I don’t know why, but I was thinking about the Berlin Wall today, and all of the people essentially imprisoned in their own city by their own government, and all of the people killed trying to escape, and I had what I’m certain is a stupid question, but…
Why was it so important that no one leave? What is the benefit of forcefully holding on to people who have zero interest in remaining your citizens, to the point where you’d rather kill them than let them move elsewhere?
Losing most of your doctors, engineers, lawyers, and other professional and skilled persons is not typically a good thing. That is what had been happening pre 1961.
It turns out that communism kinda sucks. That makes most people want to leave. A country where most people want to GTFO is not likely to be a successful enterprise.
Most fanatical ideologies, not just political but religious too, seem to have a “no defectors” rule.
This. It wasn’t just a few brave souls who were fleeing. Wiki cites an estimate of 3.5 million emigres/defectors before the wall went up, about 20% of the population. Not generally skewed towards old-age pensioners.
Also, large scale defection isn’t just economically damaging; it hurts the image of your state abroad as well as its credibility with its own citizens.
Speaking of pensioners; eventually the DDR made it very easy for men & women over retirement age to visit the West, since they were no longer working they wouldn’t be missed if they decided not to return (also there wouldn’t be any need to pay their pensions).
Thank you.
I suppose I may be lacking some historical perspective. When the Berlin Wall fell I was 12. By the time I understood what it was all about it had pretty much always been a given that life in the Eastern Bloc was miserable shit. It should be patently obvious that if your citizenry is desperate enough to leave that they will risk certain death, and not just for themselves but for their entire families, your political ideologies have failed in the most complete possible way, but I’d imagine things look a lot different when you’re sitting atop that pyramid, and the happiness and prosperity of the citizenry probably doesn’t even make the list of where your priorities lie.
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The cars available - the Trabant, for example, were just awful. 3 cylinder, two stroke engine (mix gas and oil), the body was made of a wool-cardboard material. If you wanted one, it took a while. So much that it was generally de rigeur to sign up your child when they were born. When the great day arrived 10 or 20 years later, and notification or authorization was received there was no dallying. If one did not make the purchase within a few days, someone else would have the privilege. Borrowing money or pooling with relatives to buy the car on such short notice was commonplace.
Bear with me on this story…
In 1988 I went so see a Soviet poet read at my college. I suppose now I’d be more aware of cultural distinctions (eg, Georgian, Ukrainian, Azerbaijani, etc) but to me at the time he was “Russian.” The poetry itself I have no memory of, I was dragged to it by a friend. I remember noting the very obvious KGB minder sitting in the corner, he was a caricature, badly fitting suit, sloppy haircut, obviously uncomfortable and nervous in the most banal situation imaginable.
The memorable part came after the reading. First the leader of the local Young Spartacists stood up to declaim about how the Russian engagement in Afghanistan was really about combating violent Jihadist fanatics (and in retrospect…) No one else including the poet had anything to say about this.
Then one of the Russian expats in the audience–they were most of of the people there–started haranguing the poet about emigration restrictions, and why wouldn’t the USSR let people leave. The poet eventually blurted what I assume he had been told to say:
“If we opened the borders, no one would leave. That’s why we have travel restrictions.”
Previous German administrations, wise monarchical administrations, were only too pleased to expedite the flow of the detritus of the liberal '48ers to a magical land 4-5000 miles away. Same with Castro dumping his similar criminal element.
Plus, the more who left the more is left to share out amongst the honest folk who are treue.
The same ‘rule’ applies today with émigrés from Africa. The people who leave are the young and entrepreneurial not the old and sick. In Britain in the 60s we had concerns about the so called ‘brain drain’. Doctors, engineers and scientists, leaving for a better and more rewarding environment - mainly to the US.
Nobody was imprisoned in Berlin. Anyone living in East Berlin was free to leave to other parts of East Germany. Similarly, anyone living in West Berlin was free to leave to West Germany. (West Berlin wasn’t technically part of West Germany, though the respective governments did permit freedom of movement.) Freedom of movement generally stopped at the national borders of East and West Germany, the same as in almost every other country. The problem for East Germans was that the state did not make it particularly easy for them to travel to West Germany or to West Berlin.
The part put in italics by me is not true. The restrictions on freedom of movement put in place by “almost every other country” concern immigration, not emigration. Please name a democratic country, now or during the Cold War, which was preventing its own citizens from leaving. Restrictions on immigration exist, of course, but emigaration is generally available to anybody. Which was not the case for the GDR.
You’re right, of course; in my earlier post I wasn’t making a distinction between the two. To cross a border with the intent of long-term residence, you generally need permission of the country you’re entering, but not the one you’re leaving. The Warsaw Pact countries were notable exceptions in that they required permission not just to enter but also to leave. This was a problem not just for East Germans wanting to emigrate to West Germany or West Berlin, but also for, say, Soviet Jews wanting to leave for Israel.
The USSR was more strict than just that. Farmers weren’t allowed to move into the city (nor even to leave their land for more than 30 days) and, while the Wikipedia doesn’t seem to confirm it at a glance, I believe that in general you can’t just up and move to another city, without applying for approval and so-forth.
I have a close friend in Dresden, who told me that his parents put him on the waiting list for a Trabant when he was quite young, and as it happened he got his just a few months before the wall came down. He said that the day the wall came down his car became worthless (due to the sudden availability of used western cars)
You are wrong. An internal passport only stated your permanent address. There was nothing stopping you from moving in between the Union (and indeed Comecon countries). It was more akin to a US Social Security number and passport or a Euro style ID Cards. Bus, train and earlier Air tickets (until the 1970’s hijackings) were bought without names.
My guess is that the car would rather become worthless on the day of the monetary and economic union between West and East Germany, which occurred on 1 July 1990, i.e., between the fall of the wall and complete reunification. On that day, the West German deutschmark was introduced in East Germany, and bank balances and salaries were converted. The wall being down would in itself not make western cars easily accessible to the average consumer in the GDR, since they would still lack the money to buy them.
(In fact, fancy cars had been available in East Germany long before the fall of the wall, through a state-owned East German company named Genex, which would sell, in exchange for deutschmarks, products that could not easily be got for East German marks. The main business of Genex was that West Germans could, through that company, order products as gifts to be delivered to their friends and family in the East; but if you had nobody in the West paying for it with deutschmarks, you would be pretty much excluded from these amenities.)
North Korea does the very same thing today. They retain their citizens by force (shooting them if they try leaving illegally), and/or imprisonment of that person and his family.
They also do it by brainwashing their citizens. Elementary school children are taught about the American bastards (their term) who started the Korean war by occupying SK and marching north. They believe their glorious leader had a supernatural birth because that’s the official account. They believe Kim Jung-il invented the hamburger, their leaders are magical, bowl perfect game every time, make a hole in one on every hole on the gold course, and don’t dedicate.
But a wall with armed guards is the common denominator. It’s designed to keep their near-slave laborers working in the field and marching in the army, supporting the somewhat luxurious lifestyle of a few near the top.
It isn’t easy to portray yourself as a state run by the people and for the people when the people are fleeing the country every chance they get. Hence the wall in Berlin and barbed wire and gun turrets on the other borders.