Yesterday, August 13, was the 56th anniversary of the building of the Berlin Wall. In contrast to the US where current wall- building fantasies focus on keeping people out, the Berlin Wall was built to keep people in.

The German Democratic Republic (GDR) had started out with about 19 million people after the war, occupied by Soviet forces after the partition of Germany in its entirety. Berlin was an island within East Germany that was ruled by the Western allies. The GDR was bled dry to pay war reparations to the Soviet Union, and life was difficult particularly when compared to the West German counterparts where the economy picked up at significant speed with the help of the Marshall Plan.

Soon then, young people, particularly the better educated ones, left East Germany to seek their fortune in the West. Between 1948 and 1961 when the wall was built,  2.5 million people fled East Germany. The Soviets put an end to that literally by fencing and walling the country in, separating not one country from another, but dividing basically one city regardless of how families and friends got ripped apart.

We know how it ended, some 28 years later, with the power of democratization and the lure of capitalism uniting the divided country. It has not necessarily been a happy ending for many in the East who thought salvation would come with an opening to the West, but that is a topic for a different day.

Today I am more interested in the psychology of propaganda around the wall – see the clip below masterfully painting the division between good guys and bad guys. Which ones are we, you ask? Depends which wall you are talking about…..or who you ask, I guess.

 

And I am also attaching a commentary of an important friend of the current wall-planner-in-chief, the remarks made during the 1oth anniversary of the fall of the wall. Propaganda as well.

Photographs are of contemporary Berlin.