The Berlin Wall

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The barrier erected by the German Democratic Republic from the night of 12–13 August 1961, enclosing the whole of West Berlin rather than dividing Germany — a distinction that is constantly lost and that explains its geometry: the wall ran around an island, of which only a part, some tens of kilometres, cut through the built-up city, the remainder running through countryside on the boundary with Brandenburg. It was not one wall but a fortified strip that developed over three decades into a system: an outer wall, a signal fence, a patrol road, floodlights, watchtowers, dog runs, anti-vehicle obstacles and a raked sand death strip designed so that footprints showed. Its purpose was to stop emigration. Between the founding of the two German states and 1961 a very large number of people had left the east through the open border in Berlin, disproportionately the young and the qualified, and the state was losing the population it needed. The number of people killed at the Wall between 1961 and 1989 is contested: research associated with the Berlin Wall Memorial and the Centre for Contemporary History in Potsdam arrives at a figure of at least around one hundred and forty, while other counts using broader criteria are substantially higher, and the discrepancy is a question of definition — who counts as a victim of the border regime — rather than of arithmetic.