At the end of World War II, Germany was partitioned into four separate areas, each controlled by the four allied powers: the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and the Soviet Union. As relations with the USSR deteriorated, the split hardened into just two separate regions: West Germany, supported by the United States and other Western democracies; and East Germany, which was controlled by the Soviet Union. The Berlin Wall, constructed by the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in 1961 to separate West from East Berlin, became a symbol of the division between democracy and communism. East Germany cut its citizens off from the West and violently put down a rebellion in East Berlin in 1953.
When Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1985, he and President Ronald Reagan established a rapport which allowed the United States and the USSR to improve relations. Eventually, the unthinkable happened â?? on November 9, 1989 the Berlin Wall fell, representing the symbolic end to the Cold War.
The following is a speech given by Ambassador J.D. Bindenagel, who was the former Deputy U.S. Ambassador to the German Democratic Republic from 1989-1990, at the University of Notre Dame on the tenth anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall. In his speech he provides his personal experiences with the fall of the Berlin Wall and examines the developments that made it possible.
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