The Day the Wall Went Up
2 x 23 minutes
A CTVC Production for BBC World Service
Overnight, August 12 and 13, 1961, a barbed-wire entanglement was hastily constructed through the heart of Berlin. It metamorphosed into a structure that would come to symbolise both the division of Germany into capitalist and communist blocs and the insanity of the Cold War - the Berlin Wall.
It was erected to stop the ever-increasing flow of refugees leaving East Berlin and the GDR. Tens of thousands of them were fleeing every month. Its consequences were horrific in human terms. Millions of East Berliners awoke to torn-up streets, cut telephone wires, guarded sewers and side-streets, and the primitive beginnings of the Wall, and – though, fortunately, none knew it at the time - enforced separation from their loved ones which would last for nearly three decades. On that day, too, 53,000 of East Berliners working in West Berlin, and 13,000 West Berliners who worked in East Berlin, lost their jobs.
Transport stopped, too. One woman asked a guard, 'When is the next train to West Berlin?' 'None of that any more, grandma,' he told her. 'You're all sat in a mousetrap now.'
If any East Berliners entertained hopes that the West would take up their cause, they soon learned otherwise. In the United States, President Kennedy agreed 'it's not a very nice solution, but a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war'. Willy Brandt, then the city mayor, who wanted a robust response, became 'that bastard from Berlin'.
Extraordinarily, considering the number of alert and active border controls, between 1961 and 1989 some 475,000 East Berliners managed to escape to the West. People swam, jumped, and dug for freedom. But this was mostly during the early years. As time passed, the noose tightened, and for many the Wall seemed impenetrable and eternal. 125 died trying to escape.
Now, in 2 programmes for BBC World Service – The Day the Wall Went Up – Gerry Northam revisits the site of the Cold War's most malevolent symbol to tell the story of the post-war political conflict that led to a divided Berlin and unleashed an East-West crisis. With the help of archive and historians, the memories of survivors, and revealing diaries and letters, he explores how the Wall was planned and the plans executed, how the West was indifferent when it wasn't dubiously involved, and how for half a lifetime the Wall enjoyed a foetid flourishing as East Berliners suffered heartbreak and injustice. And all this at a time when humanity itself seemed to stand permanently on the edge of nuclear destruction.
Click here to listen to a Podcast interview with Gerry Northam.
Click here to download episode 1
