Sixty-five years ago the Socialist Unity Party that ruled East Germany sealed off West Berlin to stop its own citizens escaping to the West. Barbed wire went up on 13 August 1961, concrete followed within days, and the border was fortified over the following decades into a 155-kilometre ring around West Berlin that stood until 1989. On Thursday, Bundestag President Julia Klöckner marked the anniversary at a commemorative ceremony in Berlin, saying the divide it created still shapes Germany today.
By August 1961 the German Democratic Republic had lost a sixth of its population, at least four million people. A mass migration westwards had been under way since the late 1940s, driven by political, economic and personal reasons, after the Socialist Unity Party established a dictatorship in East Germany with the backing of the Soviet occupying power.
The party had already sealed East Germany's frontier with West Germany in 1952, fortifying the long inner-German border and making it dangerous to cross. But Berlin, divided into Soviet, American, British and French occupation sectors after the Second World War, had no such barrier: the sector borders inside the city stayed open, and East Germans could still cross into West Berlin and travel on to the West. That was the last route out, and in August 1961 the party closed it, first with barbed wire, and within days with walls. It also wanted to stabilise its hold on power and demonstrate its sovereignty to the outside world.
The barrier of 1961 bore little resemblance to the one that stood in 1989. Work to perfect the fortifications continued for nearly three decades, turning a single wall into a complex, multi-layered system. Watchtowers stood roughly 250 metres apart, floodlights lit the border strip at night, and a second inner wall was added in the 1970s.
In the West the strip became known as the "death strip"; 140 people died at the Berlin Wall between 1961 and 1989, 91 of them shot by East German border soldiers. The Wall, together with the fortifications along the inner-German border, separated the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic for 28 years. It fell on 9 November 1989, and reunification followed just under a year later.
Bundestag President Julia Klöckner (CDU) has pointed to enduring divisions between East and West Germany to mark the 65th anniversary. "The Wall drew lines through Germany that still shape the paths we take today," Klöckner said on Thursday in her address in Berlin. Its effects are felt even by those born after the Wall came down, she said.
"We hardly notice it any more when we drive from Lower Saxony to Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, from Thuringia to Hesse, from Bavaria to Saxony." Even so, "East" and "West" still matter. "Political questions are sometimes answered very differently on the two sides," she said, pointing to debates over Covid protection measures, migration and how to deal with Russia.
This is also bound up with differing life experiences. "For West Germans, not much changed with unification; for East Germans, unification changed everything." Anyone who wants to understand that "must be willing to listen," Klöckner urged. "In 1989 it was courage that brought the Wall down. Courage is called for today, too. The courage to move towards one another," she added.
"To run a wall through a city is an act of political violence," Klöckner said. "The GDR was not a state of peace, it fought against those who held their own opinions, who wanted to live their freedom and refused to fall into line." That made it all the greater a miracle when the Wall fell in 1989, she said, calling it "the first peaceful revolution that has succeeded in Germany."
She urged a return to the freedom ideals of 1989, now threatened again "through indifference and lack of interest." "Freedom cannot be administered. We have to fill it with life and with trust," she stressed. "The decision in favour of freedom has to be taken afresh by every generation, particularly in the light of our history."
Sixty-five years after construction of the Wall began, Chancellor Friedrich Merz (CDU) has called for the defence of democracy. "The lesson of the Wall remains: freedom and democracy are not a given. We always have to fight for them," Merz wrote on Thursday on the short-message service X. At the same time, he pointed out that people today are able to live "in peace and freedom," noting that Germany has now been united for longer than it was divided by the Wall.
Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier described the building of the Wall by the East German leadership as "the testimony of a hopeless failure." Writing on X, the Federal President said: "Sixty-five years ago the SED dictatorship sealed off Berlin. The Wall divided a living city, families, friendships and lives." Steinmeier recalled that "at least 260 people lost their lives at the Wall as a result of the GDR border regime."
The Minister of State for Culture and the Media, Wolfram Weimer (independent), used the anniversary to warn against a glossing-over of the GDR. "Extremists on both the left and the right are currently making a targeted effort to play down the GDR," Weimer said. "But the SED regime was a brutal dictatorship with no free elections, no press freedom and no freedom to travel, but with the Stasi, torture cellars and a death strip at the Wall." Weimer warned: "When the memory of the SED dictatorship fades and the injustice and the crimes are played down, that is where historical amnesia begins. A free society must not allow it."
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