Although it seems as if this piece of history is taken from ancient days, the truth is the majority of us readers were very much alive. Germany of the late 1980s was not the Germany of today. After WWII, Germany was divided into the East and the West, keeping Berlin a city divided in two. A long torching concrete barrier separated families, cultures, and futures until the iron curtain fell, and so did the wall.
The Beginning of The End
The Berlin Wall enclosed and surrounded West Berlin from 1961 to 1989. It represented the height of the Cold War tensions in Germany and an ideological divide. Nearly fifteen years before the Berlin Wall came up in 1961, East Germans gathered together and began a mass exodus into West Germany. In fact, nearly one-sixth of East Germany’s population had already left before the wall was erected.
American’s in Berlin
The Berlin Wall was, in reality, two concrete barriers with a 160-yard strip in the middle that included trenches, floodlights, trip-wire machine guns, and watchtowers. Two years after the Berlin Wall fell, John F. Kennedy addressed a crowd of over 120,000 people who had gathered outside West Berlin’s city hall. His phrase, “I am a Berliner.” went down in history. The famous Bruce Springsteen concert in 1988 was a landmark event for Berlin. Springsteen is reported to have told the crowd, “I’m here to play rock n roll for you in the hope that one day all the barriers will be torn down.”
A Different World
Fun fact: Did you know that pieces of the wall are on display in different parts of the world, in the least likely of places? One section can be found in the men’s room of Las Vegas’s Main Street Casino. To this day, the Berlin Wall symbolizes everything West Germany represented. A fight for freedom and liberation.