The Confusing Logic of the Berlin Wall

By Danny Alpers

No city in my mind has been more affected by the Cold War than Berlin. While military conflicts within the Cold War came and went, Berlin remained a city divided between East and West by the allies after the defeat of Nazi Germany for more than four decades until November 9th, 1989, only two years before the fall of the Soviet Union itself. When the military occupation of Berlin started in 1945, citizens were still allowed to move between occupation zones. In fact, many people worked in the West where there were better wages but chose to live in the East where housing was cheaper. That was until August 13th,1961, when East Germany began to erect a wall between that cut the city of Berlin in half, resulting in the deaths of over a hundred people and the emotional scarring of untold numbers of people.

After arriving in Berlin, our group got lunch and had a short presentation of the history of Germany from the end of World War I until the reunification of the East and West. After this presentation we braved the freezing cold weather to get a tour of the Berlin Wall Memorial. As we moved through the memorial, an interesting and easy way of figuring out what side of the divide we were on was by looking at the surviving portion of the wall itself. If the wall had chunks of concrete chipped from it, we knew we were on the West side because when the wall fell the people of Berlin chipped off pieces of graffiti to keep as a souvenir of the decades of division the city experienced. If the wall was intact or had graffiti on it, we knew we were on the former East side. That is because the East Germans had not allowed any of its citizens to approach the wall. Since 1989, these untouched concrete surfaces have been used as a canvas for street art.

During the tour, our guide showed us a diagram depicting the fortifications created by the East Germans to prevent its citizens from crossing the wall. The fortifications included not one wall but two. Running in the middle was the death strip, which contained guard towers and a with spotlights to see people at night, barbed wire, mines, and machine gun nests. Seeing the reconstructed guard tower really got the point across of the lengths the East Germans were willing to go to stop people from leaving the country, even if that meant killing innocent civilians. In my opinion, this shoot to kill policy for anyone trying to leave East Germany can be simplified to, ‘if you don’t want to live with us then you can’t live at all.’

As we walked through the former death strip, we found ourselves looking at pictures of the over one hundred people that were directly or indirectly killed because of the wall. Sadly, there are multiple children who were killed. Several children fell into a river and drowned because the river was considered East German territory. For this reason, no one tried to rescue the children because they were afraid of getting shot by the East German sentries. While there was debate in West Germany over whether to put up a barrier to the river to prevent more deaths of children, it was ultimately decided not to so that if anyone was trying to escape from the East they wouldn’t be hampered by a barricade.

The youngest person to die because of the Berlin Wall was named Holger H. and was less than two years old. Holger H. was smuggled out of East Berlin by his parents who hid in the back of a transport truck. When the truck was stopped at a checkpoint, Holger started coughing. Afraid that the coughing baby would reveal their hiding spot, Holger’s mother put her hand over the baby’s mouth to muffle the sound. Holger and his parents were not caught and successfully made it to the West German side, but to the horror of Holger’s mother, she realized that by covering her baby’s mouth, she had inadvertently smothered and killed him. All Holger’s parents wanted was a better life for their child in the West, but in the end their good led to the death of their own child, all because of a wall trying to keep people in that clearly did not want to be there.

While I don’t have as strong a personal connection to the Berlin Wall as I do Auschwitz, I do have strong feelings about democracy and dictatorship. I believe in freedom of movement, if people do not want to live in a certain country, then they should not be forced to stay there. I also believe in freedom of speech, especially when it comes to the peoples’ ability to criticize the government, a right that was not available in East Germany. The Berlin Wall was built by the GDR in 1961 not to protect the East from western infiltrators or from invasion, but to keep the people of East Germany from leaving. While there were many people in East Germany who believed in the benefits of a socialist system, the GDR still knew that if people were allowed to choose between living in the East or West, then many other East Germans would take the opportunity to emigrate due to better economic and political opportunities. And if East Germans, especially young, educated people were attracted to the west, this would in turn hurt the GDR’s own economy and geopolitical capabilities. This decision by the East to erect this wall is somewhat ironic to me, it’s almost like an admission of the inferiority of communist dictatorship to capitalist democracy. If the political system East of the Iron Curtain is really so much better than the West, then why do you need to build a wall to prevent people from leaving? Again, I recognize that the GDR built the wall to protect its economy and production power from a brain drain of people leaving for the West, and I also realize there were many East Germans who strongly believed in the values of the GDR and decided to stay there to fight for and improve their country. However, at the same time I find it tragic that there were also thousands if not millions of people who were forced to stay in a country where they did not see a future for themselves and wanted to leave but were not allowed to because of the decisions of their government.