
The Berlin Wall has now been down longer than it was up - mpweiher
https://www.economist.com/blogs/kaffeeklatsch/2018/02/28-years-two-months-and-27-days
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MiscIdeaMaker99
I was a teenager when the wall came down, but I remember that time well enough
to know it was full of positive energy and good feelings. It was a great time
to be alive.

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everdev
Is there any East/West cultural tension in Germany lingering from the country
being divided for a few decades?

The US still has some undertones of North/South culture clashes and our civil
war was over 150 years ago.

~~~
improbable22
Be careful with the causality here. Some East/West distinctions predate the
wall. A vivid example is the 1933 electoral map
[http://brilliantmaps.com/nazi-votes/](http://brilliantmaps.com/nazi-votes/)
but this too reflects an older reality. (Of course some of the contrast is
indeed due to the postwar history, just not all.)

And likewise, the US North/South culture war long predates the civil war.
Puritans and Cavaliers didn't exactly see eye to eye 200 years before that.

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taejo
Regions 1 and 5-9 are now part of Poland rather than East Germany, and once
you remove them the pattern is a lot less clear.

~~~
improbable22
This is true.

About the people, I don't actually know much about where they were moved to.
Do you perhaps know of a good summary?

Within the current borders, names ending -ow & -itz (of slavic origin) look
like they have a transition near the iron curtain: [http://truth-and-
beauty.net/experiments/ach-ingen-zell/](http://truth-and-
beauty.net/experiments/ach-ingen-zell/) I thought this was very old, but I
guess there could be some mass renaming campaign I somehow didn't know
about...

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k__
A friend from Berlin told me once, for the west part of the city, the whole
story was a big party. Money was poured into the city and nobody cared what
they did.

The complete opposite of what happened in the east.

~~~
tormeh
Also I would think housing was practically free. If you have any sort of
purchasing power you're not going to want to live surrounded by the Soviet
Union.

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mstank
Is there such a thing as societal post-traumatic stress? I'd love to see data
about how people's experience and perception of events change over time. Also
the generational impact monumental events like the Berlin wall have on a
groups psyche.

Speaking from experience, I see differences between my friends that lived
through the balkan wars and those who emigrated before them.

~~~
klodolph
If you have the chance to go to Berlin, hit up the museums. There's quite a
few which will give you some of the perspective you need. The impact of the
wall (see Checkpoint Charlie) is couched in the context of the holocaust, the
SS, and the rise and fall of Naziism (see Topography of Terror, Jewish Museum,
Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe). Then these things must in turn be
understood in the context of Germany's transition from empire to republic,
unification, the Protestant reformation, and WWI (various other museums).

I highly recommend spending a few days in Berlin and just seeing this stuff in
person. Hotels are comparatively cheap and English will get you far. Just
seeing this stuff helped immensely for me, and you can make interesting
connections when you see everything in one place.

Even small slices of this history are fascinating, like the different policies
of urban renewal during different periods of Berlin's history—neighborhoods
being torn down for modern construction, the building of Berliner Dom, the
competition between East and West during occupation both w.r.t. large public
works and housing.

~~~
redorb
It is a great place to visit for historical significance. A reminder please
don't try to 'bring home a piece of the Berlin wall' .. At the worst its real
and you're moving some history from their home to yours. At best its fake and
you're buying some random busted cement.

~~~
Dylan16807
> At the worst its real and you're moving some history from their home to
> yours.

Over a hundred thousand tons of wall, and most of it was sent for recycling.
I'm pretty sure breaking one of the many anonymous segments into fragments and
selling them off is an action that greatly increases the historical reverence
being given to it.

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usr1106
Not the central point of the article, but still.

A quality newspaper that writes of German soldiers in West Berlin shows quite
a lack of understanding. West Berlin was not a part of the Federal Republic of
Germany. Although in many aspects the line was blurred, when it comes to
military it was very clear: There were only American, British, and French
troops in West Berlin, each in their respective sector. Although Western
Germany had mandatory military service, West Berlin didn't.

(As a matter of fact even civilian German aircrafts were not allowed in West
Berlin, but that's getting off-topic)

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rbanffy
In these dark times, my optimism is subdued.

It is reason to celebrate, but let's not forget how easy it is to rot a
democracy from the inside.

~~~
workthrowaway27
There are lots of problems with today's democracies, but the problems of the
20th century are on a completely different scale than the ones we're dealing
with now.

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sesteel
I understand what they are saying, but that was always true.

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blattimwind
Less than 50 % availability? Pathetic.

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interfixus
Weird. Apropos absolutely nothing, I did a rough calculation on exactly that
subject only two or three days ago. In my head, and without immediate access
to data, got no further than "sometime later this year".

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balance_factor
Starting in 1945, Russia had a very strong desire to pull out of Berlin and
east Germany, it never wanted to be there. England and the US had agreed that
Germany would be demilitarized, but then reneged on that promise, and formed a
military alliance against Russia which west Germany joined in 1955. That was
two years after Radio Free Europe in west Berlin was advocating riots to east
Berliners and east Germans - which took place. And only six years after this
was a wall built. Imagine if Iran occupied half of San Francisco or New York
City and Iranians became indignant a wall was put up around their section? Of
course much of the Nazis and SS high command was put to work in west Germany
after the war in intelligence and business (union-busting etc.) other than
their cleaner hands leaders like Reinhard Gehlen, or less clean hands such as
Nazi and SS leader Hanns Martin Schleyer who was head of the post-war German
Employers' Association (but whose past was not discussed much, most references
to him are in regards to "far-left Red Army Faction terrorism"). Also, the
Rhineland was the heart of German industrial might, the Russians got the duds
in Germany other than a divided Berlin which caused them and the DDR's leaders
headaches.

Whereas Austria, which Russia had occupied but which did not go remilitarize
and join NATO, was withdrawn from by Russia, just like Russia pulled out of
Iran and a number of other places as agreed. The allies had agreed Germany not
be remilitarized and made a military threat to a twice invaded Russia within a
30 year span, but then England and the US broke that deal.

So Russia, who wanted to leave and have Germany reunite, was stuck by US/UK
policy. Actually, as has been revealed, Margaret Thatcher was forcibly against
east Germany reuniting with west Germany at a time when the Russians wanted
it. So this thread stretched all the way from 1945 to 1990.

~~~
keiferski
Right. Just like Russia wanted to leave Poland, Ukraine, the Baltics,
Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. It was the west that forced them to stay.

~~~
balance_factor
When the Russian Revolution took place, many of the areas you discuss were
part of the Russian empire. So "Russian occupation", if that is what it was,
did not start with the Bolsheviks.

Hungary is a different story, but then of course, the Hungarians established
themselves as a communist republic in 1919 with no Russians in sight. This was
actually put down by foreign intervention - Romanian invasion and guns, with
strong support from England in the background. So you could say the Red Army
was just restoring what had been taken away by foreign invasion in 1919.

~~~
keiferski
Most of these areas were only “a part of the Russian empire” because Russia
had previously invaded them. You seem to have completely forgotten the
Partitions of Poland, the numerous uprisings in the 19th Century, and the
defeat of the Soviet Army by Poland following WWI, which thus curtailed Soviet
expansion. Clearly the Poles did not want to be a part of the Russian empire.
The same story is essentially true to a varying degree for most other cultures
in the area.

