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"The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire" by John Sloan

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"The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire" by John Sloan

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Website

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Morris, David. “The Rise and Fall of the Berlin Wall | 4 Corners of the World.” Library of Congress Blogs, 1 November 2019, https://blogs.loc.gov/international-collections/2019/11/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-berlin-wall/. Accessed 19 May 2023.

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Berlin Wall - History, Dates & the Fall | HISTORY, 15 December 2009, https://www.history.com/topics/cold-war/berlin-wall. Accessed 19 May 2023.

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"The Rise and Fall of the Berlin Wall" by David Morris

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"The Rise and Fall of the Berlin Wall" by David Morris

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The Berlin Wall came down on the evening of November 9, 1989, during a hastily arranged international press conference in East Berlin. Günter Schabowski, an official in East Germany's ruling Socialist Unity Party, ambled to the podium clutching some papers. Neither he nor the assembled journalists had got much sleep. Both had been preoccupied with the changes convulsing Communist Europe in the wake of Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev's liberal reforms summarized under the buzzwords Glasnost (openness) and Perestroika (restructuring). Over the summer, East German tourists in Hungary had already taken advantage of that country's newly relaxed border controls to evade their country's ban on travel to the West and poured through the border to Austria. More crowds of East Germans had been gathering at West German embassies in Budapest, Prague, and Warsaw to demand passage to West Germany. By the time Schabowski mounted the podium, nearly 200,000 East Germans had made their way to West Germany by these routes. In East Germany itself, the regime teetered as mass demonstrations demanded Gorbachev-style reforms. This protest movement continued to grow despite the resignation the previous month of Erich Honecker, the leader of East Germany since 1971, and the entire East German Politbüro only the day before. It was clear that East Germany was facing a crisis, but no one in the room that evening could have foreseen the historic drama that was about to unfold.

Schabowski opened the conference, which was broadcast live on East German television, with a dull recounting of a recent Central Committee meeting. About an hour into the proceedings, an Italian journalist named Riccardo Ehrman asked a question about East Germany's travel ban. Under the circumstances the question might have been expected, but Schabowski seemed caught off guard. He fumbled through his papers, familiarizing himself with their contents on the spot. Other journalists sensed his vulnerability and began to pepper him with questions. Finally, reading haltingly from a paper he said he had just received on his way to the conference, Schabowski seemed to say that East Germans were free to travel via all transit points from East to West Germany, including West Berlin, " ab sofort " (effective immediately). Then he adjourned the conference.

Clamoring reporters trailed Schabowski as he left the room. Was the Wall now truly open? Would East German border guards no longer shoot at those attempting to leave, as in the past? Would East German citizens be allowed to return after they left? Within hours such questions were swept aside by the tide of events Schabowski's comments unleashed. Aided by recent advances in cable and satellite technology, the international media soon broadcast the news, along with scenes of joy at the Berlin Wall as people began to cross it unhindered for the first time in nearly thirty years. Near the streetcar stop of Friedrichstrasse, some in the crowd recognized Ehrman and hoisted him onto their shoulders, proclaiming him the Maueröffner, the man who opened the Wall. In less than a year, East Germany would crumble along with its Wall, and Germany would be reunified.

To understand why the Wall fell it is necessary to understand why it was built. After World War II the victorious allies, known as the Four Powers, set up occupation zones in Germany-the Soviets in the East, the Americans, British, and French in the West. A special status was accorded to Berlin. It was located deep in the Soviet zone, but, like the country as a whole, was administered by the Four Powers. Originally conceived as a provisional arrangement until occupation ended, this division of Germany and Berlin soon solidified as the expedient wartime alliance between the Soviet Union and the Western powers gave way to the ideological and military confrontation of the Cold War. After the founding of two German states in 1949-the Federal Republic of Germany in the West and the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in the East-Germany's erstwhile capital of Berlin became the neuralgic heart of the Cold War, its western half an outpost of freedom while its eastern half languished under the Soviet Union's repression of freedom in central and eastern Europe.

Unlike their fellow subjects elsewhere in Soviet-dominated Europe, East Germans could look next-door to a free and prosperous counterpart, with a shared culture and language, perhaps even with relatives now separated from them by their country's division. These affinities and contrasts grew more acute over time as radio and television broadcasts from West Germany reached the East, and divided Berlin was where they were most painfully apparent. Massive migration to the West was the result, especially through West Berlin. In 1960 alone nearly 200,000 East Germans left the GDR for West Germany. This added to the over 2.5 million that had left since the war. As always in such movements, it was mostly the young and the skilled who risked the wrath of the authorities to seek their freedom. The GDR, meant to be a showcase of the Soviet model in the middle of Europe, was being drained of brains and bodies, and East Berlin, the self-styled "capital of the GDR," was the center of the hemorrhage.

The Wall was East Germany's answer to this existential threat. On August 13, 1961, at one o'clock in the morning, the boundary between both halves of Berlin and the checkpoints between West Berlin and the surrounding region of Brandenburg were sealed off. At first, rolls of barbed wire were installed, guarded by soldiers of the East German army and police. These were soon replaced by two-meter-high barbed-wire fences. In the densely built-up center of Berlin, windows and doors of buildings bordering the western sector were bricked up as guards prevented residents (and the laboring masons) from escaping. Despite the growing Wall, the number of those attempting to flee to the West continued to climb. Many paid with their lives. On August 23, the Wall claimed the first of over 130 victims in its lifespan. Ida Siekmann lived directly on the sector boundary; her house could only be entered from the West Berlin side. Only days earlier she could cross the street to visit friends and family in the French sector. As the Wall went up, she died after jumping from her third-floor apartment in her attempt to join them.

The Wall met with little more than verbal protest from the Western powers. U.S. President John F. Kennedy's visit to Berlin in June 1963 and his stirring proclamation, "Ich bin ein Berliner," could not disguise the West's accommodation of Soviet and East German actions. This fact was bitterly noted by Germans at the time but demonstrated the modus vivendi of the victorious allies after their failure to agree on a policy for all of Germany. The West would defend its rights in West Germany and West Berlin, but by the same token it would not interfere with Soviet and East German actions in "their" portions of Germany. Thus was Berlin a microcosm of the global Cold War standoff between the superpowers.

By the mid-1970s, the Wall had acquired the mechanized brutality familiar to observers in later years. Entire blocks of houses and other structures were bulldozed to make way for moats, security perimeters, lighting and alarm systems, watchtowers, and dog runs. By the time it finally came down, the Wall was a technologically sophisticated, virtually impenetrable concrete and steel barrier with an elaborate infrastructure, guarded by a special unit of the East German army. Its official designation in East Germany's Orwellian phrase was "anti-fascist protective barrier." For the free world, it was a stark monument to the GDR's illegitimacy and repression.

That such a monstrous structure could crumble overnight after some awkward remarks by a Communist official at a press conference seemed surreal to observers at the time. In retrospect it's easier to see that the Wall fell because the conditions for the GDR's survival had already vanished by the time Schabowski made his remarks. Gorbachev had ripped them away when he revoked the so-called Brezhnev doctrine of intervening militarily to quash popular opposition in Moscow's satellites, as in Budapest in 1956 and Prague in 1968. In his last days in power Honecker hoped Gorbachev would do just that as protests engulfed East Germany and thousands were fleeing the country. Gorbachev refused. In one of the most surreal and ironic moments in recent European history, Gorbachev chose the festivities of the fortieth anniversary of the founding of the GDR in October 1989 to warn Honecker: "Life punishes those who arrive late." Moscow left its satellites to their own devices; East Germany, as became clear within a month, had none. It had never succeeded in establishing a unique identity sufficient to win the loyalty of its subjects in the constant comparison with its western counterpart. Aside from Communism's valiant resistance to Nazism in World War II, it had no independent cultural foundation. While West Germany saw itself as the only free representative of the entire German people and anchored the goal of a peaceful and united Germany in its constitution, East Germany's reason for existence derived solely from the exactitudes of the Cold War and the projection of Soviet power. These existential deficiencies were why the Wall was built in the first place. With Gorbachev's famous warning, both it and the state it had isolated were doomed.

The fall of the Wall did not entirely end Germany's division. Germans still speak of a Mauer in den Köpfen, a wall in people's minds. Thirty years after joining one of the world's most advanced economies practically overnight, many eastern Germans continue to feel like second-class citizens as they grapple with rapid social and economic change. This sense of alienation has contributed to the growing appeal of populist movements in the region. In the West, many have long resented the billions of euros in subsidies that have flowed to the East since reunification and wonder if it was a good thing after all. These mutual doubts and resentments show that Germans continue to struggle with the trauma of national division and the legacy of the Wall that so brutally reinforced it.

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The Rise and Fall of the Berlin Wall | 4 Corners of the World

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A history of the Berlin Wall, why it was built and why it fell.

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Table of Contents

1. The Berlin Wall: The Partitioning of Berlin

2. The Berlin Wall: Blockade and Crisis

3. The Berlin Wall: Building the Wall

4. The Berlin Wall: 1961-1989

5. The Berlin Wall: The Fall of the Wall

On August 13, 1961, the Communist government of the German Democratic Republic (GDR, or East Germany) began to build a barbed wire and concrete "Antifascistischer Schutzwall," or "antifascist bulwark," between East and West Berlin. The official purpose of this Berlin Wall was to keep so-called Western "fascists" from entering East Germany and undermining the socialist state, but it primarily served the objective of stemming mass defections from East to West. The Berlin Wall stood until November 9, 1989, when the head of the East German Communist Party announced that citizens of the GDR could cross the border whenever they pleased. That night, ecstatic crowds swarmed the wall. Some crossed freely into West Berlin, while others brought hammers and picks and began to chip away at the wall itself. To this day, the Berlin Wall remains one of the most powerful and enduring symbols of the Cold War.

The Berlin Wall: The Partitioning of Berlin

Berlin's Animal Arms Race

As World War II came to an end in 1945, a pair of Allied peace conferences at Yalta and Potsdam determined the fate of Germany's territories. They split the defeated nation into four "allied occupation zones": The eastern part of the country went to the Soviet Union, while the western part went to the United States, Great Britain and (eventually) France.

Even though Berlin was located entirely within the Soviet part of the country (it sat about 100 miles from the border between the eastern and western occupation zones), the Yalta and Potsdam agreements split the city into similar sectors. The Soviets took the eastern half, while the other Allies took the western. This four-way occupation of Berlin began in June 1945.

The Berlin Wall: Blockade and Crisis

The existence of West Berlin, a conspicuously capitalist city deep within communist East Germany, "stuck like a bone in the Soviet throat," as Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev put it. The Russians began maneuvering to drive the United States, Britain and France out of the city for good. In 1948, a Soviet blockade of West Berlin aimed to starve the western Allies out of the city. Instead of retreating, however, the United States and its allies supplied their sectors of the city from the air. This effort, known as the Berlin Airlift, lasted for more than a year and delivered more than 2.3 million tons of food, fuel and other goods to West Berlin. The Soviets called off the blockade in 1949.

Did you know? On October 22, 1961, a quarrel between an East German border guard and an American official on his way to the opera in East Berlin very nearly led to what one observer called "a nuclear-age equivalent of the Wild West Showdown at the O.K. Corral." That day, American and Soviet tanks faced off at Checkpoint Charlie for 16 hours. Photographs of the confrontation are some of the most familiar and memorable images of the Cold War.

After a decade of relative calm, tensions flared again in 1958. For the next three years, the Soviets-emboldened by the successful launch of the Sputnik satellite the year before during the " Space Race " and embarrassed by the seemingly endless flow of refugees from east to west (nearly 3 million since the end of the blockade, many of them young skilled workers such as doctors, teachers and engineers)-blustered and made threats, while the Allies resisted. Summits, conferences and other negotiations came and went without resolution.

Meanwhile, the flood of refugees continued. In June 1961, some 19,000 people left the GDR through Berlin. The following month, 30,000 fled. In the first 11 days of August, 16,000 East Germans crossed the border into West Berlin, and on August 12 some 2,400 followed-the largest number of defectors ever to leave East Germany in a single day.

The Berlin Wall: Building the Wall

That night, Premier Khrushchev gave the East German government permission to stop the flow of emigrants by closing its border for good. In just two weeks, the East German army, police force and volunteer construction workers had completed a makeshift barbed wire and concrete block wall -the Berlin Wall-that divided one side of the city from the other.

Before the wall was built, Berliners on both sides of the city could move around fairly freely: They crossed the East-West border to work, to shop, to go to the theater and the movies. Trains and subway lines carried passengers back and forth. After the wall was built, it became impossible to get from East to West Berlin except through one of three checkpoints: at Helmstedt ("Checkpoint Alpha" in American military parlance), at Dreilinden ("Checkpoint Bravo") and in the center of Berlin at Friedrichstrasse ("Checkpoint Charlie"). (Eventually, the GDR built 12 checkpoints along the wall.) At each of the checkpoints, East German soldiers screened diplomats and other officials before they were allowed to enter or leave. Except under special circumstances, travelers from East and West Berlin were rarely allowed across the border.

The Berlin Wall: 1961-1989

The construction of the Berlin Wall did stop the flood of refugees from East to West, and it did defuse the crisis over Berlin. (Though he was not happy about it, President John F. Kennedy conceded that "a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.") Almost two years after the Berlin Wall was erected, John F. Kennedy delivered one of the most famous addresses of his presidency to a crowd of more than 120,000 gathered outside West Berlin's city hall, just steps from the Brandenburg Gate. Kennedy's speech has been largely remembered for one particular phrase. "I am a Berliner."

In all, at least 171 people were killed trying to get over, under or around the Berlin Wall. Escape from East Germany was not impossible, however: From 1961 until the wall came down in 1989, more than 5,000 East Germans (including some 600 border guards) managed to cross the border by jumping out of windows adjacent to the wall, climbing over the barbed wire, flying in hot air balloons, crawling through the sewers and driving through unfortified parts of the wall at high speeds.

The Berlin Wall: The Fall of the Wall

On November 9, 1989, as the Cold War began to thaw across Eastern Europe, the spokesman for East Berlin's Communist Party announced a change in his city's relations with the West. Starting at midnight that day, he said, citizens of the GDR were free to cross the country's borders. East and West Berliners flocked to the wall, drinking beer and champagne and chanting "Tor auf!" ("Open the gate!"). At midnight, they flooded through the checkpoints.

More than 2 million people from East Berlin visited West Berlin that weekend to participate in a celebration that was, one journalist wrote, "the greatest street party in the history of the world." People used hammers and picks to knock away chunks of the wall-they became known as "mauerspechte," or "wall woodpeckers"-while cranes and bulldozers pulled down section after section. Soon the wall was gone and Berlin was united for the first time since 1945. "Only today," one Berliner spray-painted on a piece of the wall, "is the war really over."

The reunification of East and West Germany was made official on October 3, 1990, almost one year after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

HISTORY Vault: Declassified: Rise and Fall of the Wall

Mine formerly guarded vaults and archives around the world to reveal untold stories about the brutal life and catastrophic death of the Berlin Wall, a central symbol of the 20th century's longest and deadliest war.

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On August 13, 1961, the Communist government of East Germany began to build a barbed wire and concrete "Antifascistischer Schutzwall," or "antifascist bulwark," between East and West Berlin. The official purpose of the Berlin Wall was to keep Western "fascists" from entering East Germany and undermining the socialist state, but it primarily served the objective of stemming mass defections from East to West.

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While their parents were banished to West Berlin, Kurt Muller and his brother Franz were able to remain in East Berlin. Franz has joined the East German police force, the grepo. Kurt, though, misses his parents and is unable to excuse the Wall's injustice. He longs to travel to the West.

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What shapes a person and their perspective? 

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What shapes a person and their perspective? 

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"You people are always saying something is impossible. Because it gives you an excuse for doing nothing(Marino 68).
"Your father is a very sensible man! "(Marino 105).
"I don't want to live with that. I want to get away from everybody who accepts this world as if it were right and normal"(Marino 120).

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The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory has caused many peoples perspectives to change on big capitalistic companies in the US. This is because there are no safety regulations regarding fire safety. Perspectives also have changed due to unsafe working spaces and unfair treatment to workers.

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The Berlin Wall came down on the evening of November 9, 1989, during a hastily arranged international press conference in East Berlin. Gunter Schabowski, an official in East Germany’s ruling Socialist Unity Party, ambled to the podium clutching some papers.

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Berlin Wall: Meaning, Measurement, and Information Britannica
During the Cold War, the German Democratic Republic constructed the Berlin Wall to stop its citizens from fleeing Soviet-controlled East Berlin and moving to West Berlin, which was governed by the main Western Allies. It created two starkly different areas within the city of Berlin, both in terms of geography and ideology.

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The book I chose as a companion text is Uprising. Both Escape From East Berlin and Uprising talk about suppression. They also talk about how the characters go through challenging situations. Uprising talks about women's suffrage while Escape From East Berlin talks about suffrage while being trapped. This is why the books are related.

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The Berlin Wall has caused many people's perspectives to change on communist governments and how divided the world can feel because of the wall.