Sixty years on, politicians have made East-West divisions worse
Sixty years ago today, on 13 August 1961, Gerda Langosch (28) was in the middle of making breakfast in her flat in the Kieler Straße 3 in central Berlin when she heard the news on the radio: the Soviet sector, in which she lived, had been sealed off from the Western parts of the city by an ‘anti-fascist protection wall’.
Gerda was stunned. How could the government seal off an entire part of Berlin overnight? She hurried to her parents’ flat a few doors down from where she could see onto the Boyenstraße, which marked the border. And indeed, so-called ‘Spanish Riders’, defensive wooden barriers with barbed wire, had been set up. She and 16 million other Germans would spend the next 28 years of their lives behind the Iron Curtain, whether they liked it or not.
