The Failure of Communism: The Berlin Wall
“The shutting off of movement of East Germans to West Berlin, and thence to freedom in the West, had been expected… The East German Government is putting up an iron fence against its own Germans, a monument to the world of the failure of communism to gain people’s loyalty and support.” The Christian Science Monitor, August 14, 1961
In general, the nations and peoples of today’s world enjoy a level of freedom and democracy unparalleled in the history of civilization. Although many nations remain under harsh, undemocratic political regimes, many nations now claim to be democratic in political organization, offering more freedom to their citizens. Civilization does not have a long-standing tradition of widespread freedom, as the current age of relative freedom in the world can only be traced back to the end of World War II. Up to this present age, instead of widespread freedom people have been much more accustomed to widespread oppression. As an example of this previous societal norm, this paper will discuss history’s terms of oppression, in the form of Soviet communism, and the most commonly recognized symbol of communism’s oppression, the Berlin Wall. Furthermore, we shall see the lingering effects of communist oppression in the current times, the post-communist era, and discuss the parallels existing between the economic and social failure of communist Eastern Europe as a result of oppression and the success of Western Europe as a result of democratic freedom.
Dating back to distant human history, human populations have been organized according to a social hierarchy dividing the population into two classes, the governing and the governed. Whether considering the most primitive form of tribal clan rule in which the tribe looked to the chieftain for leadership or a complex political organization such as a parliamentary democracy of more modern times, the division of population into two fundamentally separate classes remains. As human societies advanced through time, the complexity of governance developed correspondingly, eventually giving rise to the recondite political system of the modern world. Early in the process of achieving such advancement in governmental organization, however, the perversion of government from a body of organization to a body of oppression occurred. From warfare among tribal clans and ensuing subjugation of conquered peoples to the development of full-blown autocratic rule, the natural role of the government could shift towards oppression rather than protection of governed society, when prodded by those in positions of rule.
As historians note, such a shift occurred in Russia during the World War I era, as the Bolshevik revolutionaries took control of Russia’s infantile republican government which had itself only months before ousted the autocratic rule of Czar Alexander III. With control of the nation, the Bolsheviks, led by Vladamir Lenin, instituted a highly autocratic communist governmental system, with absolute power in the hands of the ruling class, and absolute oppression binding the masses. As history unfolded, communist influence expanded to enclose the whole of Eastern Europe by the end of the Second World War. Emerging from war, communist red was binding the lives of countless millions of people, each stripped of nearly all rights. Methods of denuding populations of freedom in the communist world included impingement of the right to handle one’s own economic affairs. Also stripped was the right to move freely, especially with the construction of the Berlin Wall in East Germany. The restrictions on movement and economy were, of course, not limited to Berlin, but to all of the communist world; as the East Germans physically had their battle for freedom against the Berlin Wall, other oppressed citizens under Soviet dominion had their physical battles for freedom. Taken collectively throughout Soviet dominated eastern Europe, however, no physical barrier to freedom more completely expressed the plight of the people than did the Berlin Wall.
By witnessing the prosperity of the free West, East Berliners became increasingly resistant to the prospects of continued bondage under communism, becoming ever more aware of the freedoms they lacked. The time had come for the masses to free themselves of the subjection of inordinate communist rule and bring down the symbolic “Iron Curtain” which had for so long confined the masses in oppression. By comparison, no other icon of communism was so obvious a representation of this “Iron Curtain” as the Berlin wall. Through peaceful revolution, the East Germans would eventually bring down the wall, signaling the failure of communism and once again giving rise to the liberties which had for so long been lost. In the time following the rebirth of democracy throughout the former Eastern Bloc, it can be seen that the economic oppression resulting from the separation of Berlin from free Western Europe by means of the Berlin Wall parallels the physical and economic isolation and social detachment of the entire Eastern Bloc from the free West as a result of an ultimately failing soviet dominion.
In order to gain a complete understanding of the significance of the fall of the Berlin Wall, one would need to inspect the circumstances of the wall’s construction. Historians would note that at the beginning of the post-World War II era and the Cold War, the world was divided into two political alignments, each headed by one of the world’s two superpower nations, the United States and the Soviet Union. Each alignment had its own international defense alliance, with the United States camp forming NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and the Soviet camp forming the Warsaw Pact, composed of Russia and the Eastern Bloc nations. Germany had been partitioned into zones following Hitler’s defeat, with each zone governed by one of the four prominent member-nations of the Allies, the United States, Great Britain, France, and Russia. Within a few years, the democratic Allies, controlling the western part of Germany, allowed their respective occupied zones to once again gain autonomy, establishing the Federal Republic of Germany, widely known as West Germany. The Soviets refused to relinquish control of their zone, instead instituting the puppet communist state of East Germany, formally known as the German Democratic Republic.
With the institution of different forms of government in the newly “autonomous” nations, East and West Germany took different approaches to the forming of national economic policy, with each approach yielding different results. Democratic West Germany followed the model of the other democracies of the day, such as the United States and Great Britain, in implementing a capitalist economy. Meanwhile, communist East Germany held true to the Russian economic standard by installing a command economy. The results of these two economic policies eventually came to quite a significant difference. After the Berlin Wall had already been ten years removed and freedom restored to Eastern Germany, the discrepancy in gross domestic product between the two parts of Germany had still not recovered from the long-lasting effects of ineffective communist economic policy. According to a 1999 Jack Ewing article in Business Week, the average gross domestic product of Eastern Germans still lagged behind that of Western Germans by more than $12,000 annually. In comparison to the unimproved economy of East Germany, the economy of West Germany prospered from switching to a capitalist free market economy shortly after regaining political and economic autonomy in the 1950s. The disparity in economic lots between East Germany and West Germany drove a massive exodus from the East to the West; in Berlin alone, more than two million people had fled the East to the West in the ten years preceding the construction of the Berlin Wall (Gelb, 2).
By August 13, 1961, the communist authorities would no longer idly stand by while millions of East German citizens fled the country. Norman Gelb recounted that the birth of the wall began as “thousands of armed troops and police...were deployed along the border separating the Soviet sector of Berlin from the American, British, and French sectors of the city” (Gelb, 2). Gelb goes on to describe the ugly process of dividing one of Europe’s largest cities, calling the wall a “monstrosity.” While the wall succeeded in stemming the tide of refugees, it inalterably garnered hatred for communism, as the wall became the definitive symbol of communist oppression.
Lined with barbed wire, tank-traps, hundreds of watchtowers, and alarm fences, the nine foot tall, 100 mile long concrete conglomerate that made up the Berlin Wall effectively “imprisoned” West Berlin from the surrounding East German territory. Although it was West Berlin that was enclosed by the wall, the territory made nearly impossible to escape was East Berlin. During the years the wall divided Berlin, “some 75 people died trying to cross the divide….If an escape looked likely to succeed, a ‘shoot to kill’ order was strictly enforced…” (Boulton, 1-2). As deaths continued to mount as a result of attempts to reach freedom in the West, the perception of the wall as a hated symbol of oppression could only increase. Unfortunately for the citizens of Berlin, it would be 28 long years before the wall would come down.
The Berlin Wall quickly came to be more than a divisor through the city of Berlin, to the inhabitants of both German states. As a result, the wall can be separately discussed in terms of both isolation and division. Even before the wall’s construction, the loss of a national unity had become fact, as the Soviet Union refused to reunite the two German states into one united nation. The results included a divided territory on the European continent that, according to the will of the people inhabiting the territory, should have been one united nation. As a result of the territorial division, a massive population movement developed from the East to the West, inducing the isolation of the East from the West. Thus, division of the German territory brought about isolation of the two parts of the previously national territory from one another. The isolation and division that developed throughout East Germany and West Germany, all bound by the symbolic strength of the Berlin Wall, entailed three spheres: social, ideological, and economic isolation and division of Germany.
Social separation of Germany can be equated to the loss of national unity and the subsequent demand for reunification. Following the division of Germany into separate states after World War II, each new state developed its own national identity, from that point in time separate from the identity of the other half of the previously united nation. For example, West Germany was forced to move its capital from Berlin, the traditional German capital, since Berlin was located within the confines of East Germany. As a result, West Germany’s capital was moved to Bonn, where federal government functions for West Germany were carried out during the more than forty years Germany was divided. Even after reunification of Germany, “most government functions [were] still carried out in Bonn, but plans to return the capital to Berlin [were] set to begin in April 1999” (Germany, 1). The people of one Germany were now subject to the laws of the two independent states and, as a result, freedom of movement between the two states would be dependent upon the acquiescence of both governments, with such agreement or rejection on the parts of each government revealed to the people in the form of the nation’s laws regarding any such movement between the two states. As the East German government desired to halt free movement of its citizens to freedom in the West, the desires of the people became futile. Any forced attempt at reaching freedom in the West, such as escaping into West Berlin, were routinely met with death. National unity was then an idea of the past.
The ideological isolation and division of the German state had more far reaching effects than did the social separation. In the ideological realm could be found the embodiment of the massive struggle between democracy and communism. The Berlin Wall made this struggle quite visible to the international community. Literally, on each side of the wall stood autonomous and independent ideological opposites, as the forces of communism and democracy clashed. In particular, it was the very basis of each ideology at root in the conflict. According to Valdosta State University professor Dr. Michael Baun, the communist view of democracy says that democracy’s capitalist society leads to a division of the people into classes, a hierarchy in which the ownership class is able to exploit workers, the working class. The theory continues that in order to solve the problem of unfair distribution of wealth, all property should be owned by the public, through the state, and by such means of public ownership, society will consist of a single working class. In reality, however, Dr. Baun contends that the missing ownership class in a communist society is replaced by the government, which has access to control of all state run properties and maintains all advantages over the working class, just as in capitalist economies. In contrast to the communist perspective is the democratic ideology. Democratic capitalism is based on free markets and private ownership, which Dr. Baun says maximizes individual freedom. While democratic capitalism may lead to income gaps which, in turn, lead to other problems, such as poverty and crime, societies without opportunity to gain the advantages of freedom, such as any under the dominion of Soviet Union or one of its puppet satellites, resist continued oppression in search of the freedoms such oppressed societies lack. The Berlin Wall created an impasse for millions of people in eastern Europe: any person or society hoping to bridge the gap between the conflicting ideologies of the East and the West, to flee oppression and find freedom, had to find a way to overcome the firm hand of communism, firmly grounded at the Berlin Wall.
A sublevel of the ideological struggle between the East and West deals with the economic division and isolation symbolized by the wall. The economies run by democracy and communism, capitalism and command economies, are motivated by completely different forces. According to Dr. Baun, the forces of supply and demand drive capitalist economies, whereas command economies are driven by the politically predetermined orders of the communist central government. In the command economy, government controls the means of production and distribution of goods and services. In the absence of supply and demand, what results is production and consumption without profit. Where a capitalist economy would have profits going to the ownership class, a command economy has “profits” moving back to the general population, in the form of any of the many subsidies the people receive on goods and services they buy. Governments directly effect the regulation of the economy under command economy systems, whereas capitalism is only indirectly regulated by the government, through laws rather than by governmental decree. The ideological struggle between the two systems of economy lies in the option to choose one’s role, as in capitalism, or to have one’s role chosen by the government, as in the command economy. The divide between these two economic schools of thought became its own “Berlin Wall” in the 1950s as one Germany became two independent states, yet another mechanism isolating East and West Germany. Through time, resentment to oppression built among East Germans, paving the way for the removal of all the social, ideological, and economic barriers inhibiting movement toward reunification with West Germany and freedom.
From the time of its construction to the time of its demise, the Berlin Wall was seen as a symbol of communism’s failure by the free world. In a statement in 1961 at the time of the wall’s construction, “The East German government is putting up an iron fence against its own Germans, a monument to the world of failure of communism to gain peoples’ loyalty and support” (Gelb, 1) the writer’s comment gives the West’s summation of communism’s failure to do anything more than hold on to power. Communism reigned not by the support of the people, but by their fear. On a lower scale than the massive stage of international opinion, communism failed in terms of being able to economically survive. To see the strikingly contrasting effects of long term subscription to the communist brand of economy, one need look no further than East Germany’s economic insolvency when the nation looked to reunite. In the decade following reunification, West German taxpayers paid $560 billion in subsidies to aid East Germany’s economic transition to the free market economy (Ewing, 2). Plainly, East Germany would be having much greater difficulty converting to capitalism without assistance from West Germany. With this difficulty could have come other problems, similar to ones faced in other former Soviet satellites in the transition to democracy and capitalism, such as in the Ukraine and Russia, in which both countries experiencing a certain movement within the population desiring a change back to communism (Europe, 2). The unprepared state East Germany was in, along with its Eastern Bloc counterparts, regarding a change to more free trade was due to the incompatibility of command economy with other economic systems. As state subsidies were no longer available to the populations of the ex-communist nations in transition to democracy, they were forced to bear the brunt of the pain involved with the transition. As a result, the people of transitioning nations experienced a tradeoff involving a change from oppression to economic starvation (Europe, 2). Even with such grim prospects, most people in the transitioning nations embrace the change to democracy, providing evidence that the possibility of continued struggles under democracy are better than the oppression they had formerly faced under communism. In tearing down the Berlin Wall, East Germans expressed this sentiment and have since not looked back.
Actually bringing down the Berlin Wall and removing it as both a physical and symbolic barrier to freedom required years of persistent resistance by East Germans. Nonetheless, on November 9, 1989, the wall did come down. Dr. Baun described the process leading to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent dissolution of the German Democratic Republic, saying, “The communists just gave up resisting anymore. Gorbechev’s policy in the Soviet Union no longer followed the Breznev Doctrine,” referring to Soviet reformist Mikhail Gorbechev (Baun, 2). Dr. Baun went on to explain that the Breznev Doctrine, established by former Soviet premier Leonid Breznev, said that the Soviet Union could intervene anytime communism was threatened in the satellite nations. Following the Breznev Doctrine for many years had allowed the Soviet Union to maintain the Communist party’s power in the satellites for many years, intervening by force without reserve. However, when Gorbechev instituted the Sinatra Doctrine, Dr. Baun explained, the satellites were left alone in dealing with demands for change, however the satellites could. “The dam broke open when Gorbechev repealed the Breznev Doctrine,” Baun said. “[It] emboldened people to demand change.” No longer in fear of the Soviet Union crushing resistance, the people responded throughout the Eastern Bloc. In a rapid series of events, one communist after another fell throughout the ex-Soviet zone. Moreover, the methods by which these “revolutions” took place were strikingly peaceful. “Except in Romania, where President Ceausescu and his wife were summarily shot, the old regimes were dealt with leniently” (Europe, 3). With the elimination of the oppressive communist regimes and the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, the symbolic and physical barriers to freedom had been shattered. For the first time in more than seventy years, for the people of Russia, and for the first time in more than forty years for the people of the satellite nations, they were finally rid of the iron hand of communism. What the future held for these millions of hopeful people was and remains unknown, but the key is that they then had hope for the future.
What people today see of the Berlin wall through the eyes of history is a reminder of times that have not always been as free as they are today. For the millions of people living in East Germany and eastern Europe today, the memories of communism and of the Berlin Wall as a symbol of its oppression will not soon, if ever, leave them. Taken from the perspective of history, perhaps one day future generations will be able to look back upon the events of 1989 and remark that those events were the turning point at which humanity at last became truly free.
Works Cited
Baun, Dr. Michael. 30 Nov. 2000.
Boulton, Ralph. Berlin Wall: From Barbed Wire To Solid Brick. The Toronto Star 8 Aug. 1986, Final Edition.: A12. Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe.
Country Overview: Germany. ABC-CLIO, Inc. 23 Jun. 1999. Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe.
Europe After Communism: Ten Years Since The Wall Fell. The Economist 6 Nov. 1999: 21. Academic Search Elite.
Ewing, Jack. A Nation Still Divided. Business Week 8 Nov. 1999:70. Academic Search Elite.
Gelb, Norman. The Wall That Shut Out The West. Christian Science Monitor 14 Aug. 1996:16. Academic Search Elite.