13 August
1961 · politics
Berlin woke up to a wall
Overnight, East German troops rolled out barbed wire and began tearing up the streets along the sector boundary. Berliners who went to bed in one city woke up in two. Families found themselves on the wrong side of a line drawn while they slept, and some of them stayed on the wrong side for twenty-eight years.
The wire became concrete, the concrete became a system of walls, watchtowers and a death strip, and for most of our lifetimes it was simply a fact of the world — right up until the night in November 1989 when it very suddenly wasn't.
“What did your household make of the Berlin Wall at the time?”