by a wall.
The official narrative over the past thirty-five years has been that unification represents a great German success story. Although it took a few decades for people to fully adjust, by 2019 most East Germans finally felt happy in their personal lives. That was a huge increase compared to only fifteen percent in 1991.
The wall had fallen, the people had won, and slowly, painfully, both halves of Germany found their way back to each other.