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#east-germany
2 articles
The Building of the Berlin Wall, 1961
For more than a decade after the Second World War, Berlin was the great open wound of the Cold War and its most dangerous flashpoint. The city lay deep inside communist East Germany, yet it was itself divided into a Soviet-controlled east and a Western-controlled west, and the border that ran through it remained, almost uniquely, open. Through that gap, across the 1950s, millions of East Germans simply walked to freedom — boarding a train or a tram in the east and stepping off in the west, and from there flying out to a new life. They were disproportionately the young, the skilled, the educated: doctors, engineers, teachers, the very people a struggling socialist state could least afford to lose. By 1961 this haemorrhage threatened the survival of East Germany itself, and its leaders, with the backing of the Soviet Union, resolved to stop it the only way they could — by closing the door. In the early hours of Sunday 13 August 1961, East German troops and police moved into position along the sector boundary and began to seal it with barbed wire, tearing the city in two while most of its people slept. Within days the wire was giving way to concrete, and a permanent wall was rising through streets and squares, separating families, neighbours, and workplaces with a suddenness that stunned the world. The Western powers protested furiously but did not intervene, for they understood that the wall, monstrous as it was, did not threaten their own position in West Berlin — and that to challenge it by force risked a war that might go nuclear. The Berlin Wall would stand for twenty-eight years as the physical embodiment of a divided world. This is the story of the weekend it went up.
The Stasi Archives
On the evening of Monday, January 15, 1990 — eight weeks after the Berlin Wall opened and four weeks after the Round Table had begun negotiating East Germany's transition — approximately five thousand demonstrators forced their way through the iron gates of the Ministry for State Security headquarters on Normannenstraße in the East Berlin district of Lichtenberg. The Bürgerkomitee 15. Januar (Citizens' Committee of 15 January) had organized the breach in response to evidence that Stasi officers had spent the prior weeks systematically shredding operational files. Inside the headquarters — a complex of 22 connected buildings housing approximately 7,000 of the Ministry's central-office personnel — the demonstrators found Stasi staff still at desks. The shredding stopped that night. Over the following 24 months, the East German interim government, the post-reunification Bundestag, and the citizen committees of fourteen East German cities preserved what would become the most extensive corpus of state-surveillance operational records in modern human history: approximately 111 kilometers of paper files in the central Berlin archive, approximately 47 kilometers in regional offices, 1.7 million photographs, 30,000 video and audio tapes, 15,500 bags of pre-shredded fragments awaiting reconstruction, and the operational, biographical, and personal-network files of an estimated 5.6 million individuals. The Stasi-Unterlagen-Gesetz (Stasi Records Act) of December 20, 1991 established the Federal Commissioner for the Records of the State Security Service (BStU), with East German pastor and civil-rights activist Joachim Gauck as its founding director. The Records Act authorized any individual to request their personal Stasi file. By the end of 2024, the BStU had processed approximately 7.4 million such requests. The aggregate human record of what those requesters read — who had informed on them, what had been documented, what had been done in consequence — constitutes the most comprehensive case study of institutional state surveillance against a domestic civilian population that the historical record contains.
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