LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Berlin Wall
built 234 days ago
The Berlin Wall was a structure which divided the city, and encased the French, British and American sectors of Berlin. Thus, these three sectors, which comprised West Berlin, became an island surrounded by East German (GDR) territory. The Wall dissected eight train lines, four underground train lines and 193 major and minor roads. In total, the wall measured 97 miles. This included 27 miles through the city center (of which 23 miles cut through residential areas), 19 miles through woodlands and forests and 15 miles through rivers and lakes.
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The Berlin Wall was a real and imaginary line around the planet. One side was Russia and China, the other side was the USA, England and France. A line was drawn, the symbol was the wall, and Check Point Charlie was the door. As long as the wall and the door existed, the imaginary wall of fuzzy misguided anger could and would exist between Russia and the USA.
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Berlin Wall, 1961–89, a barrier first erected in Aug., 1961, by the East German government along the border between East and West Berlin, and later extended along the entire border between East Germany and West Germany. It was built to halt large numbers of defections and to prevent E. Berliners commuting to the West. Erected at a time of growing tension between East and West, the barbed wire was eventually replaced by concrete topped with wire. In 1989, after hundreds of thousands of East Germans had fled westward via Hungary and Czechoslovakia, on Nov. 9, the beleaguered East German regime lifted travel restrictions, and days later dismantling of the wall began. Built to keep people in, the wall was dismantled in a failed gamble by the Communists to keep power. By Jan., 1990, the regime was selling large slabs of the wall for hard currency, and had set December for its total demolition.
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The longest section of the Berlin Wall still standing lies north of the bridge Oberbaumbrücke in the Kreuzberg-Friedrichshain borough. This 1.3-kilometer-long section of the Wall along Mühlenstraße was painted in the spring of 1990 by artists from 21 different countries who produced 106 large-scale murals. Some of the best-known images include Birgit Kinder's "Test the best," a painting of a Trabi (an East German car) breaking through the Wall, and the Russian artist Dimitri Vrubel's "Mein Gott hilf mir, diese tödliche Liebe zu überleben" (Dear God, help me to survive this fatal love), a picture of Honecker and Brezhnev's brotherly kiss. This ensemble of paintings was officially opened in September 1990 as the East Side Gallery; known worldwide, it is extremely popular with visitors to Berlin. The original plan to send the pictures - along with the wall sections - around the world as an exhibition and then to auction them off was never realized, and the wall and its images have been listed as a historical monument since November 1991. The East Side Gallery has become a symbol of the city's division.
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For the first time since it was erected in 1961, the Berlin Wall was opened on this date in 1963. It remained open for the holiday season, but closed again on January 6, 1964. Some 4,000 people crossed over to visit relatives during this period. The wall had originally been erected by East Germany to prevent its citizens from defecting to the West. Over the course of the Wall's existence nearly 200 people were killed trying to escape to West Germany. In November 1989, the border was finally reopened.
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In post-World War II Germany, the Berlin Wall was erected on August 16, 1961, along the demarcation between the eastern sector of Berlin controlled by the Soviet Union, and the western sectors occupied by the United States, France, and Great Britain. East Germany, officially the German Democratic Republic (GDR), was a Communist state that existed from 1949 to 1990 in the former Soviet occupation zone of Germany.
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Berlin Wall