Wall Of Shame 1961-1989

By Daniel Benjamin

The geography of the past is studded with walled cities. Jerusalem and Rome, to name but two from antiquity, fortified themselves against enemies without. Later, in medieval times, the citizens of London and Paris built and rebuilt ramparts to safeguard their liberties, ones that many of their rural contemporaries, burdened with the feudal status of serf, were denied. Only in the 20th century has a city had a wall rammed through its innards, circumscribing the freedom of two-thirds of its people, forcing upon them a serf-like tie to the land. Only in Berlin.

Images of the violation recur. When Berliners in the Soviet-run sector woke on the morning of Aug. 13, 1961, to find families sundered and the city rived by barbed wire -- and soon concrete -- many frantically sought routes of escape. The Berlin Wall was meant to halt a tide of migrants to the West that had left East Germany short of workers and threatened the stability of the Communist regime: more than 2.7 million had departed since the founding of the German Democratic Republic in 1949, 30,000 in July 1961 alone.

At first, buildings along the new boundary afforded windows on the West. Many refugees leaped, some into fire nets, others to the pavement; more than a few died in the fall. After the regime bricked up the windows, the resourceful tunneled beneath the 20-ft. "death strip" and its mines and gun emplacements. The most daring efforts came from Wall jumpers, who confronted head on the "antifascist protective barrier," as the jargon of totalitarianism described the Wall. In their jagged sprints, dodging searchlight beams and bullets, they created a theater of longing where the value of freedom -- and the maleficence of its denial -- found an extraordinary visual expression. In 1962, in one of the most publicized instances, 18-year-old Peter Fechter, an East Berlin bricklayer, was cut down by machine-gun fire as he tried to scale the Wall and, in plain view of Western policemen and reporters, was left lying for an hour while he bled to death; finally East German border guards retrieved his body. Fechter was one of an estimated 75 who have been killed over the past 28 years while trying to escape across the barrier.

The significance of the Wall extended far beyond the city, far beyond Germany. It became an epitome of the partitioning of Europe, the overarching symbol of the cold war and one of the places where the Western alliance and the Warsaw Pact came gunsight to gunsight. After the magnificent oratory of John F. Kennedy's "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech, it was de rigueur for U.S. Presidents -- and other Western leaders -- to come and shake their fists at the Wall and call down imprecations against those who had conceived and built it. But the barrier also stood as a reminder of the limits of power in the nuclear age. Paradoxically, the Wall, despised though it was, acted as a bulwark for stability in Europe, ratifying two spheres of influence and thus maintaining the alternative of cold war to hot war. It was the most palpable evidence of a deep wound in European civilization -- and it is finally gone.