Why was the Berlin Wall built? A brief history of the construction and fall of the Berlin Wall, which occurred on November 9, 1989.
Why was the Berlin Wall built?
On November 9, 1989, Berliners tore down the symbol of the Cold War that divided the city in two. Since that day, the world has never been the same . And in the ten years that followed, history has accelerated its course, for better or for worse.
The idea of healing the Berlin wound with a sanitary cordon , as the East German Communists called it, was born neither in Moscow nor in Berlin. In a certain sense, the idea germinated suddenly in the head of Nikita Khrushchev, during the brief semi-summit he held with John Kennedy in Vienna in 1961.
It was in those fateful days, destined to produce profound and shocking changes on the scenarios of the Cold War , that the unpredictable dictator of the Soviet Union took the decision to test the nerves and mind of the young American president by building a long wall through the heart of Berlin, separating with a clear and definitive cut the Eastern sector from the Western sector of the city occupied by four armies.
That dividing barrier was not only supposed to stem the continuous hemorrhage of refugees from East Germany, who passed freely from one sector of the old capital to another; it was also supposed to close, once and for all, the only open border of the Soviet empire, splitting Communist Europe and Western Europe into two incommunicable sections.
Berlin Wall: Birth
That Khrushchev had developed the plan in Vienna, and not before, was demonstrated by the fact that as late as March 1961 he had firmly opposed the suggestion of Walter Ulbricht, president of the GDR , to build a large barbed wire fence along the border between the two Berlins. The Soviet leader’s veto temporarily blocked the proposal. Ulbricht was forced to backtrack, or rather forced to wait a few more months.
Meanwhile, the hemorrhage of escapes increased day by day . Nothing seemed to be able to stop that unstoppable tide, which was increasingly bleeding the social and economic body of the GDR of its best technicians, teachers, doctors, engineers, workers, journalists, writers, artists and film and theatre directors.
A good portion of the refugees were young people. With every new sign of internal crisis, or of a crackdown in East Germany, the flow increased. The unguarded crossing points of the former capital had become real channels of outflow and emptying of the most active population of the communist fiefdom of Ulbricht and his right-hand man Honecker . In the first six months of 1961 alone, 130,000 East German subjects had fled through Berlin.
Construction of the Berlin Wall
Khrushchev was certainly aware of the gravity of the situation, which threatened to lead to the sudden collapse of the most important satellite state of the USSR , but, always undecided, he waited for the right moment to strike the blow against the West and in particular against the United States .
The opportunity was offered to him in Vienna by a Kennedy whom the astute Russian peasant judged arrogant and insecure, artificial and brittle under an elegant armor of managerial style.
So, enraged by the young Harvard man’s overly casual and disrespectful behavior, he decided to teach him a lesson and, at the same time, subject him to a very tough political test: the Wall .
No longer the artisanal kilometre-long chevaux de frise proposed in March by Ulbricht, but a Wall with a capital W , a monstrous re-edition of the Great Wall of China winding through the streets, bridges, underground passages and waterways of one of the most glorious capitals of Europe. Anger and calculation, the desire to punish the impertinent inhabitant of the White House, the will to reconsolidate the shaky structures of Communist Germany, with the added desire to simultaneously corner the Chinese imperialists and Maoists who accused him of collusion with imperialism : all this pushed Khrushchev to inflict, on the Germans and on the world, an insult that, with the Wall, moved the frontier of the Cold War to the limits of atomic holocaust. Not even Stalin , who in 1948 had blocked access from the outside to West Berlin, had dared so much.
