Was The Fall Of The Berlin Wall An Accident? – Mythbusting Berlin

“Let nothing be called natural
In an age of bloody confusion,
Ordered disorder, planned caprice,
And dehumanized humanity, lest all things
Be held unalterable!”

The Berlin Wall was without doubt doomed from its conception.

As a punitive exercise in population control, the question of its demise not so much a matter of whether but simply when. And under which conditions.

There is little evidence that human beings want to be restricted in their freedom of movement – or their ability to define themselves by their own desires. In-fact, there is much to the contrary. The totalitarian temptation, the urge to live subordinate and servile – as French philosopher Jean-François Revel described it back in 1976 – is not universal.

Irrespective of whether the defective conditions created by the East German government in its pursuit of an authentic Socialist society were merely manifestations of the true nature of its Marxist-Leninist ideology or accidental deviations – something was clearly wrong in paradise.

The East German experiment, from the moment it was first imposed on the Soviet Occupied Zone of the country, proved to be fraught with problems. Least of all the tendency exhibited by citizens of the German Democractic Republic to vote with their feet – against single party rule, against the underperforming command economy, and against the increasingly draconian and repressive actions of the state carried out to ensure its continued existence.

In resolving to deal with this exodus, the East German government moved to close off its border with West Germany in 1952. A measure justified as necessary to combat “spies, diversionists, terrorists and smugglers”. The so-called Iron Curtain had begun to take shape; now in the form of a militarized frontier dividing the countries of Eastern Europe from those in the West.

Three years earlier, the Hungarian government had actually already undertaken a similar operation – erecting 260km of barbed wire fence along its border with Austria.