Berlin Wall
Overview
Statewide Dual Credit Modern World History: Unit 15, Lesson 12
A discussion of the Berlin Wall highlights the impact it had on separating East and West Germany, both physically and ideologically. The construction of the wall symbolized the growing divide between the communist East and the capitalist West during the Cold War.
Although the Caribbean proved an important theatre in the Cold War in the early 1960s, it was not the only one. Throughout the 1960s, thousands of East Germans and other groups living behind the Iron Curtain migrated to the West, often through the free city of West Berlin. Worried about losing skilled labor, East German and Soviet officials slowly choked off migration to the West. On August 12, 1961, East German officials sealed the border with West Berlin. Over the next several weeks, brick walls topped by barbed wire, minefields, and a no man’s land sprang up between East and West Berlin.
Although limited amounts of travel and trade between West and East Germany continued throughout the Cold War, the Berlin Wall essentially sealed both societies off from one another. Linked to the United States and NATO, West Germany became more capitalistic, individualistic and materialistic. Dominated by Russia, East Germany was characterized by single-party rule, state control of the economy, a police state complete with the secret police (Stasi), a controlled educational system, and constant inculcation of communist ideology.
In summer 1963, U.S. President John F. Kennedy visited West Germany, including a trip to West Berlin. In front of the West Berlin Rathaus Schoneberg (city hall), Kennedy gave a rousing speech in which he declared, “Ich bin ein Berliner” (I am a Berliner). Although Kennedy primarily sought to show solidarity with a key Cold War ally, his speech helped cement, in the eyes of many Americans and Europeans, the perception that the West stood for freedom, opportunity and the future. In contrast, the Eastern Bloc appeared to be a closed police state trapped in the past.