Berlin Wall turns 50

[Mr. Big Dog 10,747]

50 years ago today, they put this sucker up. Fortunately, it didn't last a century as was predicted even shortly before we tore it down.

Berlin Wall turns 50 – and some want to rebuild it, barbed wire and all

Fifty years to the day after the Berlin Wall was built overnight by East German officials, little of it remains. Some argue in favor of restoring portions of the hated structure as a memorial.

By Michael Steininger, Correspondent / August 13, 2011

Berlin

Fifty years after the Berlin Wall was literally built overnight on Aug. 13, 1961, very little of it is left to look at. So little in fact, that some – even those who nearly lost their life because of it – want to see portions of the much-hated structure rebuilt.

Two years after former President Ronald Reagan declared, "Tear down this wall!" the 1989 revolution not only led to Berlin's reunification but brought legions of souvenir-hunters to the city, chipping away at the “anti-fascist protection rampart” with chisels and hammers.

COVER STORY: When the Berlin Wall came down

Industrial-size machinery joined the effort and by 1991 the wall, which East German leader Erich Honecker had promised would last a century, had all but disappeared. Ever since, historians have complained, and tourists have been disappointed.

“It was wrong to take all those pieces of Berlin Wall, paint them and send them off into the world as souvenirs of a peaceful revolution,” says Berlin’s former Mayor Eberhard Diepgen, who governed West Berlin from 1984-89 and a reunited Berlin for a decade beginning in 1991.

A few weeks ago Mr. Diepgen proposed to put parts of the wall back up, “as accurately as possible, with barbed wire, watch towers, and spring guns, so the brutality of the system is evident.” His article in a Berlin daily caused strong public reactions; readers called the idea "bizarre," "ahistorical," "the wrong signal for the city."

The wall, reproduced

For the moment, the only place to find the wall as it once stood is away from the city center, on Bernauer Strasse, home of the Berlin Wall Documentation Center.

Bernauer Strasse wasn’t just divided down the middle like many other streets in Berlin. The border actually ran through houses – looking out of a window would mean your head was in the West while your body was still in the East.

IN PICTURES: 50th anniversary of the Berlin Wall

In the first weeks after the wall was built, people rappelled from windows to escape, and a couple to be married in the West got its bridal bouquet thrown from a window by relatives stuck in the East. And the famous photograph of an East German border guard deserting and jumping the barbed wire was taken here.

Now the Berlin Wall Documentation Center gives an impression of what the border really looked like, including a 70-meter (230-foot) section of double wall, complete with death zone and watchtower.

“There were quite a few people who said, let’s keep a bit of the wall,” says Pastor Manfred Fischer of the Reconciliation Chapel, which is situated next to the documentation center. “The problem was, no one wanted to keep that very bit right in front of their door. So we said, let’s do it here, in Bernauer Strasse.”

Pastor Fischer fought hard to keep a part the wall intact. “It is the place where world history and people’s personal lives touched, were compressed into one,” he says, adding that divisions remain to be overcome even if the wall that cemented them is gone. “And even if most of it is gone, culturally, socially, politically Berlin has yet to reunite completely.”

A 'Disney' version of the wall

A few miles southeast on the northern banks of the Spree river, there is another part of the wall that was kept – a part that critics like Mr. Diepgen dismiss as a “Disney version” of history.

The East Side Gallery is a strip of wall adorned with paintings by international artists who came to Berlin in the heady days of 1989-90, celebrating the revolution by splashing an explosion of color onto the white canvas that was the eastern side of the wall (the western side had been covered by graffiti for a long time already).

But critics complain that the use of the wall as a canvas for post-revolution art does little to show the harsh reality that the wall once represented. Instead of a memorial, they say, it's merely a tourist attraction, where sight-seeing buses crawl past slowly so people can take pictures, and fake Russian military outfits can be bought from a stall.

A victim of the wall regrets its disappearance

Not far from the East Side Gallery, across the river at Elsenstrasse, one of the most dramatic of many escape attempts took place – but no plaque, no sign speaks of it.

As a young conscript in the East German army, Wolfgang Engels had to help build the wall in 1961. His unit was driven to Berlin and ordered to put up barbed wire barriers to keep people away from the building site that would turn into the Iron Curtain.

“I was the only Berliner in my unit,” he says. “We hardly understood what was going on, but I felt terrible.”

Two years later, the pressure had become too much. Mr. Engels decided to leave – and he wasn’t going quietly.

On the eve of the May 1 celebrations in East Berlin, Engels stole a tank that was meant to be part of the military parade, drove it through the city, and crashed it right into the wall.

When the wall withstood the collision, Engels got out and climbed it, getting shot twice in the process. But he was rescued by West Berliners, who pulled him out of the barbed wire and carried him to a nearby bar.

“I came to on top of the counter,” he says. “When I turned my head and saw all the Western brands of liquor on the shelf, I knew that I had made it.”

But does he think that more of the wall, which almost cost him his life, should have been preserved? Definitely yes, he says.

'No matter if there are monuments'

His opinion is not shared by some among the younger generation, however.

“I don’t care that so little of the wall is left,” says Anna, a 20-year-old student.

She sits with her friends on the grass at Mauerpark, or wall park, not far from Pastor Fischer’s chapel. Nothing here reminds of the border, it’s just an open space where on summer weekends thousands of young people hang out, make music, and play volleyball. It’s a party place, where people dance on the ground that once was no-man’s land. Many of them weren’t even born when the wall fell.

“No matter if there are monuments or not,” Anna says. “Berlin is the exciting, lively, fresh place that it is, because the wall was there – and because it came down.”

[Bad_Daddy 2,209]

There should have never been a wall in the first place. It was nothing short of a sellout of Germany and Eastern Europe by Roosevelt. The US had the bomb and we had the fire power to push Stalin back to other side of the Urals.

[IR5FORMUMSIE 850]

50 years ago today, they put this sucker up. Fortunately, it didn't last a century as was predicted even shortly before we tore it down.

At least they didn't predict it would stand for a thousand years.

[Gary and Alla 3,694]

Which means it has been torn down almost as long as it was standing. Imagine if the elections of 80, 84, amd 88 had turned out differently. Wow!

[spookyturtle 9,466]

There should have never been a wall in the first place. It was nothing short of a sellout of Germany and Eastern Europe by Roosevelt. The US had the bomb and we had the fire power to push Stalin back to other side of the Urals.

That's what Patton wanted to do.

[ria_s 0]

50 years ago today, they put this sucker up. Fortunately, it didn't last a century as was predicted even shortly before we tore it down.

Edited August 14, 2011 by ria_s

[Bad_Daddy 2,209]

That's what Patton wanted to do.

He was correct and they killed him for it.

We could have made an ultimatum to Stalin, and if he didn't accept we would have dropped the big one on Moscow and drove them back beyond the Urals were they would have either surrendered or starved to death.

No Iron Curtain, no more deportations of hundreds of thousands of people to Siberia and Russian Far East, no spending trillions of dollars as in the Cold War, no nuclear threat, etc...

[I AM NOT THAT GUY 5,715]

There should have never been a wall in the first place. It was nothing short of a sellout of Germany and Eastern Europe by Roosevelt. The US had the bomb and we had the fire power to push Stalin back to other side of the Urals.

We knew Roosevelt was a die in the wool Communist, by the number of Communists serving on his staff. Truman and Kennedy were just pansies, unwilling to take on the Soviets directly. Instead, they got us into these surrogate conflicts that didn't change anything in the long run, but did kill and maim thousands of young Americans, and many more innocent civilians.

Edited August 14, 2011 by Crusty Old Perv

[Bad_Daddy 2,209]

We knew Roosevelt was a die in the wool Communist, by the number of Communists serving on his staff. Truman and Kennedy were just pansies, unwilling to take on the Soviets directly. Instead, they got us into these surrogate conflicts that didn't change anything in the long run, but did kill and maim thousands of young Americans, and many more innocent civilians.

Roosevelt was a big time Commie sell out. Not only did he sell out Eastern Europe and pretty much sign the death certificate to all those people, he actually turned over our allies to Stalin including Cossack families that Stalin massacred right there in Austria.

[Gary and Alla 3,694]

Some idiots what to do that on our border with Mexico. They will probably hire contractors using illegal alien labor and the illegals will finish the job on our side of the fence! Oops.

Proof that this doesn't work?

When the Berlin wall came down and Germany united, did all the East Germans move to West Germany? Nope

Why? Because it was no longer economically practical. We do not need a wall to keep people OUT we just need to make it economically impractical for them to come here. They won't.

[Mr. Big Dog 10,747]

Some idiots what to do that on our border with Mexico. They will probably hire contractors using illegal alien labor and the illegals will finish the job on our side of the fence! Oops.

Proof that this doesn't work?

When the Berlin wall came down and Germany united, did all the East Germans move to West Germany? Nope

Why? Because it was no longer economically practical. We do not need a wall to keep people OUT we just need to make it economically impractical for them to come here. They won't.

Exactly.

[Bad_Daddy 2,209]

http://news.yahoo.com/20-years-later-ex-ussr-cracked-mosaic-101338407.html

20 years later, ex-USSR is a cracked mosaic

By JIM HEINTZ - Associated Press | AP – 16 hrs ago

MOSCOW (AP) — First came Mikhail Gorbachev, who moved a monolithic Soviet Union toward reform. Then in August 1991, an ill-conceived coup attempt by clumsy and occasionally drunken men opened a crack that could not be closed.

A few pieces of the empire fell off and floated away. Soon the rest of the mass collapsed.

Triumphalists in the West saw the USSR's disintegration as the inevitable triumph of democracy, even as "the end of history." Others, as Russian leader Vladimir Putin, later put it, bemoaned the "greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century."

The shards of the Soviet Union lie somewhere between those extremes — a jumbled pile of countries, totaling one-sixth of the world's land mass, that are wildly different from each other and facing futures ranging from promising to troubling to anyone's guess. Islamic insurgencies threaten to explode into wide fighting, and two "frozen conflicts" appear nowhere near resolution.

They range from Europe's poorest nation, Moldova, to Russia, which breeds tycoons of Pharaonic wealth. Some are genuine democracies; others are unconvincing, or cynical, imitations; Turkmenistan is an open dictatorship and Belarus and Uzbekistan effectively are the same. In the assessment of the Freedom House watchdog group, three of the 15 former Soviet republics are considered free, seven not free and the other five somewhere in between.

Russia is among the "not free," losing ground over the past decade. By far the largest former Soviet republic, the one with the most lavish treasure chest of natural resources and the only one to still have nuclear weapons, the path that Russia chooses is of key concern to the world — and the path is far from clear.

In the first years after the Soviet Union's collapse, Russia's political scene seemed wide open, as reformers, opportunists and rabid nationalists entered the arena. In 1996, the presidential election competition was so intense that it forced a second round of voting, which Boris Yeltsin won with only 53 percent of the vote.

But Putin's Russia, though nominally a democracy, has clamped a tight lid on any genuine opposition politics, except for the increasingly marginal Communist Party. Authorities routinely deny opposition groups permission to rally and police harshly break up unauthorized gatherings; election-law changes over the past decade threw up almost-insurmountable obstacles to independents and true opposition groups.

President Dmitry Medvedev has repeatedly spoken of the need for reform, but as a weak president who attained office only because Putin could not run for another presidential term in 2008, his words have had little impact. Putin, currently prime minister, is widely expected to run for the presidency next year and would be certain to win. That would reinforce the so-called "managed democracy" system, which many observers believe could lead to catastrophe.

"Russia throughout its history repeatedly saw political reforms launched only when it was already too late. And now the nation is again heading in the same direction," said Boris Makarenko of the independent Moscow-based Center for Political Technologies. "The government can't endlessly ignore society's opinion. If they attempt to do that, it could lead to the scenarios of 1917 or 1991."

Russia's recent stability and its citizens' willingness to accept declining political freedoms are closely tied to the astonishing wealth that has flowered in the country since the Soviet collapse, hinging on world demand for its vast supplies of oil and natural gas. Even Russians who can't afford the multimillion-dollar apartments of central Moscow appear excited by watching from the sidelines.

But the global economic crises of 2008 and 2011 starkly illustrated how vulnerable Russia is to drops in hydrocarbon prices. Prolonged economic stagnation or decline could rock the political system.

"Without growth, it would be difficult for the government to 'buy off' discontent," University of California at Los Angeles professor Daniel Treisman said in a paper for the Carnegie Moscow Center.

Russia also is plagued by an Islamic insurgency in its Caucasus provinces, an offshoot of the two post-Soviet wars with Chechen separatists. The violence periodically spreads deep into the heartland, as in January when a suicide bomber killed 36 people at Moscow's largest airport.

Kazakhstan, smaller than Russia but still larger than all of Europe, has also thrived on its gas reserves and other natural resources. And its prospects for democracy are even more doubtful than Russia's. Nursultan Nazarbayev, who has led the country since the Soviet collapse, holds unchallenged power and his party occupies every seat in the national legislature. Yet Nazarbayev strikes a more progressive posture than have Russia's leaders, eagerly giving up the nuclear weapons that Kazakhstan inherited from the Soviet Union and promoting ethnic and religious tolerance.

However, neighboring Kyrgyzstan remains a focus of worry because of violent animosity between ethnic groups, which exploded last year in pogroms in the south that killed hundreds. Both the United States and Russia have air bases in the country and stability there is a key concern for both Moscow and Washington.

Kyrgyzstan's moment of truth may come in national elections in October, showing whether the country can return to the democratic path it bloodily veered away from in recent years. Once regarded as the region's "island of democracy," Kyrgyzstan since 2005 plunged into two violent overthrows of power.

Two other former Soviet states' moves toward democracy and the West deteriorated but have not definitively collapsed.

Ukraine, where massive protests in 2004 ushered in a reformist Western-leaning pro-NATO government, almost immediately devolved into factional jealousies that effectively paralyzed the country. Voters threw out that regime last year in favor of a Russia-friendly president, who is under wide criticism from the West for politically motivated prosecutions and pressure on independent news media. Ukraine meanwhile has acquired international notoriety for frequent brawls in parliament, and whether the country ultimately tilts West or East remains a question.

Georgia, whose 2003 "Rose Revolution" led the way for the region's regime-changing mass protests, was driving firmly toward NATO and European Union membership under reformist President Mikhail Saakashvili. But the momentum petered out after Georgia's five-day war with Russia in 2008, which both the Kremlin and many Georgians blame on Saakashvili's impetuosity.

The two Georgian regions that split off in the war, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, remain potential flashpoints, with Georgia alleging they are occupied territory used as staging points for Russian terrorist incursions.

Not far from Georgia lies another obdurate problem — Nagorno-Karabakh. This Luxembourg-sized territory, deep inside Azerbaijan, has been controlled by Armenian soldiers and ethnic Armenian forces since a 1994 cease-fire ended separatist fighting. More than a decade of international mediation has brought no apparent move toward resolution, and both sides frequently report small clashes across the no-man's-land that separates them. A renewal of full-scale fighting could shake European markets because of the key oil pipeline that passes through Azerbaijan en route to the West.

Less volatile, but equally stagnant, is the status of Transdniester, a separatist sliver of Moldova reinforced by Russian troops.

At one extreme of the post-Soviet experience lie Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. The first to leave when the USSR was disintegrating, these three small countries have taken a firmly Westward course, all joining NATO and the EU.

At the other stand authoritarian Uzbekistan, Belarus and Turkmenistan. No change appears even remotely likely in Uzbekistan until strongman leader Islam Karimov leaves office. Belarus' President Alexander Lukashenko, who has suppressed opposition and independent media, currently faces the biggest threats to his 17-year rule as the Soviet-style command economy collapses.

Turkmenistan, where huge natural gas revenues have transformed the once-dismal capital into a shiny desert showpiece resembling Las Vegas, has thrown off much of the personality cult engendered by the late eccentric leader Saparmurat Niyazov, who had banned gold teeth and ballet, but it remains a single-party state. However, Niyazov's successor has invited exiled opposition leaders to return to take part in next year's elections in what may be a hesitant step toward openness.

The differing fates and prospects of the countries add up to a historical irony: Whereas the Soviet Union sought to spread a single ideology throughout the world, its former territory is now as varied as the world itself.

[Usui Takumi 1,562]

Some idiots what to do that on our border with Mexico. They will probably hire contractors using illegal alien labor and the illegals will finish the job on our side of the fence! Oops.

Proof that this doesn't work?

When the Berlin wall came down and Germany united, did all the East Germans move to West Germany? Nope

Why? Because it was no longer economically practical. We do not need a wall to keep people OUT we just need to make it economically impractical for them to come here. They won't.

I totally agree.

Btw they did leave a few sections of the wall in place in Berlin...not sure why they want to rebuild more sections.

[Bad_Daddy 2,209]

Until it's uneconomically feasible for illegals to come / stay here, I vote for a wall in the meantime. Talk is cheap, but a solid wall keeps them out.

[Gary and Alla 3,694]

Until it's uneconomically feasible for illegals to come / stay here, I vote for a wall in the meantime. Talk is cheap, but a solid wall keeps them out.

No it doesn't. People escaped from the east and they risked being killed to do so. I do not thin you are suggesting a solid wall AND land mines and soldiers to shoot illegals trying to get in...are you?

A solid wall is uneconomically feasible. They could end the economic reason to come here illegally TODAY at -0- cost. Simply apply a HUGE tax penalty to each and every illegal worker that is employed, or, if they do not have the balls needed for that, implement a HUGE tax break for documenting that ALL employyes are legal workers. Either way, if it COSTS a business a huge amount of money to employ/exploit illegals...they won't. If there are no jobs for illegals to make money, they won't come. When it costs a business more to do something than the benefit they receive, they will not do it any longer. Works every time it is tried.

If you are worried about losing revenue by offering business huge tax breaks, consider the cost savings for not having to provide services/education/medical care to the illegals they were exploiting PLUS the fact that you will replace them with legal workers that actually pay tax, you will still be collecting tax on all the money.