The Berlin Wall — A Toxic Concrete Legacy Which Came To Symbolise the Failures of Communism
For those who awake today in the rich nations of the West and consider their liberty limited, ponder if you will the horrible new world which dawned on August 13th, 1961, as a fissure through civilisation divided a great historic city.
On that day the infamous Berlin Wall formally separated the Soviet sector from the American, British & French sectors of the German capital still under elements of post-war administration by the Allied powers. Ultimately it became an imposing and daunting structure that illustrated the “Iron Curtain” as Winston Churchill so elegantly described the split cleaving the Communist East of Europe from the free West after World War 2.
This towering barricade was constructed by the East German government as a part of the GDR’s control — ironically termed the “anti-Fascist protection barrier.” Propaganda sought to protect its citizens where it was realistically a clear implement to lock the citizens of the Warsaw Pact within the vast Stalin-era empire. Once rendered physical, the segregation clearly demonstrated the ideological separation between a free capitalist democratic West and the centrally planned Soviet Communist system.
Post War west Germany went from strength to strength with Berlin a remarkable island of prosperity landlocked by the somewhat more agrarian DDR.
I’ll never forget visiting as a child in 1975 — we drove the autobahn across FRG, then into the corridor through the DDR. Product advertising gave way to propaganda hoardings. At the other end, our toll cards were meticulously inspected to ensure we hadn’t wavered off the road to engage in nefarious activity. West Berlin was a magnificent sparkling city but by the wall, there was an immense sadness hanging over neighbourhoods broken in two overnight during August 1961.
Walking through Checkpoint Charlie was an amazing experience — we went from the technicolour contemporary 1970s West Berlin into a strange almost soulless city which felt like it existed only in black and white. A monochrome town with many buildings still unrepaired from World War 2, 30 years earlier. An East Berlin toy shop’s most exciting window display was a wooden version of Meccano.
The Berlin Wall was the most graphic symbol of the horrors of Communism and ought to serve as a perfect reminder of how fragile our liberty and economic freedom can be. When reforms such as the Round Table in Poland led to the dismantling of this vile wall, it was a cause for sheer celebration the world over. Freedom won but it was an expensive price for generations who had been locked in the repressive East.
The DDR legacy of leaving East Germany worse off to this day is a powerful legacy of just how government doesn’t run economies well… Moreover, when you ask the government to rebuild a nation, they often can’t manage that very coherently either.
Nowadays, Berlin is barely recognisable — for all the right reasons. The entire city has the dynamism which was once available only in the Western sectors. I walked the wall in downtown Berlin a few years back… It was incredible to reflect I had slept in the Soviet sector in perfect five-star luxury and could effortlessly crisscross where before there were checkpoints, barriers, dogs, soldiers, tank traps, mines, multiple wire fences, and of course the core Wall itself.
What a wondrous change in my lifetime. it may not have been ‘the end of history.’ However, the fall of the Berlin Wall was the televisual feast that brought home to everyone the incredible opportunity for all the many diligent, talented people previously trapped by their Soviet puppet governments not just in DDR but further east, across the Oder River.
