- But with Berlin we also have
to talk about the Cold War.
What you see in the background,
is a part of the original
Berlin Wall at a memorial site
and here I have a student, Cody Huber,
who is a freshman who also
studied German with me
so tell us about the wall.
- [Cody Huber] As he said, I'm Cody Huber
and this is the original Berlin Wall.
After World War II, Germany and Berlin
were both divided into four sectors:
the Russian sector, the American sector,
the British sector, and the French sector.
And in 1949, there was a London Conference
with Great Britain and America
and they put their two zones together
and then they talked to France
and they put their three zones together.
So now we have
the three zones versus the Russian zone
so we're getting some tension going on.
And then we had a couple years of that
and then it was very divided,
the west was very different from the east.
So a lot of the East Germans
were moving over to West Germany
and the Russians didn't like this
because they needed the population
here in East Germany, in East Berlin.
So, in 1961, they started,
overnight they put up a wall.
It started out with just barbed wire
and rubble and whatever they could find
and it actually surrounds
Berlin, West Berlin.
Not just cuts through Berlin.
There were four stages of the wall:
First one was this barbed wire
and then the second one, a
couple days later in 1961,
was they put some concrete blocks up.
And then the third one was
a couple years later, in the late sixties,
they put up more heavy duty
concrete blocks that were higher
like more like this one,
this was the fourth stage where they had
the whole wall with the thing on the top
so even if you got to the top
it's really hard to climb over that.
And many places in Berlin have
a very extensive wall with a no mans land,
such as this one.
You can see there that's
the inner wall over there
and this is the outer wall.
So even if you'd gotten past this wall,
you'd still have to get over
the inner wall and by that time
there'd certainly be a Soviet
guard who'd be stopping you.
Once they had the wall completed,
in the mid seventies with
the fourth stage like this,
it was really hard to get across.
And that's pretty much the
history of the Berlin Wall.
