The cold war was the state of hostility, military competition and geopolitical confrontation between the United States and Soviet Union from 1945 and early 1990s. The most outstanding icons of such a period included the Berlin Wall built through splitting the German capital into East and West Berlin. In this blog article, I will analyse the influence that the Berlin Wall had to the cold war.

1. It took only about twenty-four hours from the night of August 13th , 1961 for what was once a single city to have two walls erected around it.

The partition wall was built by the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in August of 1961. It was meant to stop the flood of East Germans pouring into West Germany or West Berlin. Before the construction of the wall, there were already about 3, 5 million of East Germans who escaped to the western side exploiting the open border in the two parts of the city.

The making of this wall comprised concrete walls, barb wire fencing, watch towers and anti vehicle emplacements. It literally cordonned off west Berlin from the rest of the East German area thus making it a physical as well as a figurative barrier.

2. Symbol of the Iron Curtain

The Berlin Wall also became a symbol of the so-called Iron Curtain dividing Western Europe in the democratic part of the globe and Eastern Europe in the part of the world under communism rule. The fact of the existence of the wall illustrated the division of the world into the capitalist West and Socialist East.

: It reflected the general struggle of the Cold War and had the United States on the side of democracy and the West and the USSR, along with its vassal, on the side of communism.

3. Tension and Confrontation

Germany again divided politically by the existence of the Berlin Wall served heightened tension and confrontation between the super powers. The United States and its allies condemned the wall as an embodiment of a totalitarian regime-oppressive, anti-human rights. They employed it to give focus on the collaps of the soviet union and its political system.

This wall also destabilized into a epicenter of several aspects of the cold war. One major episode was the Berlin crisis of 1961 at which American and Soviet armor confronted each other at a checkpoint known as Checkpoint Charlie between East and West Berlin. They also examined the possibility of a direct military clash of the two parties as seen in this event.

4. Civilian Propaganda and Psychological Effect

Another fact showing that psychological aspects of division were dominant is that the construction of the Berlin Wall affected Berliners and people all over the world. This way it became associated with oppression and the restrictions of life under communism regime. We could observe also that there were many paintings on the walls robbers, proclamations of hope, graffiti messages, lists…

The wall also had informative function for both groups in order to use for propaganda purposes. It was used by the West to openly advertise the values of the democratic and economies freedom as opposed to what the Eastern Bloc was implementing. The East sometimes used it to express their need for the wall as a means of preserving the socialist gains of the Eastern Bloc from contamination by the decadent West.

5. Fall of the Berlin Wall

One of them is the destruction of the Berlin Wall in November of 1989 which divided East and West Germany and symbolized the entire process of the Cold War. This signified indeed the end of communism in Eastern Europe and the Germany’s unification.

As I have mentioned above, the fall of the wall was as a result of internal and external pressures. Domestically, Mikhail Gorbachev was presiding over the Soviet Union and liberalising making it much more open and reformative. Externally, the imposition of democracy from the western world and heightened defiance and desire of the East Germans led to toppling of the wall.

Conclusion

The Germany’s division by the Berlin Wall, was a symbol and at the same time an instrument of the Cold War tensions. It was a materialization of the separation between east and west and symbolized as a sign of struggle of communism on people’s lives. nổinational finally catastrophically collapse a turning point that culminating the reunification of Germany and the cold-war eras.