East Germany, 1958-90

On 15 June 1961 Walter Ulbricht told a press conference that nobody had any intention of building a wall. Eight weeks later Berliners woke to find barbed wire across their streets. For the next twenty-eight years the German Democratic Republic held its population in place with concrete, watchtowers and a secret police force that at its height employed around 91,000 people full time and ran roughly 189,000 informers. Then, in the autumn of 1989, it lost control of its own citizens in about eight weeks and disappeared within a year.

This note covers the Berlin Wall crisis, the economy and the machinery of control, daily life in a state that genuinely delivered work, childcare and housing while denying free speech and free movement, the strange half-friendship of Ostpolitik, and the Peaceful Revolution. Because this is a Paper 2 source topic, it also uses one of the richest bodies of evidence any period has left behind: propaganda, escape testimony, applications to emigrate, and the Stasi's own files, which the people they spied on were later allowed to read.