To The Teacher:
In this lesson and a companion lesson on Poland’s nonviolent revolution, students explore two major upheavals that signaled a new era in global relations that began 25 years ago.
For almost three decades, the Berlin Wall stood as a central symbol of the Cold War. This conflict pitted the United States and Western European countries against the Soviet Union and its allies in Eastern Europe and Asia in a geopolitical struggle for military, economic, and cultural supremacy. The fall of the Berlin Wall in the autumn of 1989 is widely viewed as a watershed moment in modern world history.
Some interpret the destruction of the Berlin Wall simply as a victory for the United States over the forces of communism. However, there are several reasons to adopt a more nuanced view. First, this Cold War triumphalism tends to devalue the work of local grassroots movements in Eastern Europe, which had long struggled for greater democracy in their own countries. Second, it ignores the negative impact of the cold war, including a massive military buildup that sapped resources for addressing humanitarian concerns and a nuclear showdown that almost eliminated the human species. Third, this triumphalist view doesn’t reflect the need for a continued struggle for genuine democracy and economic justice in Eastern Europe and Asia.
This lesson is divided into two student readings. The first reading provides a general history of the Berlin Wall, its collapse, and German reunification. The second reading considers the legacy of the Cold War. Questions for discussion follow each reading.
Student Reading 1:
The Rise and Fall of The Berlin Wall
For almost three decades, the Berlin Wall stood as a central symbol of the Cold War, which pitted the United States and Western European countries against the Soviet Union and its allies in a geopolitical struggle for military, economic, and cultural supremacy. The fall of the Berlin Wall in the autumn of 1989 is widely viewed as a watershed moment in modern world history.
The Cold War has its roots in the immediate aftermath of World War II. In the wake of Germany's defeat, political and military tensions mounted between the United States and the Soviet Union, which had been allies in the war. In contrast to a "hot war" involving direct battlefield engagement, analysts dubbed the geopolitical struggle between these powers a "Cold War." Germany, because of its industrial infrastructure and its central location in Europe became a key contested location for the Eastern and Western Blocs.
At the 1945 Potsdam Conference, leaders of the former Allied forces divided Germany into two parts. West Germany fell under the Western Powers' sphere of influence while East Germany fell under the Soviet Union's sphere of influence. Germany's largest city and capital, Berlin, was divided along similar lines. However, because the city was surrounded by East German territory, the Soviet-controlled East German government constructed a wall around the entirety of West Berlin to socially and economically isolate the population of West Berlin, as well as to prevent its own citizens from defecting.
A website entitled Chronicle of the Wall, a cooperative project of several German media outlets and public organizations, provides a detailed account of the wall and its construction:
In the night of the 12 to the 13 of August, Walter Ulbricht, as SED (Socialist Unity Party of Germany) party leader and Chairman of the National Defense Council of the GDR, (German Democratic Republic [East Germany]) gave the order to seal off the sector border in Berlin. Having obtained the agreement of the Soviet Union a few days previously, and with the support of the Soviet troops in the GDR, the regime closed off the last route for escape from the Party dictatorship: in the early morning of August 13, border police started ripping up streets in the middle of Berlin, pieces of asphalt and paving stones were piled up to form barricades, concrete posts were driven into the ground and barbed-wire barriers erected. A few days later, in the night of August 17 to 18, groups of construction workers stared replacing the barbed wire by a wall made of hollow blocks. On August 24, 1961, the first refugee, the 24-year-old tailor Günter Litfin, was shot by GDR border guards as he tried to escape from East Berlin into West Berlin.
The Wall cemented the political division of Germany and Europe; it became a worldwide symbol of the Cold War, which split the world politically into an eastern and a western hemisphere - and a symbol of the failure of a dictatorship that was only able to secure its existence by walling in its population.
In the decades following the partition of Germany and the construction of the wall, the resistance of ordinary East Germans against the undemocratic, Soviet-influenced ruling regime steadily grew. Escalating dissent in the 1980s coincided with the growth of resistance movements in other Eastern Bloc countries such as Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. In the summer of 1989, after nearly ten years of organizing and protest, Poland's Solidarity labor union movement was finally successful in bringing free elections to that country. This was the first domino in the series of what have been called "the Revolutions of 1989."
The year 1989 was a momentous one in East Germany as well. The fight against the authoritarian East German government coalesced around the issue of freedom of movement, with the Berlin Wall standing as a stark reminder of the control the government exercised over peoples' lives. When Hungary disabled its border defenses with Austria in the summer of 1989, thousands of German tourists in Hungary took the opportunity to escape to Austria. Not long thereafter, the East German government disallowed travel to Hungary, sparking a wave of increasingly large protests throughout the summer and fall. By November, protests in Leipzig had spread to Dresden and East Berlin.
On November 9, 1989, authorities who had planned to allow limited passage through the wall were overwhelmed by citizens demanding that the wall be opened altogether. With none of the East German authorities willing to authorize the use of lethal force, they were left with no choice but to allow the protesters to pass. East Berliners and thousands of allies in West Berlin descended on the wall with sledgehammers to begin the process of physically destroying it. The full-scale demolition was not completed for nearly two more years.
Early in 1990, further protests resulted in the first free elections in East Germany since 1933. At that time, the ruling regime was swept out of power. On August 23, 1990, politicians voted to dissolve the East German state. As journalist Uwe Hessler wrote in a 2005 article for the German news site DW.de:
The answer was clear: 294 parliamentarians were for the dissolution of East Germany. Only 62 were against it.
"Parliament today decided nothing less," said Gregor Gysi, then head of the PDS party, the successor of the former ruling SED party, "than the destruction of the state of East Germany to take place on Oct. 3, 1990."
In hindsight, the vote of Aug. 23 was nothing but a rubber stamp for about 16 million East Germans. The protest wave that had begun in the autumn of 1989 had unleashed a series of events leading to the resignation of the country's ruler Erich Honecker....
The pressure on the parliamentarians had reached a head. The majority of the people had tasted freedom after Nov. 9, 1989. The time to carry the German Democratic Republic to its grave had neared.
For almost 30 years the Berlin Wall stood as a physical manifestation of the "Iron Curtain" that divided the United States and Western Europe from the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc. The destruction of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent reunification of Germany represented a devastating blow against the Soviet Union's influence in Europe. It foreshadowed the collapse of the Soviet Union itself and the end of the Cold War.
For Discussion:
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How much of the material in this reading was new to you, and how much was already familiar? Do you have any questions about what you read?
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What was the Berlin Wall? Why was it constructed?
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Why was the Berlin Wall a focal point in the Cold War?
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What brought about the collapse of the Berlin Wall? What was the significance of its collapse?
Student Reading 2
The Legacy of the Cold War
Some interpret the destruction of the Berlin Wall simply as a victory for the United States over the forces of communism. However, there are several reasons to adopt a more nuanced view. First, this Cold War triumphalism tends to devalue the work of local grassroots movements in Eastern Europe, which had long struggled for greater democracy in their own countries. Second, it ignores the negative impact of the cold war, including a massive military buildup that sapped resources for addressing humanitarian concerns and a nuclear showdown that almost eliminated the human species. Third, this triumphalist view doesn’t reflect the need for a continued struggle for genuine democracy and economic justice in Eastern Europe and Asia.
In 1999, Edward Teller, who helped invent the hydrogen bomb, defended the Cold War, arguing that ''work on weapons during the cold war did not put a particularly heavy burden on the American economy,'' and that ''at any rate, the cold war had the distinction of not costing any lives." But atomic scientist Stephen I. Schwartz disagreed, writing in a 1999 New York Times letter to the editor:
The term ''particularly heavy'' is rather subjective; in fact, United States expenditures for nuclear weapons and weapons-related programs between 1940 and 1996 consumed nearly $5.5 trillion in adjusted 1996 dollars. That is 29 percent of all military spending and 11 percent of all Federal Government spending.
As for lives lost, while the United States and the Soviet Union did not fight on the battlefield, hundreds of thousands of American and Soviet citizens were exposed to the radioactive and toxic byproducts of nuclear weapons production and testing in their own countries. The human toll of these activities is only now beginning to be quantified.
The Cold War had other costs. In the name of combating communism, the U.S. fought deadly wars in Korea and Vietnam, and supported brutal dictatorships in Latin America and beyond. It also opposed figures such as Nelson Mandela in South Africa.
The struggle for genuine democracy has involved popular movements in both the East and West—and these efforts have continued even after the Cold War. In a 1999 article for The Nation foreign policy, expert John Tirman argued that the peace movement and its demand for nuclear disarmament created the conditions for the negotiations the ended the Cold War:
As the apparent winner [of the Cold War], the West has tended to regard its triumph as a vindication of cold war policies or, more modestly, as a case of Soviet "exhaustion." Neither of those views is satisfying because each discounts the role played by the peace and antinuclear movements. Evidence is mounting that their influence on events was more important than most historical accounts admit--perhaps even decisive. Recounting this influence is imperative for two reasons. The dominant view of the right and center is that military intimidation was the root of victory, a dangerous axiom then and just as foolish today and tomorrow. Second, the history demonstrates the ability of popular movements to effect change, a lesson that sharply diverges from the habits of historians and news media alike, which generally give far more attention to the actions of elites....
The rise of the nuclear freeze campaign in the early eighties was... a spur that galvanized further public outrage. Thousands of freeze chapters sprang up overnight all over the country; the movement's scale was apparent in the June 12, 1982, demonstration in Central Park, the largest ever, when 750,000 people gathered to protest the arms race. News media coverage of the movement and its proposals was almost a daily occurrence...
At first, the White House mobilized every means possible to defeat [grassroots nuclear] freeze referendums, but it gradually abandoned its bellicose rhetoric and moved steadily toward serious negotiations with the Soviet Union. "Ronald Reagan came into office on a Republican platform explicitly pledging the new government to achieve 'technological and military superiority' over the Soviet Union," explains David Cortright, a leader of SANE and SANE-Freeze in the eighties. "Popular culture became increasingly antinuclear as the freeze movement swept the country. Faced with this unreceptive political climate, the Reagan Administration largely abandoned its harsh rhetoric and quietly dropped the concept of superiority."
The collapse of the Soviet Union and of single-party rule in Eastern Bloc states did not solve all of those countries' problems. In some cases, the introduction of an unregulated market economy resulted in crises of corruption and inequality that themselves have been threats to democracy.
Those pushing for true democracy in the Soviet Union and other states now contend with oligarchs who use their connections to corrupt state officials for their own profit. As Andrew Mueller writes for The Guardian:
[I]n the chaos that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, the state-owned assets and resources of the superpower were snapped up by a tiny group of smart, ruthless, ambitious and well-connected men, who abruptly joined the ranks of the very richest people in history....
The rise of the oligarchs was one of many grotesque results of Russia's transformation to capitalism—a shift managed so ineptly that many Russians ended up nostalgic for communism. The oligarchs, idiotically rich in a country that was largely poor, and given to parading their wealth in a manner that makes American hip-hoppers look like an especially reticent community of Amish farmers, could certainly have given any former Soviet citizen pause to wonder, as he queued for beetroot, what the proletarian revolution had been for.
The oligarchs, not content with buying companies, villas, yachts, planes and the most beautiful of Russia's beautiful women, also bought power. In 1996, they connived to engineer the re- election of the politically and physically ailing Boris Yeltsin. In 2000, they helped steer Yeltsin's successor into power—Vladimir Putin, a saturnine former spook with the KGB.
For residents of the former East Germany, a transition to multiparty democracy faced fewer obstacles. German reunification meant that the East was reabsorbed by a country with a strong, stable economic base and a social democratic political tradition. As a result, Germans have fared better than many others in the former Soviet bloc, who today, a full 25 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, continue to struggle for genuine democracy and economic justice.
For Discussion:
- How much of the material in this reading was new to you, and how much was already familiar? Do you have any questions about what you read?
- What are some of the things left out of conventional American accounts of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War?
- John Tirman argues that anti-nuclear activists played a critical role in slowing the nuclear arms race and facilitating the Cold War's end. What do you think of his argument?
- Despite the end of the Cold War, a struggle for genuine democracy and economic justice persists in many former Eastern Bloc countries. What challenges are residents of these countries now facing?