Sixty-five years ago this week, soldiers and engineers of the German Democratic Republic began construction on the 20th century’s most infamous wall. Over the next 28 years, the Berlin Wall would become a symbol of the divisions between the victorious nations of World War II, and between capitalism and communism. For more than 10,000 days, the wall would separate the residents of Germany’s largest city—and, of course, would keep in any East Germans seeking to defect.

Like what remained of Germany itself after World War II, Berlin was divided among French, British, American and Soviet occupation zones, which eventually hardened into eastern and western enclaves. While Berlin was a flashpoint for Cold War tensions almost from the beginning—in no small part because it was surrounded by what became East Germany and was susceptible to blockade—it also became one of the primary routes for residents of East Germany to defect.

That changed in August 1961 with the construction of the Berlin Wall, which was heavily fortified with watchtowers, anti-tank trenches and landmines, designed not only to keep defectors in but to kill those who attempted to breach it (over 140 by some estimates). A newly elected President John F. Kennedy and his Western European allies objected strongly, but it was also the era of Nikita Khrushchev and perhaps the peak of Cold War tensions: Francis Gary Powers had been shot down the year before; the Cuban Missile Crisis was just a year away.

Many of America’s articles on the issue in 1961 were decidedly hawkish on the question of American intervention to destroy the wall. Writing from Germany a month after its construction, contributor Marcia L. Kahn observed that the “great wall erected in Berlin by the Communists is starkly real. To drive along it is to drive along a city-wide prison.” She quoted a German magazine editor who, she wrote, “had aged ten years in eight months.” He was not optimistic:

Before August 13 we Berliners had a goal, a purpose. We were an island of freedom to which others could escape. We were the show window of freedom for refugees from the Communist zone. Now they can’t come over, and we have no purpose. We are just isolated. We’ll become a living corpse.

In December of that year, the editors had sharp words for politicians who would accept Khrushchev’s hints toward a peaceful solution. “Perhaps Mr. Khrushchev has put the damper on his fire because he has decided that he cannot barbecue the West. We don’t really care,” they wrote. “What we worry about is the sedative effect of a little carrot-waving on the West. We fear that it may make our resolution vanish more rapidly than Stalin’s statues.”

An article a few months later by contributor Christopher Emmet noted that “the failure of America to act more vigorously caused bitterness among the people and in the press of West Germany. These feelings gave rise to doubts and suspicions about America’s future policy, on the assumption that our passive acceptance of the Wall foreshadowed other and even more far-reaching concessions. All this is serious because the battle for Berlin, now as during the airlift, is primarily a test of will and of faith.” Many West Berliners, he noted, feared “that first Berlin, and then all of Germany, will be abandoned by the Allies. Perhaps a prelude to just such a reaction was the intense anguish in West Germany and West Berlin over the building of the Wall and the shock expressed when the Americans did not act to tear it down.”

Writing in America in 2018, Antonio De Loera-Brust noted one irony: The sudden construction of the Berlin Wall also offered a relaxation of some tensions between East and West. “In a sense the wall can be said to have prevented a military confrontation,” he wrote, “as it represented the Soviets’ giving up any hope of reuniting Berlin under communist control. They would solve their problem of emigration with a border wall instead.”

Military and political positions on both sides hardened, and soon the Wall was another fact of the Cold War. In 1963, President John F. Kennedy became the first U.S. president to visit the Berlin Wall, delivering his famous “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech. Six years later, President Richard Nixon visited as well. In 1987, President Ronald Reagan spoke at the Wall as well, challenging Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.” 

Mr. Gorbachev didn’t do it, but the end was near. Two years later, the East German government announced that its citizens would be allowed to pass freely through the Wall’s defenses to West Berlin. The feeling for many prognosticators and pundits was one of watching history suddenly taking place at triple speed. Writing two weeks later, the editors of America had this to say in an editorial titled “Glasnost as Verb: To Open A Wall”:

The week following Nov. 9, 1989, when the Berlin wall was officially opened, saw journalists and diplomats alike struggling to come up with superlatives adequate to the occasion and appropriate to their respective callings. Hedrick Smith, who has spent years reporting on the Soviet Union, thinks it will be regarded as “the day the Cold War ended.” Secretary of State James A. Baker 3d, tempering euphoria with a modicum of restraint, calls it merely the most historic day since the end of World War II. Now that we have all had a chance to pinch ourselves and rub our eyes, the momentous implications of Nov. 9 are coming clear.

Berliners from both sides swarmed the Wall in the days after Nov. 9; the following June, shortly before the reunification of Germany and the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and eventually the Soviet Union, bulldozers finished the job. Pieces of the Berlin Wall can be found all over the world (including at my alma mater) as memorabilia and monuments, reminders of a fraught era in world politics. 

What lessons might we learn today from the sad history of the Berlin Wall? “Walls are not a thing of the past,” cautioned De Loera-Brust in 2018. “The democratic optimism ushered in by the end of the Cold War has been significantly tempered.” Nowhere was that more clear in 2018 than in the United States, where President Trump’s first term was defined in some ways by his plan to build a massive border wall between the United States and Mexico. 

It won’t work, wrote De Loera-Brust. It never does:

While building a wall to keep people in certainly reflects worse on a society than building one to keep people out, the idea shares the delusion of the Berlin Wall, which is that force can forever contain human aspirations. The circumstances that led to both the rise and the fall of the Berlin Wall remind us that the instinct of the human animal is always to move, to be free and to seek better, regardless of any divisions of race, class, nationality or creed. Remembering the Berlin Wall, for all its horrors, also represents remembering this enduring and universal truth.

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Our poetry selection for this week is “They tell us border nets, 10,000 feet high,” by Emily Davis-Fletcher. Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.

Other recent Catholic Book Club columns:

Happy reading!

James T. Keane

James T. Keane is a Senior Editor at America.