The Berlin Wall represents their military strategic power of the Cold War period when two global leading powers – the USA and the USSR – were in an ideological competition. This paper aims to entail brief history and construction of the Berlin City and Wall, division of Berlin, and finally the fall of Berlin City Wall.

The Cold War: An Overview

Cold war is a term that is used to describe a twenty five years standing duel between the two mighty powers in the world that existed from 1947 TO 1991. It was a time that saw the world divided into two powerful giants; there was frequent conflict, and a great concentration of the military force coupled with spying between the two world powers.

The Division of Berlin

Following World War II, Germany was divided into four occupation zones, each administered by a different Allied power: The empirical model in this study focuses on four countries, namely, the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and France. Like any other country in Europe, Germany capital city Berlin was also divided into four different powers. However, relations between the Soviet Union and the western states arose tensions rather quickly.

In 1948, the Soviet Union cut off all road, rail and water communications with West Berlin in an attempt to gain control on the whole of the city. Staring the Berlin Airlift as one of the greatest aerial operations in the history, United States successfully provided necessities that included food and fuel in West Berlin for over a year. Many refer to this event as a climax of the early years of the Cold War process.

It is the Wall of Shame: The Construction of the Berlin Wall

Despite this the crisis in Berlin has been temporarily defused, tension persisted between East and West Berlin. In the summer of 1961, the East German government with the backing of the Soviet Union, started construction of an actual barrier that would soon come to be called the Berlin Wall. The actual border was a concrete and barbed-wire wall that delivered West Berlin entirely and shut the escape route for East Germans.

The division of Berlin through the erection of barbed wire fence was as much physically as it was psychologically a brutal act representing two completely different political systems. People were torn from their loved ones, and numerous persons died trying to surmount the wall.

The Impact of the Berlin Wall

The Berlin Wall provided a balance of the division of the cold war politics. It showed how extreme the basic requirements could get for the East German government in its attempts to prevent citizens from travelling to the West. It also sealed the political, military and ideological split between NATO’s Western countries and the Warsaw Pact Soviet states.

The flooding had immediate affects on German socio-cultural, political and economical systems as well as significant implications on the construction of new Berlin Wall. People were separated from their dear ones, some of them for a generation and the wall just reminded that one was a slave in own country with no freedom and rights in the Eastern block. It also had alsosocial and economic implications since the West Berlin was fully developed capitalist economy alonside with East Germany.

The Fall of the Berlin Wall

During the second half of the 1980s, both domestic and international tensions rose against the Soviet Union and countries of its influence. In East Germany, people want political liberalization and freedom of speech and movement. Increasing pressure was brought to bare on East Germany by revolutions that overthrew communism in other Eastern Bloc countries including Poland and Hungary.

Then on November 9 ^{th} 1989 there was a historic shift of events when the government of East Germany opened borders allowing citizens to visit west Germany. Huge numbers of East Berliners moved to the check-point and with the assistance of overawed border guards, the Berlin Wall was opened.

The Reunification of Germany

The details of the break-up of the Berlin Wall provided for the reunification of East and West Germany. After long seven months of talks thus the reunification was finally completed on October the third of nineteen ninety and a new Germany has been created. This event marked the end of Cold war division in Germany and paved way for change in Europe and over the international political map.

Conclusion

The erection and removal of the Berlin Wall can be described as defining moment of the cold war period. Ideological and geopolitical battles were playing out in the wall, through the wall. It constructed and then destroyed the dreams of many people and redesigned the faces of the European geography.

Today, there are parts that make a Berlin Wall hence every time someone passes through them area they are reminded of past, freedom, unity and the pursuit of peace.