Around this time of the year, on 9. November 1989 to be precise, the most severely protected and most dangerous borderline of the world, the wall between East and West going right through the centre of Germany and surrounding West Berlin like an island embedded in the heart of the GDR, had gone. This is an opportunity for a travel back in time to see how it all began.

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 After WWII, Germany was divided into four sectors, each of them governed by one of the Allied Great Britain, France and the US, as well as by the Soviet Union. This was the result of the four-power agreement from 1945. The same situation was mapped for the capital of Germany, the large city of Berlin. The French, British, American and Russian sectors or zones were dividing the city as you can see it from the picture below.

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Straight after defeating the Nazis, each of the Allied was trying to bring life their respective sector back to normal. That is, normal under the given circumstances: There was no food, no work and no housing after so much had been destroyed as a result of the war. But people had hope. From that point on, it could only get better. But the Allied also implemented their political ideals and ideologies in their sectors of Berlin. The Soviet Army was trying to establish local councils and administrative structures according to the model they were used from the Soviet Union. And the other Allied powers hated it to see the Russians exporting communism to the liberated Germany, even if it was only in a part of it. What happened was the game of power, of ideology, of politics, which became more and more the focus of the administrative people in each sector. A “cold” was developing. After several years, people in the so-called “West” sectors had more to cheer about, since they got more opportunities of work and of earning better incomes than the people in the “East”. It didn’t take long until the terms of “East” for the Russian sector and “West” for the French, British and American sectors had become common vocabulary amongst the Berlin inhabitants. More and more young people from the East started moving to the West in order to find work, to earn more money and to get more for their money in the shops. Others became commuters who lived in the East and commuted to the West for work. The numbers of people leaving the East sector increasingly unsettled the East German leaders and the Soviet Union as the occupying power.

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Although the former leader Walter Ulbricht declared “Nobody has it in mind to erect a wall” in a speech he held on 15. June 1961 at a press conference, only two months later during the night leading up to the 13. August 1961, the building of the Berlin wall was started. Barbed wire was rolled out right across the road in some cases.

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This changed everything for the people in Berlin. The division tore families apart, and some people who were just in the West for work, were unable to return to the East, where they had lived. Over night the entire line was hermetically blocked by police and army. In the following weeks and months, the wall was turned into a massive division line as you can see it on the first picture. Brothers and sisters, mothers and sons, Grandfathers and grandchildren suddenly lived in two different systems although there was only a distance of a few miles between them.