The History and Significance of the Berlin Wall (1981)

The film was made by the BBC and the narrator is Gabriel Wolfe. The Berlin Wall isn't just a wall through a city. It's also this giant scar across the landscape of Germany. And it's much more than merely a wall. It includes anti-tank barriers, anti-vehicle trenches, electrified fences, watchtowers, dog runs, giant electric lights. All set in a death strip of carefully raked sand, which goes on for a hundred miles, in circling West Berlin.

There is one concession, unlike the iron curtain between East and West Germany. It doesn't include anti-personnel mines. In the city itself, it has cut through streets and even houses, separated neighbours, divided communities. This is one of the most recognisable symbols of divided Berlin.

The Brandenburg Gate, beyond which lies 9 East Berlin, the famous Avenue Unter den Linden. The Brandenburg Gate was a key point on the day in August 20 years ago. When Berliners woke to discover that their city was being physically ruthlessly cut into. Wolfgang Wilder, an 18-year-old at the time, remembers that bitter morning. I was listening to the news over breakfast, and I heard about some strange activities here at the Brandenburg Gate. And they made it quite dramatic, so I knew something is definitely wrong. I decided to go here. When I arrived, I saw a crowd of between two and three thousand Berliners standing in a semicircle. There were workmen building up a wall, which was at that time, around ten o'clock, about three feet high. Behind that were lots of soldiers, Russian soldiers, DDR Army, with machine guns, heavily armed.

And first the cart was very quiet, because we thought the Americans would do something. After a while, we realized that the American Army is guarding us and not stopping the East Germans building up that wall. And the cart really got emotionally very highly charged, and I think we were ready to run over that square and pull down the wall. And I think if one detuned man would have been there, it might have been different, I think the wall would have been pulled down. The redrawing of front is, since the Second World War, has left Berlin deep inside Eastern Block Territory. It's over a hundred miles from West Germany. It's only 40 miles from Poland. West Berlin is politically linked with West Germany and has its own city government, but is still legally an occupied city, occupied by the Western Allies who came here in 1945. And now it's ringed by the Berlin Wall.

There have been other walls in history, but city walls have usually been built by those inside them to defend themselves against outsiders. This wall is different. It's been built around West Berlin by East Germany, to keep this island of Western capitalism firmly isolated. And here it stands, solid in the heart of Berlin. This is one of the classic images of Berlin, since the wall. The young man is waving to his father in East Berlin. It's a rare sight now, but in the early days after August 61, people stood for hours, waving to relatives or friends on the other side. It was something particularly done on a Sunday. Instead of meeting for Sunday lunch, they waved at each other across the wall. While on the other side, less obtrusively, people waved back.

These were the days of the frantic early escapes before the loopholes in the wall were closed up. There were dramatic escapes to from houses adjoining the border, not always without injury. Sometimes people were literally pulled to freedom from the hands of the East Berlin police. Meanwhile, the East Germans worked incessantly to plug the gaps, clear the ground, build up their walls. This is an East German song of the time. Build up, build up, young German people build up, clean up your homeland for a better future.

For to the East Germans, this was not the Berlin Wall. It was and still is the anti-fascist protection barrier, built to keep out the corrupting philosophy of the West and to ensure the continuance of an unsullied socialist state.