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Mousetrap: How the Wall Sealed a City in a Single Night
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
On August 13, 1961, East Germany sealed Berlin with barbed wire before dawn — and the West did nothing. This chapter traces the first forty-eight hours: the desperate escapes, the split families, and the decision that locked a city in place for twenty-eight years.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
What would you do if you woke up one morning and your city had been cut in half overnight? Not metaphorically.
Let's go back to the night itself. Just after midnight on August the thirteenth, East German construction workers, police, and soldiers moved through the sleeping city in coordinated teams.
In the hours after the wire went up, something remarkable happened. People ran.
Consider what the wall meant for ordinary people in practical, immediate terms. Roughly fifty thousand East Berliners held jobs in the western sectors of the city.
The physical structure of the wall evolved over time, and that evolution matters. The first barrier was barbed wire.
On August the seventeenth, nineteen sixty-two, one year and four days after the wall went up, an eighteen-year-old bricklayer named Peter Fechter made a run for it. He and a companion had been watching the barrier near Checkpoint Charlie, looking for a moment.
Ten months after Peter Fechter died in the death strip, John F. Kennedy stood on a platform at Rathaus Schöneberg in West Berlin and delivered the most quoted speech of the Cold War.
The wall stood through Kennedy, through Johnson, through Nixon, through Carter, through Brezhnev and Andropov and Chernenko. On June the twelfth, nineteen eighty-seven, Ronald Reagan stood at the Brandenburg Gate and delivered his own speech to the city.
November the ninth, nineteen eighty-nine. East Berlin.
Here's the frame that holds all of this together. The Berlin Wall was the Cold War made concrete.
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