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The Night the Wire Went Up: August 13, 1961
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
In the early hours of August 13, 1961, East German workers divided Berlin overnight with barbed wire — and a city of millions woke up trapped. From the death strip and Peter Fechter's killing to Kennedy at Schöneberg and the tank standoff at Checkpoint Charlie, this is how the Wall was born.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Here's something that gets forgotten in most accounts of the Berlin Wall. When East German workers began unrolling barbed wire in the early hours of August thirteenth, nineteen sixty-one, they did it so quietly that the Western powers didn't find out until it was already done.
Within weeks, a crossing point appeared at the corner of Friedrichstraße and Zimmerstraße. The Allies called it Checkpoint Charlie.
The Wall didn't stay as barbed wire. Over the years it evolved into something far more systematic.
Eight months after Fechter died, President John F. Kennedy came to West Berlin.
Between Kennedy's speech and what came next, twenty-six more years passed. The Wall didn't weaken.
November ninth, nineteen eighty-nine. East Germany's leadership had been in crisis for weeks.
There's a temptation to end the story there, with the celebration and the hammers and the champagne. But the Wall's significance runs deeper than its fall.
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