Memory of the World; 2012 - unesdoc - Unesco

conflict and the Cold War started: two irreconcilable
systems struggled worldwide for power and influence, and
one main arena of this Cold War was the divided Germany
– and Berlin. The building of the Berlin Wall on 13 August
1961 cemented the political division of Germany. The
initial barbed-wire fence was systematically transformed
into a concrete wall surrounded by a death strip, between
15 and more than 150 metres in width, with watch towers,
electrified signal fences, guard dogs, anti-vehicle trenches
and armed patrols who had the order ‘shoot to kill’. This
Wall was not defensive against external enemies; it was
directed inwards, against the escape of its own people from
the German Democratic Republic, against their voting
with their feet. It became the worldwide symbol of political
repression in the states of the Soviet empire. Accordingly,
the fall of the Wall on 9 November 1989 symbolized not
only the end of the political division of Germany and of the
European continent, but also the end of the Cold War and
the Eastern and Western bloc systems. The images of the
fall of the Berlin Wall have become a symbol for democracy
522 Construction and fall of the Berlin Wall and the Two-Plus-Four-Treaty of 1990
A sentry of the East German
border guards at the
Sebastianstrasse checkpoint
in the mid 1960s. �
� This photograph of Peter
Fechter, shot while trying
to escape and bleeding
to death at the Wall,
17 August 1962, is one
of the documents inscribed.
and personal freedom, a symbol of hope that change
is possible without bloodshed.
The fifteen selected items are fundamental to understanding
the history of the Wall. The eleven audiovisual records
include the press conferences by Walter Ulbricht in 1961 and
by Günther Schabowski in 1989, which mark the beginning
and the end of the Berlin Wall, the construction proper of