Reasons For The Cold War Essay -- essays research papers fc

The Cold War With the aim of preventing East Germans from seeking asylum in the West, the East German government in 1961 began constructing a system of concrete and barbed-wire barriers between East and West Berlin. This Berlin Wall endured for nearly thirty years, a symbol not only of the division of Germany but of the larger conflict between the Communist and non-Communist worlds. The Wall ceased to be a barrier when East Germany ended restrictions on emigration in November 1989. The Wall was largely dismantled in the year preceding the reunification of Germany. The victorious Allies agreed to give most of Eastern Germany to Poland and the USSR, and then divide the rest into four zones of occupation. However, they could not agree of whether or how to reunite the four zones. "As Cold War tensions grew, stimulated in part by the German situation itself, the temporary dividing line between the Soviet zone in the East and the British, French, and U.S. zones in the West hardened i nto a permanent boundary. In 1949, shortly after the Western powers permitted their zones to unite and restore parliamentary democracy in the Federal Republic of Germany, the Russians installed a puppet regime of German Communists in the East, creating the German Democratic Re-public."(Niewyk, 1995) According to Galante (1965, p.vii) "a city is the people who live in it. Berlin is 3,350,000 people in twenty boroughs. A rich city of factories, an airy city of farms and parks and woods and lakes†¦On Sunday, August 13, 1961 Herr Walter Ulbricht stopped that. He built the Wall." One reason for the building of the Wall was due to the more than fifty-two thousand East Berliners who crossed the border everyday to work in West Berlin. These people were referred to as the "grenzgaenger or border crossers." "East Berliners said the grenzgaenger were parasite who should stay and work on the East side of the boundary, for the benefit of Communism and the prosp erity of the German Democratic Republic."(Galante, p.3) Gelb (1986, p.3) states, "Berlin was where the Cold War began with a Soviet blockade, where Soviet and American tanks faced each other virtually snout-to-snout for the first time, and where the grisly game of nuclear brinkmanship was introduced." The Wall was constructed of concrete and steel and barbed wire. It was 28 miles long, if stra... ...), p.23) On Sunday, 18 March 1990, East Germans held the first free election on their territory since 1933-"the first fully free election in Eastern Europe since the Second World War."(Borneman, p.229) The wall opened because its reason for existence had disappeared. The East German regime erected it in 1961 to stem the flow of refugees to the West. In a paradox of history, the same government was forced to open the Wall in a desperate, last-ditch effort to stop an even more massive wave of deflections in 1989. Bibliography References Borneman, John (1991). After the Wall. U.S.: Basic Books, Inc. Cate, Curtis (1978). The Ides of August. New York: M. Evans & Company, Inc. Galante, Pierre (1965). The Berlin Wall. New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc. Gelb, Norman (1986). The Berlin Wall. New York: Times Books. Bornstein, Jerry (1990). The Wall Came Tumbling Down. New York: Outlet Book Company, Inc. Heaps, W.A. (1964). The Wall of Shame. New York: Meredith Press. Niewyk, D.L. (1995). Groliers Multimedia Encyclopedia. Garrard, Margaret (1989). Facing Up to the German Question Newsweek, pp. 51-52 Anderson, Harry (1989). A Mixed Blessing for Bonn Newsweek, pp. 33-34 v