"The Rise and Fall of the Berlin Wall"

The Art of Good Government has an interesting article entitled "The Rise and Fall of the Berlin Wall," which provides a brief history of East Germany and the Berlin Wall, including photographs. I found the article engaging if for no other reason than the history. However, the article not only relates the rise of East Germany, but the failures that eventually led to the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the eventual merging of East and West Germany. The author provides a personal point of view by describing his own travel into East Germany prior to the fall of the Wall.

The author describes a 1985 journey into East Germany:

As we drove the short distance towards Eisenach in East Germany our hearts began to sink as the dismal socialist scene gradually unfolded before us. The main road leading into the town was of prewar cobbles, full of potholes, the road edges overgrown and untidy, with rusted and leaning street lights many with their light fittings missing. Eisenach itself presented a scene straight from the aftermath of World War II. The buildings were crumbling, the dusty, dirty and long-unpainted facades almost obscured by a thick pall of sulphurous coal-smoke, and the blue fumes from the 2-stoke cars which, incidentally were only for model workers after a wait of up to 21 years. The yellow coal smoke, we later learned, was produced by the ubiquitous yellow-dust coal briquettes which seemed to be the only form of domestic heating fuel. It came from enormous open-cast mines which in their relentless expansion had consumed whole villages.
All the buildings were dirty and grimy, the streets and pavements in disrepair, the few shops dowdy, and small crowds of people seemed to be standing around on street corners as if with nothing to do. In the back streets whole blocks of houses were simply falling down, some boarded up, some lying as piles of rubble which nature was already camouflaging with grass and small bushes. To call our reaction "a culture shock" after West Germany would be a totally inadequate description, despite our familiarity with other East European countries.
The more we travelled through East Germany, the more evidence we saw of a country close to economic breakdown. The roads were all full of holes – though there was little traffic even on main roads, for private motorists could not travel outside their towns without a permit. The air was polluted everywhere, even in the forest where we had thought we might enjoy a brief refreshment with nature. The few relatively modern industries belched out clouds of polluted gases while the many older factories seemed to be surviving in partly ruined premises. Urban streets were everywhere in decay and not a touch of paint had been put on the former private houses, each now assigned to several families, since before the War.


Wittenberg was a town we hadn't planned to visit – we had been directed there by the almighty State Tour Planners. But it was, we were to discover, the home of Martin Luther, so at least we were able to learn more about him and to see the famous church door on which he had nailed his 95 Theses which sparked the Reformation. It was a sunny afternoon, so after a morning of Luther-study, we walked the short distance out of town to the banks of the Elbe River – the great artery which is to East Germany what the Rhine is to the West. We sat down at the edge of a field a few yards from the river, looking across to the opposite bank where there was a large and active Russian army barracks.
After a few moments we became aware of an overwhelmingly foul odour. Surprised, we got up and looked closely at the river. The water was thick and black, its surface solid with pollution of every kind imaginable, glistening multicoloured globules of oily petroleum products, lumps of industrial waste, yellowish foam, solid human effluent and domestic garbage. Following the universal instructions on fireworks – we retired immediately! Simple fact: environmental protection was a luxury East Germany could not afford, and didn't even care about.

 Could almost be a description of Detroit....