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• Selected Topic: Berlin Wall
  • 1945-1961: from WWII to the Wall
  • 1961-1989: the years of the Wall
  • 1989: the Wall falls
  • 20 years afterwards
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1961-1989: the years of the Wall

1961: Up against the Wall

  Imagine that you live in the area of the Bastille in Paris. You wake up one Sunday and there is a wall stretching across the city, that prevents you from going to see your parents in Montparnasse, your friends who live in the Saint-Michel area, and cuts you off from your job at Odéon.
This is what the residents of Berlin experienced during the night of 12 August 1961. In the early morning, barbed wire barriers made it impossible to move between the Russian sector and the Western sectors. From then on, West Berlin was an island inside the GDR.
The barbed wire was soon replaced by a concrete wall in order to stop East Germans escaping to the West.
Because the irony of this wall was that, by confining the citizens of West Berlin, in fact it confined those of East Berlin.

Attempts to escape

Numerous attempts to cross to the West were made. It became more and more difficult to escape, since the Wall was continually reinforced as a result of these attempts.
Various methods of escape were used: by balloon, by a submersible boat, through buildings that had entrances on both sides of the Wall, via the sewers or tunnels dug with great patience, using suspended metal cables, in specially designed boots of cars or in lorries that knocked down part of the Wall, in the uniforms of Russian or American officers…

Several thousand of these attempts were successful, but at least 136 people died while trying to escape.

Vidéo: « Voici un an, le mur de Berlin s’élevait » 15/08/1962 (source: ina.fr).

The impact of the Wall

The Wall became a barometer of East-West relations and the symbol of the Cold War.

At first the reaction in the West to the building of the Wall was prudent: there was no desire to go to war for West Berlin.
On 27 June 1963, the American President John Kennedy pronounced during a visit to Berlin his famous sentence: "ich bin ein Berliner" ("I am a citizen of Berlin"), thus expressing his solidarity with the people of West Berlin.

Video: Kennedy : « ich bin ein Berliner », 15/04/1980 (source: ina.fr)

West Germany experienced a period of economic growth and its first genuinely democratic regime since the Weimar Republic.

East Berlin, like the rest of the GDR, lived under the Soviet system: the economy was managed on the basis of 5-year Plans, the SED (Socialist Unity Party of Germany) dominated politics, and the population was subjected to a system of tight ideological control.

Video: L’autre Allemagne, 18/09/1970 (source: ina.fr)