We all know them at least visually, if not even having visited them one day. Over time, some have even become real symbols for their city or country, or even good commercial products in their derivatives. But do we always know their history, if not sometimes their reason for being? Rarely. So let’s go to some of these famous monuments that make up our world.
Today, we head to the remains of what many have rightly described as “Wall of shame” and whose fall in 1989 remains considered on the contrary as a symbol of freedom. Here is Berlin and its “famous” Wall…
28 years of separation between East and West Berlin
In 1961, in the middle Cold War, tensions between Russian and American blocs continue to crystallize in Berlin divided between Westerners and Soviets. Faced with the ever-increasing exodus of “refugees from the East”, 3 million people already moving to the West in a few years, the Soviets then decided to close the borders between their sector and the rest of the city.
In Berlin, they pose like this on the night of the 12th to the 13th august 1961 barbed wire which will then make way for the Berlin Wall with its no man’s land, its watchtowers and its ditches to prevent people from fleeing. A Wall which will also disappear one night, that of November 9, 1989, when East Berliners warned by the Western media of the decision of the East German authorities to no longer submit the passage in Germany of the West with prior authorization force without violence the opening of the few crossing points which then existed between the two Berlins.
An event which will at the same time mark the end of the communist dictatorships of Eastern Europe and of a prison wall which is estimated to have cost the lives of several hundred people (we are talking about 270 to more than thousand victims) and sent to prison thousands of others considered by the GDR authorities as “deserters from the republic”.
What remains of the Berlin Wall today?
Checkpoint Charlie
At the time of the Wall, it was the main crossing point between the two Berlins. Right next door, the Wall Museum traces its history and indirectly also that of the thousand people who died trying to flee the socialist dictatorship.
East side gallery
It is in fact, at 1,300 meters, the longest preserved section of the Berlin Wall. Since its fall in 1989, it has served as an open-air gallery for works of street art (118 in total) by recognized artists.
This is where you can see in particular the “Socialist Brotherly Kiss” otherwise called “God, help me survive this deadly love” which is this famous graffiti painted there in 1990 by the artist Dmitri Vrubel representing the (very real) kiss between the leader of the USSR, Leonid Brezhnev, and the president of East Germany, Erich Honecker in 1979.
Berlin Wall Memorial
Even though there is not much left of the Wall now, this memorial opened in 2011 traces its history and therefore in part that of the city. Right next door is the Chapel of Reconciliation.
The Wall in figures
- 155 km in total length: including 43 km crossing Berlin and 112 km encircling West Berlin.
- 124 km of guardrail: to which add 105 km of anti-vehicle pits and 127 km of electric fences.
- 4.2 meters: this is the maximum height reached by the Wall in certain places, with deep ditches and anti-escape obstacles in addition.
- between 270 and 1,135: this is the number of people who died trying to cross the Wall and whose deaths were directly attributable to the East German authorities.
- more than 5,000: the number of successful escapes between 1961 and 1989.
- 28 years, 2 months and 28 days: that’s how long the Wall remained in place, from August 13, 1961 to November 9, 1989.