Word: walling
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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COVER: After nearly three decades as the cold war's premier symbol, the Wall crumbles...
...speed, the hideous partition that split Berlin falls to the pickax of reforms inspired by Mikhail Gorbachev. As the city exults and the world ponders the consequences, one thing is certain: nothing will ever be quite the same again. -- Is one Germany better than two? -- An obituary for the Wall of Shame, where some 75 people yearning for freedom have perished...
...geography of the past is studded with walled cities. Jerusalem and Rome, to name but two from antiquity, fortified themselves against enemies without. Later, in medieval times, the citizens of London and Paris built and rebuilt ramparts to safeguard their liberties, ones that many of their rural contemporaries, burdened with the feudal status of serf, were denied. Only in the 20th century has a city had a wall rammed through its innards, circumscribing the freedom of two-thirds of its people, forcing upon them a serf-like tie to the land. Only in Berlin...
Images of the violation recur. When Berliners in the Soviet-run sector woke on the morning of Aug. 13, 1961, to find families sundered and the city rived by barbed wire -- and soon concrete -- many frantically sought routes of escape. The Berlin Wall was meant to halt a tide of migrants to the West that had left East Germany short of workers and threatened the stability of the Communist regime: more than 2.7 million had departed since the founding of the German Democratic Republic in 1949, 30,000 in July 1961 alone...
...West. Many refugees leaped, some into fire nets, others to the pavement; more than a few died in the fall. After the regime bricked up the windows, the resourceful tunneled beneath the 20-ft. "death strip" and its mines and gun emplacements. The most daring efforts came from Wall jumpers, who confronted head on the "antifascist protective barrier," as the jargon of totalitarianism described the Wall. In their jagged sprints, dodging searchlight beams and bullets, they created a theater of longing where the value of freedom -- and the maleficence of its denial -- found an extraordinary visual expression...