# data[].attributes.body
This article "Berlin Wall" from History.com is about the events relating to the Berlin Wall. It starts as early as the 1940s when describing the events leading up to. The USSR decided to build the wall after the end of WWII. It then describes the life of many during the time of the wall through example and comparisons. Finally, the article concludes by detailing the fall of the wall and the events that followed.

# data[].attributes.body
History.com. “Berlin Wall.” Berlin Wall - History, Dates & the Fall | HISTORY, 15 December 2009, https://www.history.com/topics/cold-war/berlin-wall. Accessed 19 May 2023.
Marino, Andy. Escape From East Berlin. Scholastic, 2022.
Wiesel, Elie. Night. Hill & Wang, 2006.
Walt Disney studios home entertainment. (2019). Coco [Film]. Milano.
Buena Vista Pictures Distribution, Inc. (1989). The Little Mermaid [DVD]. United States.

# data[].attributes.body
I chose to use the movie Coco as my multimodal connection because I can easily answer the essential question of what happened in this movie. The movie is about a boy who loves music while their family had a history of hating music. During this time, Miguel does the unthinkable and steals a guitar but as playing the guitar, he warps into the realm of the dead. To answer the essential question, his love for music made him the black sheep of his family. He rebelled by being the first one in his family to start playing the guitar in decades of years.

# data[].attributes.body
The article "Berlin Wall" from the source History.com completely goes over what you need to know historically. The reader may find that there are many events that one can connect between this and Escape From East Berlin. One of these connections being the dates. The wall started being torn down in 1989, and the book does display that. It says so in the last chapter where both Marta and Kurtz take part in the destruction of the wall together.

# data[].attributes.body
I picked Disney's The Little Mermaid because it fits well to the essential question and even Focal Text. It is about a Mermaid who wants to be a part of the human world. She faces quite the challenge though because it is looked down upon by her father, a powerful figure in the film. This is just like how Kurtz and Marta face off against the Stasi. These both collide the expectations of their eras or communities.

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.history.com/topics/cold-war/berlin-wall

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
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.

Fact Check

We strive for accuracy and fairness. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! HISTORY reviews and updates its content regularly to ensure it is complete and accurate.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
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.

# data[].attributes.body
The similarities between these two books are significant but their differences are also ones to take notes for. For instance, both of these books take place in Germany. However the year the book Night was in was 1956, and the year the book "Escape from East Berlin" was in the late 1980s. Both books also involve the event of getting in trouble with the government. Nevertheless, in the book "Night" the government involved dehumanizes people and they were able to control everything around them, while in "Escape from East Berlin", both Marta and Kurt escaped.

# data[].attributes.body
Marta Dietrich is a seemingly normal 12-year-old girl in East Berlin, but that couldn't be further from the truth. Her brother had tried to cross the then newly-formed Berlin Wall, but had been tragically shot in the process. Marta has now developed her own ideas of crossing the wall and she schemes with her cousin Harry, yet narrowly avoids being caught. Marta makes it over the wall with her family, but that's not the end of the wall. Several years later, another man named Kurtz got over the wall, but not without challenges. Having a Stasi(German agent) brother and grandpa were a few. In a change of heart, his grandpa comes around to get him over the wall, yet was killed in the process.

# data[].attributes.body
How do the protagonist’s traits collide with the expectations of the era?