The Berlin Wall (History Essay Example)

What would happen if a family was separated by a massive wall that lasted nearly 30 years? Well on August 13, 1961, a wall was built to separate the two sides of Berlin. The east side was the communist side(Russia), and the west side was the democratic side(US, France, and UK). This was known as the Berlin wall, that divided east from west until it fell on November 9, 1989(History.com). It was meant to divide the city in two because of diplomatic issues during the cold war. (Webster)

This east side of the wall (Communism side) was in economical struggle because of the Cold War. This side also had poor living conditions, for example there was a lack of food and clean water, as well as a lot of diseases. This caused people to want to defect  to the West side of the wall where all of those issues would be solved. According to reports, official figures show that more than 400 people died trying to cross the wall. However, human-rights activists say that the true number could be closer to 800(Wirtschaft). Many of the escape attempts were dramatic. People leapt from windows, tunneled and crept through sewers, rammed through the gates in steel-plated trucks, crawled through mud, and swam the icy waters of the city's rivers and canals. Only 5,000 people managed to escape the east side of the wall(History.com). Escape soon became harder. The barbed wire was replaced with concrete slabs, waterways were blocked by underground fences, windows along the borders had bricks instead of glass. Getting across became increasingly difficult, and it required ingenuity as well as determination(Britannica). The east side of the Berlin Wall was a bad place for anyone to live with many people trying to escape, and unfortunately, some even dying.

The west side of the Berlin Wall was not in economic struggle even though it was still affected by the Cold War. This is because the Marshall Plan helped West Germany (Democratic side). The Plan was basically an effort to prevent the economic deterioration of postwar Europe, expansion of communism, and stagnation of world trade. Due to the plan, people from West Berlin were reveling in the growing prosperity of a new democratic Germany. As people were starving and died on the east side of the wall, people in the west could only helplessly watch. Although there were some people who rose up and tried to fight the issue like Willy Brandt, they never really fixed the issue. Even though some argue that it helped convince the spokesmen of East Berlin (Schabowski), there is no definitive proof while the west just had to sit back and watch as life in communism in East Berlin was rough as ever(Britannica). All the wall showed to the west was, “A reminder that there was a regime that lacked the support of its own people and could survive only by blocking them in. It was obvious to all that, when the wall fell, so too would the East German regime”(Steury).

Ever since the mid 1980s, people have anticipated the fall of the Berlin Wall, On November 9, 1989, the Cold War caused the spokesman for East Berlin’s Communist Party to announce a change. Starting at midnight that day, he said, “Citizens of the GDR were free to cross the country’s borders.” People from east and west Berlin started to head towards the wall, with different types of alcohol, and started chanting “Tor auf!” (“Open the gate!”) At midnight, they crossed the sides. More than 2 million people from East Berlin went over to West Berlin that weekend to celebrate, “The greatest Street party in the history of the world” , a journalist wrote (History.com). People called mauerspechte or wall woodpeckers used hammers and picks to knock away chunks of the wall all the while with cranes and bulldozers started to tear down the wall. Soon the wall was gone and Berlin was united for the first time since 1945. “Only today is the war really over” someone spray painted on a piece of the fallen debris. Surprisingly, Berlin was officially reunited on October 3, 1990, about one year after the fall of the wall (Tikkanen). This meant that east and west Berlin were reunited and joined the Federal Republic as a full-fledged federated city-state.

Overall, the Berlin Wall was meant to divide the city of Berlin in two due to diplomatic issues, and it sure worked. The Berlin Wall stood for nearly 30 years (Blakemore) killing an estimated 400 people and possibly more just because they wanted better living conditions. Though East and West Germany were formally reunified on October 3, 1990, the fall of the Berlin Wall served as a symbol of the country's unification, and for many, the end of the Cold War and communism in Eastern Europe.