By Patrick Major, Professor of Modern History, Reading University
The Berlin Wall was the Cold War made concrete.
It went up during one of its frostiest flashpoints; it came down as the eastern bloc unravelled, closely followed by the Soviet Union itself two years later.
It was built right on the East-West fault-line created by World War Two. (The bunker garden where Hitler was cremated in 1945 became part of no-man's land.) Berlin had always been a Cold War anomaly, located 100 miles behind the Iron Curtain.
Its three internationally-agreed western sectors, belonging to America, Britain and France, became a refuge for millions of East Germans fleeing in the 1950s.
A sentry on the western side of the wall looks across to the east
The decision to build the wall in August 1961 was a communist act of desperation to prevent itself from bleeding dry.
Literally overnight, the Berlin border was closed, and gradually reinforced with breeze blocks and barbed wire.
Video: Gorbachev's Interpreter On Wall
Soon, the first fatal shooting had occurred, when a young man was machine-gunned swimming a canal by the Reichstag - 135 other victims followed over the next 28 years.
"The West is doing NOTHING!" ran Bildzeitung's headline.
Although western leaders condemned the "Wall of Shame", they did not act. There were good reasons. The wall was founded on nuclear stalemate.
In October 1961, the Soviets detonated a 50-megaton Tsar Bomba which mushroomed more than 50 kilometres high (31 miles).
The message was not lost on US President John Kennedy who may not have liked the wall, but thought it "a hell of a lot better than a war".
Video: Sound And Vision: Berlin Wall Fall
This stark reality forced a rethink among some western leaders.
Willy Brandt, social democratic mayor of West Berlin in '61, later Federal chancellor, was the architect of détente - or Ostpolitik - in the late 1960s.
Now the West de facto recognised the German Democratic Republic; in 1973 both Germanys joined the United Nations.
Ironically, it was this international "bringing in from the cold" that undermined the wall in the 1980s.
The date of 9 November, 1989, when thousands thronged the checkpoints and the wall "fell", seemed like another overnight sensation.
Video: Sky Reports The Fall Of Berlin Wall
But there was a long fuse.
East Germany was trapped between Gorbachev's glasnost in the East and the West German Wirtschaftswunder in the West. In return for aid, both demanded human rights reforms which fuelled the mass demonstrations in the hot autumn of 1989.
Nor should we forget that the fall of the wall was a symptom, not a cause, of the collapse of communism. If the writing was on the wall, it was in Polish and spelled "Solidarity", the path-breaking anti-communist movement under Lech Walesa, or in Hungary, where the first McDonald's behind the Iron Curtain had opened in 1988.
The fall of the wall completely altered the geo-political landscape. Even doubters such as Mrs Thatcher could not oppose German reunification in 1990.
By 1994, Russia had left eastern Germany, and NATO was soon on her doorstep. The West had to come to terms with the realities of freedom of movement which for so long had been largely Cold War rhetoric. And the world had learnt about revolution by "people power".
1/55
-
Gallery: 25 Years Since The Berlin Wall Fell
West Berlin policemen and East German Volkspolizei face each other across the border in Berlin, circa 1955
1961: Soldiers build the Berlin Wall, as instructed by the East German authorities, in order to strengthen the existing barriers dividing East and West Berlin
]]>
