Rise and Fall of The Berlin Wall – Part Two – 1961 to 1989
by This is part two of three articles dealing with the spectacular rise and fall of the Berlin wall.
Part two is about the period from 1961 to 1989, when people from the East and West of Berlin lived entirely different lives.
While the people in the Western part went on with their business as usual, the communist government in the East along with the Soviet Union tried to implement a new system. Everything was ruled by the party guidelines of the leading Socialist Unity Party (”SED”) and by the ideas of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the “KPdSU”. Together they tried to set up a new model of “centrally planned economy”. Communists and socialists believed that planning all economic activities thoroughly and well in advance according to the demand of people would overcome the major disadvantage of the capitalist society, the over-production, which leads to an economic crisis in regular cycles.
In theory this might sound like a good idea. But reality looked somewhat different. The planning process went through many levels and a large number of people interfered with it. Often enough there were years between the time when the demand was evaluated and the time when production started. In some areas were also agendas for saving in place. And some goods were considered to be luxury goods and were put way down in priority. This included cars, colour TVs, fashion, southern fruits, etc. As a result, many shops experienced empty shelves, and people became used to queuing up in large lines i front of the shops in order to get bananas, colour TVs or fashionable clothing items. Eastern German economy became known for deficiencies and long queues, and dissatisfaction amongst the inhabitants rose dramatically.
Things in the Western part also didn’t always go well, especially when the first (1973) and second (1979) oil crisis brought the energy prices to an all-time high. But the technological development advanced in the Western part of Germany (including West Berlin) much faster and, as a result, actually “dwarfed” the economic crisis.
Alongside with the economic difficulties, ideological problems were also responsible for an increasing unrest amongst people in the East. The rift between the ideological leaders of the Unity Party and their sympathisers on one hand, and the ordinary people who tried to improve their life style on the other hand, widened year by year. People who tried to openly oppose the system, were a thread to the leaders power and they assigned the special task of monitoring anti-socialist activities to the secret police called “StaSi”. Were their activities restricted to information and supervision at the start, they soon included more and more violent and repressive methods in order to keep the resistance under control. Dissidents were isolated in society, they received threads, their life was made a misery or they were even jailed and tortured. A large number of files was kept in the headquarters of the secret police in Berlin. Social unrest was building up to a climax, when the GDR party veterans celebrated the 40. anniversary of the GDR foundation in October 1989.
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