Division of Berlin

11 Key excerpts on "Division of Berlin"

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  eBook - ePub

  Berlin Between Two Worlds

  • Ronald A. Francisco(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  1 Introduction: Divided Berlin in Postwar Politics

  Ronald Α. Francisco

  Berlin has been a central issue in the postwar dispute between East and West. Often it has been the site of political tensions that brought the Soviet bloc and the West to the brink of open combat. Its geographic location, unique political status, and dramatic division have made Berlin an important symbol in the struggle for the control of Germany and central Europe. Berlin's present role in international politics is noticeably muted. Yet its political status remains essentially unchanged. It remains sharply divided between East and West even after the past decade's concessions from both sides. Its geographic locations is now no less important strategically or politically.

  The Berlin of the 1980s owes its relative quiescence to the diplomacy of the 1970s. By the late 1960s most of the relevant national actors had sufficient incentive to work to defuse the tension that had grown out of the conflicts and raw politics of the previous two decades. Yet because Berlin's political status remains unsettled, its potential to precipitate a crisis and even a military conflict has lessened only by degree. Berlin's future lies in the hands of a diverse set of actors that operates on three basic levels: East versus West; East Germany versus West Germany; and to a lesser extent East Berlin versus West Berlin. The combinations and permutations that occur within and between these levels have become increasingly complex, and are reflected in the multiplicity of international perspectives represented in this volume.

  This introduction explores Berlin's international position by reviewing the major events of the postwar era in the context of the foreign policy perspective of the major actors. As the subsequent chapters show, the motives and goals of these actors have varied widely and often conflicted directly throughout the postwar period. In fact, much of the intensity of the Berlin problem can be traced to the fact that its postwar structure was jointly designed by allies who failed to anticipate the fundamental political struggle that was to grip Europe in the wake of World War II.

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  Architecture, Politics, and Identity in Divided Berlin

  • Emily Pugh(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • University of Pittsburgh Press

    (Publisher)

  8 introduction 5 The wall affected identity construction in Berlin in other ways as well. Although political tensions eased after 1961 , the border closure raised the stakes for Berlin in its role as the center of the Cold War. While Berlin had been the symbolic and literal frontier between “East” and “West” since the end of World War II, the wall heightened the city’s symbolic importance by formalizing Berlin’s division and its place at the center of the Cold War. Af-ter 1961 , it was clear there was to be no compromise on the so-called Berlin Question. Berlin would be divided or it would be wholly western or wholly eastern; the division and conflict as a whole would end only with the vic-tory of either the eastern or the western Cold War powers. Thus, August 13 , 1961 , marks a change in the way East-West Berlin/German identity was constructed in and with Berlin and to what ends: it is at this point that the divided city truly became a microcosm of the Cold War as a whole. The symbolic importance of the Berlin Wall was such that “the wall” soon came to refer to both a physical structure and a figurative concept. As a result, the Berlin Wall made the city even more important as a staging ground for competing identities, dividing as it did Berlin and the world into “East” and “West,” as well as into socialist/communist versus demo-cratic/capitalist. So definitive was the wall both physically and as a visual symbol that it became difficult to see the Cold War conflict in any terms other than black and white. This dichotomy was by design, as eastern and western powers encouraged a narrative of the Cold War based on a choice: one or the other, not both. This choice was made physical reality in divided Berlin, where there was what amounted to two alternate versions of a sin-gle city.

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  Places of Encounter, Volume 2

  Time, Place, and Connectivity in World History, Volume Two: Since 1500

  • Aran MacKinnon, Aran MacKinnon, Elaine McClarnand MacKinnon(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  13Berlin A Global Symbol of the Iron Curtain(1945–1991)

  ELIZA ABLOVATSKI AND ELAINE MAC KINNON

  IN 2009 PEOPLE ALL ACROSS THE GLOBE CELEBRATED THE TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY of the events of 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell, paving the way to the reunification of Germany and the end of the Cold War. For those of us who now teach, one no-I table aspect of this anniversary was the shock of realizing that events that were so pivotal to our own intellectual and academic path happened before most of our students now were born! One of this chapter’s authors entered college in the fall of 1989 and remembers watching the news about the Berlin Wall in her Russian history class, which paused to track these monumental current events. As a historian of Central Europe and a former resident of Berlin, she often finds it natural to use the shorthand “fall of the Berlin Wall” as a way of talking about post-1989 transitions. Berlin is truly central to international understanding of Cold War history, as well as to the commemorations and histories of the transition taking place throughout Europe with the collapse of communism.

  The post–World War II division of Europe into two hostile political, economic, and military blocs or alliances was one of the defining features of the Cold War. And Berlin, the divided former capital of Nazi Germany, seemed more than anywhere else to exemplify this divide. Thousands of miles of borders marked the so-called Iron Curtain from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Balkan Peninsula in the south. Within Berlin itself, a fortified dividing line developed in stages, while the two Germanys were divided by a much longer internal border. Yet the nearly one hundred miles of cement wall erected beginning in August 1961, furnished with guard towers and barbed wire, seemed above all to exemplify the barbarity of this division of Europe, especially since at least a third of its distance ran right through the heart of the city, slicing through residential and commercial districts and cutting the single city in two.

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  Cold War Berlin

  Confrontations, Cultures, and Identities

  • Scott H. Krause, Stefanie Eisenhuth, Konrad H. Jarausch, Scott H. Krause, Stefanie Eisenhuth, Konrad H. Jarausch(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • I.B. Tauris

    (Publisher)

  It has almost been forgotten nowadays that the distinction between East and West Berlin was not a product of the Cold War but existed much earlier, from just after the turn of the twentieth century in fact, in the form of an old historical center at Alexanderplatz and a new one at Bahnhof Zoo. Plans were made in the German Empire, and later under Albert Speer, to link the Western and Eastern halves of the city, none of which was implemented. 3 Starting in the 1950s, the two centers grew apart even more as each was developed with the intent of demonstrating the attractiveness and superiority of its respective system. 4 Administrative division was followed by a physical split in 1961 with the erection of the Wall. The “Cold War Berlin” in the title of this book was therefore a double Berlin, and should actually be thought of in the plural. Until the demise of the GDR in 1989–90 and the reunification of these two halves, there existed two different realms of experience that are linked to different memories today. Thus, this chapter will begin by exploring the memory of these two respective halves followed by a discussion of the memory of the nearly fifty-year presence of the victorious Allied powers in World War Two, a key feature of Cold War Berlin. Remembering West Berlin “West Berlin is back!,” crowed the entertainment guide tip Berlin in January 2013. 5 This flashback was occasioned by a new David Bowie song reminiscing with a certain wistfulness on his Schöneberg years

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  Why We Fought

  America's Wars in Film and History

  • Peter C. Rollins, John E. O'Connor(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • The University Press of Kentucky

    (Publisher)

  The construction of the Wall, of course, completed the city’s division. In his book The Ghosts of Berlin, Brian Ladd argues that the Wall “was antithetical to the mobility and circulation characteristic of a modern city.” Pollution, radio and TV signals, and the sound of rock concerts still passed across it, and it was possible for Westerners to travel underneath it through the city’s historical central district (Berlin-Mitte) on two subway lines that linked the northeastern and southeastern parts of West Berlin. Otherwise, the Wall now blocked streets and tram lines, and even gas and water mains had been cut. East German guards would kill at least seventy-eight people trying to cross it illegally (Ladd 18–19, 24). The inner-German détente of the 1970s and 1980s did relatively little to revive personal contacts in the divided Berlin, even after East Germans received increasing opportunities to visit relatives in the West starting in 1984 (Merritt 174–81; McAdams 166–67). The city also clearly began to drift apart economically. In the words of Der Spiegel magazine in 1966, West Berlin and its 2.2 million residents had become “the glittering thing” (Ladd 469). Even though East Berlin enjoyed the highest standard of living in the communist bloc, the GDR’s economy as a whole went into a long and irreversible decline during the 1970s. Its inhabitants realized that West Berliners had it much better (Ladd 463–515; Maier 59–107; Fulbrook 37–38). By the mid-1980s some observers were also pointing to a much more serious source of division that was psychological in origin. Political scientist Richard L. Merritt wrote in 1985 that “as each year passes, the underlying basis of political community in Berlin as a whole erodes a bit more…. In place of community, estrangement was growing” (183). East and West Berliners had lived parallel but separate lives for too long

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  Where in the World is the Berlin Wall?

  170 Sites around the World

  • Anna Kaminsky(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Berlin Story Verlag

    (Publisher)

  FROM THE BUILDING OF THE BERLIN WALL TO THE FALL OF THE BERLIN WALL

  A SHORT HISTORY OF THE DIVISION

  Maria Nooke

  On 13th August 1961 at 1:00am, the lights went out at the Brandenburg Gate and police and members of the East German army moved towards the sector border. Ten minutes later, the GDR announced that measures were being taken which would help to “guard and control”.1

  Within a few hours, the GDR government had closed the border to West Berlin with barbed wire. An impermeable border fortification was built over the next days and weeks – the Berlin Wall. Pictures of this formidable border installation were sent around the world. Confused faces and a Wall of armed soldiers at the Brandenburg Gate have become engraved in the collective memory. On November 9, 1989, the Brandenburg Gate was once again the focus of worldwide interest: The Wall had fallen. There were images of people dancing with joy on the concrete Wall in front of the Brandenburg Gate.

  The euphoria felt when the division came to an end was not only felt by Berliners, not only by Germans in the East and the West, but by people all over the world.

  The Wall had divided Berlin for over 28 years. The beginning and end of the Berlin Wall marked significant landmarks in world history, which history books would later refer to as the “Cold War”. The Berlin Wall was a physical construction which showed the inhumanity of the GDR government. A government that became known for shooting its own citizens if they tried to escape. When the Wall fell on 9th November 1989, it became a symbol for the peaceful victory over German division. The end of the GDR was sealed and the reunification of Germany became possible.2

  The Brandenburg Gate after the Fall of the Wall © Archiv Bundesstiftung Aufarbeitung / Bestand Uwe Gerig Nr. 4563

  GERMANY UNDER OCCUPATION AFTER THE SECOND WORLD WAR 3

  The reasons leading to the building of the Berlin Wall go back to the Second World War, which had been instigated and lost by Germany. When it became clear that Hitler was going to lose the War, the Allies began to negotiate plans to split Germany into new territories once Hitler had been defeated. Germany was to be divided into three, later four, zones of occupation and a special status was arranged for Berlin, the capital city. The city was also to be divided into four sectors with an Allied Kommandatura.

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  Debates on the German Revolution of 1918-19

  • Matthew Stibbe(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Manchester University Press

    (Publisher)

  Part II Divided Europe and the politics of history: ‘1918’ in the two Germanys Passage contains an image

  3 Revolution betrayed or democracy saved? West German debates, 1949–79

  The Cold War, which developed apace after 1949, was a truly worldwide phenomenon. Its global reach was underlined by events such as the Korean War of 1950–53, the testing of the first H-bomb in 1952, the Sino-Soviet split from 1960 and the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Nonetheless, it also came to have a special ideological and symbolic significance in central Europe, where two German states – the Federal Republic founded in May 1949 and its Communist rival, the German Democratic Republic, established in October of the same year – stood on what for much of the 1950s and the early 1960s seemed to be the brink of all-out war. From 1955 they were also integrated into rival military alliances – the American-led NATO in the case of the FRG and the Warsaw Pact in the case of the GDR.

  Just as the German nation was split in half after 1949, so too was the German history profession. However, the timeline for this did not follow the course of the Cold War exactly. In the early 1950s there were still some on both sides who hoped that there was enough common understanding to allow for the maintenance of a single professional body for German historians. The final split came in the mid-to-late 1950s. West Germans such as the conservative Gerhard Ritter, President of the Verband der Historiker Deutschlands (German Historians’ Association (VHD)), refused to accept the new East German journal the Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft, founded in 1953, as a ‘scientific’ publication, denouncing it as Marxist propaganda. Very few western historians would write for it. Then, at its annual conference in Trier in September 1958, the VHD forbade three East German historians – Ernst Engelberg, Max Steinmetz and Leo Stern – to speak if they appeared as official representatives of the Deutsche Historiker Gesellschaft (German Historians’ Society (DHG)), the new East German body that had been founded a few months before. The DHG ordered a full-scale walk-out, and henceforth instructed all of its members to resign from the VHD.1 Finally, in the run-up to the eleventh International Congress of Historical Sciences in Stockholm in August 1960, Ritter successfully pressed the Swedish organisers not to allow an official delegation from the GDR to attend, insisting that there was only one legitimate body for German historians – the VHD.2

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  Berlin

  The Spatial Structure of a Divided City

  • Dorothy Elkins, T. H. Elkins, B. Hofmeister(Authors)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  After the construction of the Wall, the Soviet Union continued for a year or two with the familiar pattern of minor harassment, particularly along the lines of communication, designed to chip away at the western position in Berlin. By the mid-1960s, however, the major powers had enough preoccupations elsewhere to be willing to consider an agreement that would retire Berlin from the forefront of international political attention, and make it unlikely that the city would become a flash-point for global conflict. At a more immediate level, the western powers wished to improve the position of West Berlin, freeing it from the repeated Soviet-induced or GDR-induced crises, particularly with regard to access, which tended to produce feelings of insecurity in the population and which were economically damaging. A major objective was to reduce West Berlin’s isolation.

  Plate 2.1 The western face of the Berlin Wall is a gift for graffiti writers. Beyond the Wall, the tramlines can just be discerned running through the former Leipziger Platz, once at the busy heart of pre-1945 Berlin, now part of the Wall’s death strip. Beyond are East Berlin government buildings along the Otto-Grotewohl-Strasse (formerly Wilhelmstrasse) and in the far distance new residential developments along the Leipziger Strasse.

  It might be thought that, at local level, the Soviet Union had every incentive to keep the Berlin pot on the boil; this was certainly the view of the Ulbricht regime. The Soviet Union, however, was at this time concerned to stabilize the political system in Central and Eastern Europe, and it also needed to obtain vitally needed economic help for itself and the GDR. To do so it needed the completion of treaties with the Federal Republic, which made it clear that no progress would be made without a satisfactory agreement on Berlin. From the eastern point of view, negotiations on Berlin were a concession to achieve other aims. This did not mean that the Soviet Union had no specific objectives of its own with regard to Berlin. It was determined that, whatever the form of words used, any agreement should in practice apply only to West Berlin, and should in no way restrict the existing rights of East Berlin. It was also determined to do everything possible to counter one of the principal western objectives, which was to reduce West Berlin’s isolation through the strengthening of ties between West Berlin and the Federal Republic.

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  Available until 27 Jan |Learn more

  No Place for Russia

  European Security Institutions Since 1989

  • William H. Hill(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Columbia University Press

    (Publisher)

  1.  FROM A EUROPE DIVIDED TO A EUROPE WHOLE AND FREE

  From 1945 to 1989, European geopolitics and the system of European security were relatively easy to describe. Europe was split, territorially and ideologically, between two giant blocs: the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), led by the United States; and the Warsaw Pact, headed by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the twentieth-century manifestation of the Russian empire. For some forty years, the political and security landscape in Europe was constant and predictable, if not stable, and Russia’s place as the second global power and chief rival to the United States was clear and undisputed.

  The Cold War and the division of Europe into two separate military and ideological camps ended with unexpected rapidity and lack of violence in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The date most commonly cited as the symbolic end of the Cold War was the “fall” of the Berlin Wall on the evening of November 9, 1989, when East German guards at the border first refused to fire on demonstrators climbing and then dismantling the structure; by dawn on November 10, the guards seemed to have simply disappeared. Many US officials and academics cite the summit meeting between presidents George H. W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev in Malta in December 1989, which was followed by hitherto unthinkable US-Soviet cooperation, as the real end to the Cold War’s hostility and competition between Moscow and Washington. Whatever importance is assigned to interim dates and events, it is an indisputable fact that the ideological, political, and military rivalry that characterized relations between the United States and the Soviet Union when Gorbachev came to power in February 1985 was clearly gone by early 1992, and neither the Soviet Union nor the Warsaw Pact existed any longer.

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  The German Wall

  Fallout in Europe

  • Marc Silberman(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  60. Jarausch, The Rush to German Unity ; Ritter, Wir sind das Volk! passim. 61. Jana Hensel, After the Wall: Confessions from an East German Childhood and the Life That Came Next, trans. Jefferson Chase (New York: Public Affairs, 2004); or Thomas Brussig, Heroes Like Us, trans. John Brownjohn (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997). 62. Timothy Garton Ash, “Conclusion,” in Between Past and Future: The Revolutions of 1989 and Their Aftermath, ed. Sohrin Antohi and Vladimir Tismaneanu (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2000); Konrad H. Jarausch, “Kollaps des Kommunismus oder Aufbruch der Zivilgesellschaft? Zur Einordnung der friedlichen Revolution von 1989,” in Die demokratische Revolution 1989 in der DDR, ed. Eckart Conze, Katharina Gajdukowa, and Sigrid Koch-Baumgarten (Cologne: Böhlau, 2009), 25–45. Chapter Two The Different Aesthetics of the Berlin Wall Olaf Briese The Exceptionality of the Wall? From a global perspective, the Berlin Wall was a complete anomaly. It neither closed off a state or territory from the outside world nor protected one from invasion. What’s more, it was functionally backward: it protected the East German state from the escape of its own citizens; it was a bar- rier directed internally. This was, so it seems, globally unheard of. The Berlin Wall was part of the GDR’s comprehensive state border, of course, and from an international perspective, part of the Iron Curtain that sliced through Europe after World War II. Territories and borders secured by walls had always existed and continued to exist. A recent volume has thor- oughly analyzed such state and territorial borders—that is to say, those borders secured by walls.

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  A History of Germany 1918 - 2014

  The Divided Nation

  • Mary Fulbrook(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  And in different ways, the two new Germanies repressed their past. The issue of Nazism was ignored, suppressed or argued away, as new realities and new struggles took precedence in contemporary life. Associated with the consolidation of new patterns was the question of non-reunification. As with internal politics, certain key turning-points – or missed opportunities – can be discerned. One such is the Stalin overture of 1952, interpreted by the West as more a matter of propaganda than policy. By 1955, when the Soviet Union under Nikita Krushchev made another gesture towards reunification, it was clearly too late. In August 1961 the division of the two Germanies was literally cemented with the building of the Berlin Wall, which closed the last means of escape from East to West. While the two Germanies had been radically ripped apart in the 1950s, and energetically pointed in different directions, there had yet been a lingering sense of impermanence; but in the 1960s, with division sealed, the two societies witnessed changes of generation and internal divergences as they more gradually, but no less fundamentally, proceeded to grow apart. Crystallization and Consolidation 149 Foreign Relations In October 1949, only a few months after the foundation of the Federal Republic, West Germany became a member of the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC); in March 1951 the Occupation Statute was revised; in April 1951 West Germany entered the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) and in May became a full member of the Council of Europe. In 1957, in the Treaty of Rome, West Germany became a founder member of the European Economic Community.

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