10 ms·

Berlin, a divided city. The events of 60 years ago

95 points by samizdis 5y ago

samizdis 5y ago
DW anniversary special: 60 years ago, the Berlin Wall went up, dividing the city — and more https://www.dw.com/en/60-years-ago-the-berlin-wall-went-up-dividing-the-city-and-more/a-58837912 https://www.dw.com/en/60-years-ago-the-berlin-wall-went-up-d... The East German secret police and the Berlin Wall https://www.dw.com/en/the-east-german-secret-police-and-the-berlin-wall/a-58837881 https://www.dw.com/en/the-east-german-secret-police-and-the-... Underground pop art thrived in East Germany https://www.dw.com/en/underground-pop-art-thrived-in-east-germany/a-58705049 https://www.dw.com/en/underground-pop-art-thrived-in-east-ge...
codeulike 5y ago
The idea of a city split into two by ideologically opposing factions, and the split being marked by a big wall, sounds like sci-fi now. Also, the idea that a physical barrier could affect the spread of information. Its interesting how much of 20th century history centers on Berlin. There's a wall museum in Berlin, well worth visiting. Edit: thanks for the reminders about contemporary split cities, sobering to think about those
- marc__1 5y ago
  > the idea of a city split into two We see this more often than not. The modern version just omit the walls https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/upshot/2020-election-map.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/upshot/2020-electio... > physical barrier could affect the spread of information Don't you think that there is a component of physical barrier in today's internet? while this may sound odd for the Americans, this is very typical in many parts of the world (East Europe, Asia and parts of Africa and Latin America)
- perihelions 5y ago
  "The idea of a city split into two by ideologically opposing factions, and the split being marked by a big wall, sounds like sci-fi now." Current reality in Nicosia (capital of Cyprus, a EU nation). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Buffer_Zone_in_Cyprus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Buffer_Zone_in_... >"The Turkish army has built a barrier on the zone's northern side, consisting mainly of barbed-wire fencing, concrete wall segments, watchtowers, anti-tank ditches, and minefields. The zone cuts through the centre of Nicosia, separating the city into southern and northern sections. In total, it spans an area of 346 square kilometres (134 sq mi), varying in width from less than 20 metres (66 ft) to more than 7 kilometres (4.3 mi).[2][3][4] Because of this, after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Nicosia remains the last divided capital in Europe.[5][6]"
  - usr1106 5y ago
    Korea. While it's not in the middle of the capital, it's not that far. And the border is much tighter than the Berlin wall has ever been.
    - flohofwoe 5y ago
      I don't know about that, trying to cross the border had/has a high chance of being shot to death, both in the GDR and (AFAIK) in North Korea. East Germany even had automated the whole killing part: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selbstschussanlage https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selbstschussanlage (I haven't found the matching article on the English Wikipedia, sorry)
      - fsckboy 5y ago
        matching article in English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spring-gun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spring-gun (on most wiki pages you can find matching articles in other languages near the bottom of the column of links under the wikipedia logo on the far left of the desktop version)
      - usr1106 5y ago
        I know that. But there was always some travelling over the Inner-German border. Not convenient at all for those wanting to travel from the East, could lead to losing your job and even imprisonment until the West paid to get you free years later. But possible for those who were persistent enough and accepted the sometimes severe consequences. In Korea even that is not enough.
        flohofwoe 5y ago
        Only pensioners got an exception and could travel from East to West to visit family. Everybody else had to try their luck digging tunnels (mostly in Berlin in the 60s), over the Baltic Sea or make it through the "Death Strip" alive, all ending very likely in death or if they're lucky, imprisonment (one of my uncles and his wife ended up with a 10-year prison sentence for trying to flee over the Hungarian border, and were eventually "bought out" by the West). Travel from West to East was unrestricted of course.
- newacct583 5y ago
  > The idea of a city split into two by ideologically opposing factions, and the split being marked by a big wall, sounds like sci-fi now. Jerusalem says hi.
- kunagi7 5y ago
  > The idea of a city split into two by ideologically opposing factions, and the split being marked by a big wall, sounds like sci-fi now. Say welcome to the "Peace lines" or "Peace walls" [0] in Belfast and other cities in North Ireland. There's also Jerusalem, Nicosia and more places with walls around certain areas. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_lines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_lines
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  "sounds like sci-fi now" Sci-fi is usually about future. With 8 billion people in the world and growing, I can definitely see some other places divided by walls so that hostile factions do not mix. There are "peace lines" in contemporary Belfast and Derry still in existence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_lines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_lines
- flohofwoe 5y ago
  > Also, the idea that a physical barrier could affect the spread of information. It didn't, radio waves didn't stop at the wall ;) My dad told stories of communist youths tearing down people's "west antennas" and there were also attempts to jam western TV and radio stations, but this was in the early 60's or so. Later it was more or less tolerated (to watch western TV and listen to western radio), even though officially a taboo.
  - est31 5y ago
    Yeah they could send to most of the east except for a few regions that got dubbed "valley of the clueless". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tal_der_Ahnungslosen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tal_der_Ahnungslosen
  - tylersmith 5y ago
    Slightly off topic but the German band Rammstein, whose members prodominately grew up in East Berlin, have a great song called "Radio" about how the information leakage from the west to the east over radio helped encourage the cultural changes required to unify Germany. It's interesting to me to hear from the source how valuable it was/is.
- mbg721 5y ago
  Having the subway run under the other side's territory and just skip stations is the part that really feels sci-fi/cyberpunk to me.
- pomian 5y ago
  Mexico USA border seems to a pretty strong example of a contemporary wall. Imagine what would happen if it was completely removed?
  - nautilius 5y ago
    You mean all 700 miles of it along 2000 miles of border? I would guess nothing at all would change. No comparison to the German wall with minefields, self shooting devices, etc.
  - gadders 5y ago
    The Berlin Wall was to stop people escaping. The US border Wall is to stop people coming in.
  - relativ575 5y ago
    Border wall is nothing new and not that rare. They are often used to stop illegal immigrants. Just an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_border_barrier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_border_barrier
- Barrin92 5y ago
  >sounds like sci-fi now if you actually want the speculative fiction version and the concept taken to the extreme, you're in luck https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_%26_the_City https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_%26_the_City
  - codeulike 5y ago
    Yes! Love that book
rkachowski 5y ago
I live in Berlin, I tried to cycle home yesterday past Bernauer Strasse (pictured) but the police had completely blocked off the whole region with barricades and around 20 police wagons. I'm pretty sure the irony of commemorating the Berlin wall and its fall via people with guns stopping the public from crossing was lost on them.
- sdoering 5y ago
  Thanks for sharing this story. Made me smile. Nice ironic touch.
- bogomipz 5y ago
  Can you say what was the reason that they were there? A protest?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - nibix 5y ago
    The official commemoration ceremony with all German top politicians took place at Bernauer Straße. That was probably the reason why the street was blocked by police. https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/gedenken-an-mauerbau-steinmeier-schicksalstag-fuer-die.1939.de.html?drn:news_id=1290550 https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/gedenken-an-mauerbau-steinmei...
    - rkachowski 5y ago
      Thanks for the link, I couldn't find anything on Berliner Zeitung and cynically assumed it was something to do with Elon Musk being in town.
- tpmx 5y ago
  ~15 years ago I randomly wandered into an antifa vs police standoff in Berlin, just as it was forming. Surreal experience. Everyone knew where they were supposed to be, except for me. It felt like they had done it so many times before. I got out of there just in time. It's the only time I've seen large scale street violence. I don't think it belongs in a civilized society.
xx511134bz 5y ago
Odd/amusing point, the Stasi referred to the wall as the "antifascist defense border". Although these days, I'm a bit torn on the term as I see rent prices jacked up across the world by whomever can borrow money at the lowest rate. The Stasi and the Berlin Wall | DW Documentary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=haxkWC6MgcQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=haxkWC6MgcQ
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  I suspect that real estate prices are dragged up by fear of inflation. People in my country buy whatever has a roof, because they do not want their savings to go to waste.
  - Spooky23 5y ago
    It’s all about the cheap money. I just refinanced my house for a rate that is effectively negative in real terms right now.
    - inglor_cz 5y ago
      We had even slightly lower interest rate on mortgages in 2017 and the market was nowhere as hot as today. I am sort-of familiar with real estate market in Prague and Ostrava, two very different cities. Apartments in Ostrava were hard to sell even with low interest rates, because the city lost 10 per cent of its population - a typical rust belt phenomenon. Even just two years ago, an apartment put on market in Ostrava could be there for half a year before attracting a serious buyer. They are now hot like hell and more than twice as much expensive.
    - spaetzleesser 5y ago
      Agreed. Some people/institutions have access to more money than can be productively used so they bid up anything that has the potential to make money, be it startups, Bitcoin or housing.
  - adsche 5y ago
    Is the real estate market (esp. for renting out) actually dominated by private investors and their savings? Here in German cities, it feels like it's dominated by faceless investors and corporations but I have no data to back that up.
zwieback 5y ago
Berlin had the most memorable wall but the entire country was divided by a wall as well. My mom's family abandoned their house and factory and fled to the west when the Russians took their property and punished them for being capitalists. Since the wall wasn't up yet they left through Berlin, which was like a porthole to the west at the time.
- bosie 5y ago
  if the wall wasn't up by then, why did they have to go through berlin?
  - zwieback 5y ago
    It was a shorter path, they would have had to travel much farther to get to West Germany than to West Berlin. At the time the commuter trains in Berlin were still going back and forth between the sectors and too busy to be checked thoroughly.
  - nibix 5y ago
    The border between West and East Germany was already heavily fortified in 1952. So, during the nine years until 1961, West Berlin was indeed a kind of porthole to the west. The reasons why the East German government did not close the border within Berlin are complex. For example the Sowjets first had the goal to make Berlin an independent but unified city. But there were also economical and logistical issues: The border would cut important railway transport routes for East Berlin, for which a replacement was only completed in 1961.
- sdoering 5y ago
  I grew up on the western side of the Iron curtain. Not far from the border. My father was born in East Germany and had fled with his mother, ssister and brother before the wall was up. They could only take one suitcase to make it look like they were visiting western Germany only. So he and his family came to the west. His life went in a way so that he got a job near the border as it was back then in north eastern Bavaria. Not far from where I grew up there was another village divided by a wall: Little Berlin [1] It was interesting as a child to grow up near a divided village and country. And seeing the border fall. I still remember my dad, tears streaming down his face while watching people standing on the Berlin Wall when it fell. I remember him welcoming the trains from the West German Embassy with the GDR people shortly before that. [2] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%B6dlareuth?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%B6dlareuth?wprov=sfla1 [2]: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fl%C3%BCchtlingsz%C3%BCge_aus_Prag?wprov=sfla1 https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fl%C3%BCchtlingsz%C3%BCge_aus_... (German only)
keewee7 5y ago
The East German authorities called the wall "Anti-Fascist Protection Border". >The Eastern Bloc portrayed the Wall as protecting its population from fascist elements conspiring to prevent the "will of the people" from building a socialist state in East Germany. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Wall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Wall
- mostertoaster 5y ago
  What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.
- jasonvorhe 5y ago
  What's your point though? That building walls is a useless endeavour or that anti-fascism is evil becay an anti-democratic state abused the term for propaganda reasons? If it's the latter, I hope you'll never look into the historic use of terms such as democracy, freedom/liberty or "free elections".
  - argvargc 5y ago
    Not the OP but I think you've made their point quite well.
  - MichaelMoser123 5y ago
    The point of the wall was to prevent the population of the GDR from running away from socialism; Between 1959-1960 they collectivized agriculture, this means that all the independent farmers were forced to join big state owned farms; the system did not work properly and resulted in shortages. All this resulted in the flight of more than a million citizens from the GDR to the west between 1959 and 1961; about two and a half million fled between 1949 and 1961; The east german rulers stopped this flight by errecting a hightly unpopular wall; East Berlin before the wall was a very open city - for example you could live in the east and work in the western part of the city. Now they had to justify the whole project with ideology constructs - and the ultimate trick was to apply Goodwin's law, and that was done before the invention of the internet.
silvio 5y ago
On the topic of a city divided in two, I highly recommend the novel ‘The City & The City’ by China Mieville. It’s an excelllent detective thriller that reminds you that the strongest and tallest walls are always in our minds.
FabHK 5y ago
Some Berlin Wall trivia: * The wall was not between East and West Berlin, but between West Berlin and the GDR, entirely enclosing West Berlin, naturally. (45 km bordered East Berlin, 113 km Potsdam, the state around Berlin.) * Just two months before the wall was built, at a press conference, Walter Ulbricht, then head of the GDR, said that nobody had the intention of building a wall. "Niemand hat die Absicht, eine Mauer zu errichten." * It wasn't just a wall, but an entire corridor 50m to several hundred metres wide (on the "Eastern" side), consisting of a smaller wall ("Hinterlandmauer"), sometimes corridors for K-9s (German shepherds, naturally), anti-tank obstacles ("Czech hedgehog"), observation towers (302 by the time the wall came down), control strips "Kontrollstreifen" of freshly harrowed sand so trespassers would leave tracks, then "the wall", then a few more metres GDR, then the actual legal border. (However, no "Selbstschussanlagen SM-70", shotguns rigged to fire automatically - those were only deployed at the border to West Germany.) * There were 2300 border troops deployed at any time, mostly in pairs to control each other, but rotating, so that they couldn't form a bond. They were under an order to shoot trespassers, the infamous "Schiessbefehl". * Some 100 to 200+ people died trying to cross the wall. It is surprisingly hard to put an exact number on it. * There were some "enclaves" (exclaves?) like the Lenné-Dreieck (Lenné-triangle): on the "western" side of the wall, but officially belonging to the East, so effectively a no-man's land. * One of the iconic events precipitating the fall was in Sept 1989. Many (thousands) of East Germans had traveled to Prague, Czechoslovakia (not part of the USSR, but of the Eastern Bloc), and climbed over the fence of the West German embassy there, camping on the grounds. On 30 Sept, the foreign minister of West Germany (after long negotiations with USSR foreign minister Shevardnadse), Hans-Dietrich Genscher, appeared on the balcony to tell those refugees that they could go on to West Germany. The rest of the speech was basically drowned out by cheering as soon as the crowd heard "Ausreise". See here from about 1:20. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ov9IHjX8UF4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ov9IHjX8UF4 * Then, on 9 Nov 1989, the wall fell, and it was a surprisingly silly culmination of the revolution. The East German authorities knew that they couldn't carry on, and were planning to gradually open the borders from December onwards (given that people could flee via Czechoslovakia anyway). They started working on legislation, and there was lots of discussions going back and forth (would people that left be allowed to return, etc.) On Nov 9, they sent the first secretary of the party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands) in East Berlin, Günter Schabowski, on a press conference to talk about these plans, but he hadn't attended the deliberations and was basically reading from some notes he had been handed. An Italian reporter asked about it the border, and Schabowski announced these plans for liberalisation, live on TV. He was then asked when these would go into effect, and he shuffled around in those papers and said "as far as I know, that's applicable now, immediately". People stormed the border ("first gradually, then suddenly"), and the rest was history. See around 0:40 here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mn4VDwaV-oo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mn4VDwaV-oo

95 points by samizdis 5y ago

DW anniversary special: 60 years ago, the Berlin Wall went up, dividing the city — and more https://www.dw.com/en/60-years-ago-the-berlin-wall-went-up-dividing-the-city-and-more/a-58837912 https://www.dw.com/en/60-years-ago-the-berlin-wall-went-up-d... The East German secret police and the Berlin Wall https://www.dw.com/en/the-east-german-secret-police-and-the-berlin-wall/a-58837881 https://www.dw.com/en/the-east-german-secret-police-and-the-... Underground pop art thrived in East Germany https://www.dw.com/en/underground-pop-art-thrived-in-east-germany/a-58705049 https://www.dw.com/en/underground-pop-art-thrived-in-east-ge...

codeulike 5y ago

The idea of a city split into two by ideologically opposing factions, and the split being marked by a big wall, sounds like sci-fi now. Also, the idea that a physical barrier could affect the spread of information. Its interesting how much of 20th century history centers on Berlin. There's a wall museum in Berlin, well worth visiting. Edit: thanks for the reminders about contemporary split cities, sobering to think about those

marc__1 5y ago
> the idea of a city split into two We see this more often than not. The modern version just omit the walls https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/upshot/2020-election-map.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/upshot/2020-electio... > physical barrier could affect the spread of information Don't you think that there is a component of physical barrier in today's internet? while this may sound odd for the Americans, this is very typical in many parts of the world (East Europe, Asia and parts of Africa and Latin America)
perihelions 5y ago
"The idea of a city split into two by ideologically opposing factions, and the split being marked by a big wall, sounds like sci-fi now." Current reality in Nicosia (capital of Cyprus, a EU nation). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Buffer_Zone_in_Cyprus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Buffer_Zone_in_... >"The Turkish army has built a barrier on the zone's northern side, consisting mainly of barbed-wire fencing, concrete wall segments, watchtowers, anti-tank ditches, and minefields. The zone cuts through the centre of Nicosia, separating the city into southern and northern sections. In total, it spans an area of 346 square kilometres (134 sq mi), varying in width from less than 20 metres (66 ft) to more than 7 kilometres (4.3 mi).[2][3][4] Because of this, after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Nicosia remains the last divided capital in Europe.[5][6]"
- usr1106 5y ago
  Korea. While it's not in the middle of the capital, it's not that far. And the border is much tighter than the Berlin wall has ever been.
  - flohofwoe 5y ago
    I don't know about that, trying to cross the border had/has a high chance of being shot to death, both in the GDR and (AFAIK) in North Korea. East Germany even had automated the whole killing part: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selbstschussanlage https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selbstschussanlage (I haven't found the matching article on the English Wikipedia, sorry)
    - fsckboy 5y ago
      matching article in English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spring-gun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spring-gun (on most wiki pages you can find matching articles in other languages near the bottom of the column of links under the wikipedia logo on the far left of the desktop version)
    - usr1106 5y ago
      I know that. But there was always some travelling over the Inner-German border. Not convenient at all for those wanting to travel from the East, could lead to losing your job and even imprisonment until the West paid to get you free years later. But possible for those who were persistent enough and accepted the sometimes severe consequences. In Korea even that is not enough.
      - flohofwoe 5y ago
        Only pensioners got an exception and could travel from East to West to visit family. Everybody else had to try their luck digging tunnels (mostly in Berlin in the 60s), over the Baltic Sea or make it through the "Death Strip" alive, all ending very likely in death or if they're lucky, imprisonment (one of my uncles and his wife ended up with a 10-year prison sentence for trying to flee over the Hungarian border, and were eventually "bought out" by the West). Travel from West to East was unrestricted of course.
newacct583 5y ago
> The idea of a city split into two by ideologically opposing factions, and the split being marked by a big wall, sounds like sci-fi now. Jerusalem says hi.
kunagi7 5y ago
> The idea of a city split into two by ideologically opposing factions, and the split being marked by a big wall, sounds like sci-fi now. Say welcome to the "Peace lines" or "Peace walls" [0] in Belfast and other cities in North Ireland. There's also Jerusalem, Nicosia and more places with walls around certain areas. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_lines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_lines
inglor_cz 5y ago
"sounds like sci-fi now" Sci-fi is usually about future. With 8 billion people in the world and growing, I can definitely see some other places divided by walls so that hostile factions do not mix. There are "peace lines" in contemporary Belfast and Derry still in existence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_lines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_lines
flohofwoe 5y ago
> Also, the idea that a physical barrier could affect the spread of information. It didn't, radio waves didn't stop at the wall ;) My dad told stories of communist youths tearing down people's "west antennas" and there were also attempts to jam western TV and radio stations, but this was in the early 60's or so. Later it was more or less tolerated (to watch western TV and listen to western radio), even though officially a taboo.
- est31 5y ago
  Yeah they could send to most of the east except for a few regions that got dubbed "valley of the clueless". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tal_der_Ahnungslosen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tal_der_Ahnungslosen
- tylersmith 5y ago
  Slightly off topic but the German band Rammstein, whose members prodominately grew up in East Berlin, have a great song called "Radio" about how the information leakage from the west to the east over radio helped encourage the cultural changes required to unify Germany. It's interesting to me to hear from the source how valuable it was/is.
mbg721 5y ago
Having the subway run under the other side's territory and just skip stations is the part that really feels sci-fi/cyberpunk to me.
pomian 5y ago
Mexico USA border seems to a pretty strong example of a contemporary wall. Imagine what would happen if it was completely removed?
- nautilius 5y ago
  You mean all 700 miles of it along 2000 miles of border? I would guess nothing at all would change. No comparison to the German wall with minefields, self shooting devices, etc.
- gadders 5y ago
  The Berlin Wall was to stop people escaping. The US border Wall is to stop people coming in.
- relativ575 5y ago
  Border wall is nothing new and not that rare. They are often used to stop illegal immigrants. Just an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_border_barrier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_border_barrier
Barrin92 5y ago
>sounds like sci-fi now if you actually want the speculative fiction version and the concept taken to the extreme, you're in luck https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_%26_the_City https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_%26_the_City
- codeulike 5y ago
  Yes! Love that book

rkachowski 5y ago

I live in Berlin, I tried to cycle home yesterday past Bernauer Strasse (pictured) but the police had completely blocked off the whole region with barricades and around 20 police wagons. I'm pretty sure the irony of commemorating the Berlin wall and its fall via people with guns stopping the public from crossing was lost on them.

sdoering 5y ago
Thanks for sharing this story. Made me smile. Nice ironic touch.
bogomipz 5y ago
Can you say what was the reason that they were there? A protest?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- nibix 5y ago
  The official commemoration ceremony with all German top politicians took place at Bernauer Straße. That was probably the reason why the street was blocked by police. https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/gedenken-an-mauerbau-steinmeier-schicksalstag-fuer-die.1939.de.html?drn:news_id=1290550 https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/gedenken-an-mauerbau-steinmei...
  - rkachowski 5y ago
    Thanks for the link, I couldn't find anything on Berliner Zeitung and cynically assumed it was something to do with Elon Musk being in town.
tpmx 5y ago
~15 years ago I randomly wandered into an antifa vs police standoff in Berlin, just as it was forming. Surreal experience. Everyone knew where they were supposed to be, except for me. It felt like they had done it so many times before. I got out of there just in time. It's the only time I've seen large scale street violence. I don't think it belongs in a civilized society.

xx511134bz 5y ago

Odd/amusing point, the Stasi referred to the wall as the "antifascist defense border". Although these days, I'm a bit torn on the term as I see rent prices jacked up across the world by whomever can borrow money at the lowest rate. The Stasi and the Berlin Wall | DW Documentary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=haxkWC6MgcQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=haxkWC6MgcQ

inglor_cz 5y ago
I suspect that real estate prices are dragged up by fear of inflation. People in my country buy whatever has a roof, because they do not want their savings to go to waste.
- Spooky23 5y ago
  It’s all about the cheap money. I just refinanced my house for a rate that is effectively negative in real terms right now.
  - inglor_cz 5y ago
    We had even slightly lower interest rate on mortgages in 2017 and the market was nowhere as hot as today. I am sort-of familiar with real estate market in Prague and Ostrava, two very different cities. Apartments in Ostrava were hard to sell even with low interest rates, because the city lost 10 per cent of its population - a typical rust belt phenomenon. Even just two years ago, an apartment put on market in Ostrava could be there for half a year before attracting a serious buyer. They are now hot like hell and more than twice as much expensive.
  - spaetzleesser 5y ago
    Agreed. Some people/institutions have access to more money than can be productively used so they bid up anything that has the potential to make money, be it startups, Bitcoin or housing.
- adsche 5y ago
  Is the real estate market (esp. for renting out) actually dominated by private investors and their savings? Here in German cities, it feels like it's dominated by faceless investors and corporations but I have no data to back that up.

zwieback 5y ago

Berlin had the most memorable wall but the entire country was divided by a wall as well. My mom's family abandoned their house and factory and fled to the west when the Russians took their property and punished them for being capitalists. Since the wall wasn't up yet they left through Berlin, which was like a porthole to the west at the time.

bosie 5y ago
if the wall wasn't up by then, why did they have to go through berlin?
- zwieback 5y ago
  It was a shorter path, they would have had to travel much farther to get to West Germany than to West Berlin. At the time the commuter trains in Berlin were still going back and forth between the sectors and too busy to be checked thoroughly.
- nibix 5y ago
  The border between West and East Germany was already heavily fortified in 1952. So, during the nine years until 1961, West Berlin was indeed a kind of porthole to the west. The reasons why the East German government did not close the border within Berlin are complex. For example the Sowjets first had the goal to make Berlin an independent but unified city. But there were also economical and logistical issues: The border would cut important railway transport routes for East Berlin, for which a replacement was only completed in 1961.
sdoering 5y ago
I grew up on the western side of the Iron curtain. Not far from the border. My father was born in East Germany and had fled with his mother, ssister and brother before the wall was up. They could only take one suitcase to make it look like they were visiting western Germany only. So he and his family came to the west. His life went in a way so that he got a job near the border as it was back then in north eastern Bavaria. Not far from where I grew up there was another village divided by a wall: Little Berlin [1] It was interesting as a child to grow up near a divided village and country. And seeing the border fall. I still remember my dad, tears streaming down his face while watching people standing on the Berlin Wall when it fell. I remember him welcoming the trains from the West German Embassy with the GDR people shortly before that. [2] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%B6dlareuth?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%B6dlareuth?wprov=sfla1 [2]: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fl%C3%BCchtlingsz%C3%BCge_aus_Prag?wprov=sfla1 https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fl%C3%BCchtlingsz%C3%BCge_aus_... (German only)

keewee7 5y ago

The East German authorities called the wall "Anti-Fascist Protection Border". >The Eastern Bloc portrayed the Wall as protecting its population from fascist elements conspiring to prevent the "will of the people" from building a socialist state in East Germany. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Wall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Wall

mostertoaster 5y ago
What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.
jasonvorhe 5y ago
What's your point though? That building walls is a useless endeavour or that anti-fascism is evil becay an anti-democratic state abused the term for propaganda reasons? If it's the latter, I hope you'll never look into the historic use of terms such as democracy, freedom/liberty or "free elections".
- argvargc 5y ago
  Not the OP but I think you've made their point quite well.
- MichaelMoser123 5y ago
  The point of the wall was to prevent the population of the GDR from running away from socialism; Between 1959-1960 they collectivized agriculture, this means that all the independent farmers were forced to join big state owned farms; the system did not work properly and resulted in shortages. All this resulted in the flight of more than a million citizens from the GDR to the west between 1959 and 1961; about two and a half million fled between 1949 and 1961; The east german rulers stopped this flight by errecting a hightly unpopular wall; East Berlin before the wall was a very open city - for example you could live in the east and work in the western part of the city. Now they had to justify the whole project with ideology constructs - and the ultimate trick was to apply Goodwin's law, and that was done before the invention of the internet.

silvio 5y ago

On the topic of a city divided in two, I highly recommend the novel ‘The City & The City’ by China Mieville. It’s an excelllent detective thriller that reminds you that the strongest and tallest walls are always in our minds.

FabHK 5y ago

Some Berlin Wall trivia: * The wall was not between East and West Berlin, but between West Berlin and the GDR, entirely enclosing West Berlin, naturally. (45 km bordered East Berlin, 113 km Potsdam, the state around Berlin.) * Just two months before the wall was built, at a press conference, Walter Ulbricht, then head of the GDR, said that nobody had the intention of building a wall. "Niemand hat die Absicht, eine Mauer zu errichten." * It wasn't just a wall, but an entire corridor 50m to several hundred metres wide (on the "Eastern" side), consisting of a smaller wall ("Hinterlandmauer"), sometimes corridors for K-9s (German shepherds, naturally), anti-tank obstacles ("Czech hedgehog"), observation towers (302 by the time the wall came down), control strips "Kontrollstreifen" of freshly harrowed sand so trespassers would leave tracks, then "the wall", then a few more metres GDR, then the actual legal border. (However, no "Selbstschussanlagen SM-70", shotguns rigged to fire automatically - those were only deployed at the border to West Germany.) * There were 2300 border troops deployed at any time, mostly in pairs to control each other, but rotating, so that they couldn't form a bond. They were under an order to shoot trespassers, the infamous "Schiessbefehl". * Some 100 to 200+ people died trying to cross the wall. It is surprisingly hard to put an exact number on it. * There were some "enclaves" (exclaves?) like the Lenné-Dreieck (Lenné-triangle): on the "western" side of the wall, but officially belonging to the East, so effectively a no-man's land. * One of the iconic events precipitating the fall was in Sept 1989. Many (thousands) of East Germans had traveled to Prague, Czechoslovakia (not part of the USSR, but of the Eastern Bloc), and climbed over the fence of the West German embassy there, camping on the grounds. On 30 Sept, the foreign minister of West Germany (after long negotiations with USSR foreign minister Shevardnadse), Hans-Dietrich Genscher, appeared on the balcony to tell those refugees that they could go on to West Germany. The rest of the speech was basically drowned out by cheering as soon as the crowd heard "Ausreise". See here from about 1:20. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ov9IHjX8UF4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ov9IHjX8UF4 * Then, on 9 Nov 1989, the wall fell, and it was a surprisingly silly culmination of the revolution. The East German authorities knew that they couldn't carry on, and were planning to gradually open the borders from December onwards (given that people could flee via Czechoslovakia anyway). They started working on legislation, and there was lots of discussions going back and forth (would people that left be allowed to return, etc.) On Nov 9, they sent the first secretary of the party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands) in East Berlin, Günter Schabowski, on a press conference to talk about these plans, but he hadn't attended the deliberations and was basically reading from some notes he had been handed. An Italian reporter asked about it the border, and Schabowski announced these plans for liberalisation, live on TV. He was then asked when these would go into effect, and he shuffled around in those papers and said "as far as I know, that's applicable now, immediately". People stormed the border ("first gradually, then suddenly"), and the rest was history. See around 0:40 here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mn4VDwaV-oo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mn4VDwaV-oo