From August 1961, a wall of “barbed wire and concrete” kept Western “fascists” out of East Germany (Dundon, 2018). The German tend to not beat around the bush when naming things, and hence the “Antifascistischer Schutzwall” was born and one of the most prominent borders of European history was instated.
For the next 30 years, West Berlin was described as a “consciously capitalist city deep within a communist East Germany” which sat very unhappily with the Soviets. In the years after WW2, the German capital city experienced oscillations between times of tension and relative peace. After the refugee crisis in 1958 tensions flared (HISTORY.com, 2018). Despite political claims that no wall would ever be built (imagine that – a politician who LIES!! I’m glad we left that in the 1960’s…), on the night of the 12th – 13th of August a makeshift wire barrier encircled West Berlin. Overtime, this evolved into a constantly watched fortified structure, which cut West Berlin off from the GDR (East Germany) (Imperial War Museums, 2019).
Prior to the wall, the inner-German border was as soft as the Northern Irish – Republic of Ireland border. Berliners could work, live, play on either side of the wall. Public transport took civilians across the border with no major kerfuffle and passports weren’t required during movement across. This was in stark contrast to life after the Berlin Wall was built. There were only 3 crossing points between East and West Berlin, Checkpoint Alpha, Checkpoint Bravo and Checkpoint Charlie (Damiaans, 2016). West Berlin became a “prison from which its citizens can no longer escape” (German-way.com, 2017).
The fall of the Berlin wall propelled the removal of the border between East and West Germany. Around a year after the wall was tumbled, Germany was reunified (HISTORY.com, 2018). The physical act of removal the concrete walls was regarded as a monumental symbol of the end of the Cold War (Bonnell, 2018).
From a technological perspective, what is interesting about the Berlin Wall was the plans that the GDR had for it. In 1988, just one year before the wall fell, the East German leaders were proposing to replace the expensive walls with a high-technology system, which was codenamed Grenze 2000 (for those not of the German persuasion, Border 2000). Grenze 2000 meant that the whole border control process would be automated and digitised. Searches would no longer require physical card indexes and passport control would no longer require guards. Visas and access rights would all be completed by a centrally networked PC, namely the EC 1834 which was a personal computer pioneered in East German (the Germans were not a fan of outsourcing!) (De.wikipedia.org, 2019). However, this PC posed unique problems for the use on the border as it was not compatible with ANY printer. Despite this, the GDR still claimed this new border would be an incredible leap in technology and border control. They were confident that the new technology would mean no man, woman or child would pass the border unbehelligt (a word which directly translates to “unmolested” in English) (Satjukow, 2009).
Border crossings generate a huge amount of information. The GDR recognised that their aging equipment was haemorrhaging money and was still leaving the East Berliners at risk of sneaky West Berliners escaping, despite the surveillance. The plans for the new technology were based on that of the Soviet Army during the Soviet-Afghan War (Koop and Volker, 1996). “Infrared barriers, radio beacons, vibration detectors, radio-frequency reconnaissance equipment and electrical surge protectors” were some of the devices included in the plans. It was hoped that the intelligent computers would filter “friends and enemies” more effectively than humans could (Satjukow, 2009).
The ideas behind Grenze 2000 were definitely ambitious, despite the lack of technological innovation happening in GDR at that time. Even the high-tech borders of today have not reached the levels of seamless management that was dreamed of in 1988. I wonder what would have happened to these high-tech plans if the Cold War had raged on for another decade. Would the plans have been forgotten and ignored by the GDR for more pressing matters? Would some technology have been instated in line with the manual processes that existed? Or would the East Germans have built the most technological advanced border to ever exist? Perhaps if they had succeeded, all borders would look very different today.
References
Dividing a major city using bricks and mortar is recognisably old-fashioned in todays world of internet of things and networked systems. As we approach the doomsday of Brexit, I wonder if a potential hard border would look closer to the 1961 German border or closer to the progressive border that the GDR dreamed of. As a potential hard border could be similarly disastrous, perhaps we should name it Grenze 2020, after another famed border that changed the course of history.
Bonnell, A. (2018). World politics explainer: The fall of the Berlin Wall. [online] The Conversation. Available at: https://theconversation.com/world-politics-explainer-the-fall-of-the-berlin-wall-100812 [Accessed 2 Mar. 2019].
Damiaans, D. (2016). Checkpoint Charlie – and Alpha and Bravo. [online] CENTRALBERLIN Blog. Available at: https://www.centralberlin.de/blog/checkpoint-charlie-and-alpha-and-bravo/ [Accessed 2 Mar. 2019].
De.wikipedia.org. (2019). EC 1834. [online] Available at: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/EC_1834 [Accessed 2 Mar. 2019].
Dundon, A. (2018). A Brief History of the Berlin Wall. [online] Culture Trip. Available at: https://theculturetrip.com/europe/germany/articles/a-brief-history-of-the-berlin-wall/ [Accessed 2 Mar. 2019].
German-way.com. (2017). Berlin Wall Timeline. [online] Available at: https://www.german-way.com/history-and-culture/germany/history-of-germany/berlin-wall-timeline/ [Accessed 2 Mar. 2019].
HISTORY.com. (2018). Berlin Wall. [online] Available at: https://www.history.com/topics/cold-war/berlin-wall [Accessed 2 Mar. 2019].
Imperial War Museums. (2019). What was the Berlin Wall and how did it fall?. [online] Available at: https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/what-was-the-berlin-wall-and-how-did-it-fall [Accessed 2 Mar. 2019].
Koop, Volker (1996). “Den Gegner vernichten”: die Grenzsicherung der DDR. Bonn: Bouvier. ISBN 978-3-416-02633-8.
Satjukow, S. (2009). Grenze 2000 | APuZ. [online] bpb.de. Available at: http://www.bpb.de/apuz/31982/grenze-2000?p=all [Accessed 2 Mar. 2019].
Beyond The Border 