berlin essay

Matt Carr’s Infernal Machine

Five Days in Berlin

A photo-essay.

All cities are historical cities, but some are more historical than others.

I’ve just come back from a five-day visit to Berlin - a city with more history than any capital has any right to expect. Two world wars and the frontline of the Cold War; fascist and socialist dictatorship; Nazi genocide and Prussian militarism; revolution and counter-revolution - Berlin was at the epicentre of the twentieth century’s darkest politics, and it is instantly and compulsively fascinating to see how this past has been incorporated into the physical structure of the city.

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We spent a lot of time in historical museums, or wandering the streets where the past is written into buildings, names and places familiar from history and literature. The history of Berlin is on one level the history of two failed utopian projects that took root in the same city. Firstly, the racially-purified ‘World City Germania’ that Hitler’s architect Albert Speer attempted to construct from his leader’s sketches and megalomaniac fantasies:

And then the Stalinist utopia of the GDR that emerged from the wreckage of Nazism:

Some may struggle to recognize the Third Reich as a utopian project, but that was how Hitler, Himmler and their movement saw General Plan East - their insane plan to kill 30 million Slavs by the early 1970s and connect Berlin to German farms in the Urals through supertrains and superhighways.

Nor is it easy for post-Cold War Europeans to consider the shabby Soviet-dominated surveillance-dystopia of the GDR as an ideal place, but that was the image of East Berlin which the German Democratic Republic transmitted to its people and to the West - a socialist city headed for a better future under Soviet tutelage.

These aspirations are embodied in the monumental architecture along Karl-Marx Allee (formerly Stalinallee until de-Stalinisation reached East Berlin in 1961) a wide boulevard of ornate apartment blocks constructed largely through volunteer labour after the war as a socialist counterpart to the bourgeois Unter den Linden:

Like so many of Berlin’s avenues and public squares, the boulevard seemed built for marching armies and massive crowd gatherings - including the crowds that rebelled against the communist government in 1953 and were met with tanks and soldiers while the development was under construction.

Today, it remains a vainglorious relic of socialist neoclassicism in a city where even the shopping malls are built on an epic scale. And once you get used to the size, you can trace the city’s history in the dazzling mixture of architectural styles, that include the nineteenth century apartment blocks known as Mietskaserne (rental barracks), modernist experiments, and the few Nazi buildings that still remain, such as Goering’s sinister aviation ministry:

I don’t think I’ve ever been in a city where so many buildings and historical sites recall universally-familiar images. Look at the Reichstag and you immediately see photographs of the burning building in 1933, or Russian soldiers soldiers flying the Soviet flag from the facade in 1945.

Few people who peer down at the empty bookshelves of the underground ‘empty library’ monument in the Bebelplatz, will not have seen the images of Nazi students piling books onto bonfires in the same space in 1933.

In East Berlin, we visited the offices at the Stasi HQ where Erich Mielke, the Minister for State Security, coordinated ‘blanket coverage’ of the population until the last days of the GDR. Beyond the statue of ‘Iron Felix’ Dzerzshinsky, the founder of the Cheka, in the foyer, the museum was a testament to the Stasi’s sleazy obsession with pervasive surveillance - all formica tables and desks, cameras in watering cans and bathroom walls, hidden microphones, lock-breaking tools and tales of informers who included the lead singer in a punk band and members of national athletics teams.

At the section of the Berlin Wall known as the ‘East Side Gallery’, we saw the murals and paintings celebrating the advent of a borderless world - another imagined utopia that now seems obsolete in our era of proliferating borders, drowning migrants and more ‘fortified’ walls and barriers than at any other time in human history.

IF Berlin is the city of lost utopias, it was also the city where the greatest genocide in human history was planned and organized, and this past is also visible all over the city. I was not impressed by the ‘Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe’ - an abstract necropolis consisting of 2, 700 concrete slabs or stellae of different sizes in what was once the heart of the repressive institutional machinery of the Third Reich.

The monument comes out of the fraught discussions in the recently-unified Germany of the early 1990s, which Brian Ladd describes so forensically in his 1998 book The Ghosts of Berlin. Its creator, Peter Eisenman, has described the monument as an attempt to ‘develop a new idea of memory that differs markedly from nostalgia’ - a curious proposition when applied to the Holocaust - and a ‘frame of reference [that} leads to uncertainty and isolates the individual through a disturbing personal experience.’

Berlin’s official website says that ‘visitors that may experience a brief moment of disorientation, which should open up space for discussion’. Personally, I found the memorial tricksy, excessively-abstract, and distinctly underwhelming. Nor, wandering amongst the slabs, was I able to grasp Eisenman’s claim that ‘The time of the experience of the individual does not grant further understanding, because understanding is not possible.’

In constructing a memorial to so massive a crime, ‘understanding’ or not-understanding should not be the only considerations, and the monument felt to me like a pretentiously-conceived and pointless labyrinth, in a place where something more visceral, emotional and empathetic was required.

Berlin has many other forms of Holocaust remembrance, which are far more successful in achieving these aspirations. At the site of the SS Reich Security Main Office in Niederkirchnerstrasse, a permanent ‘Topography of Terror’ exhibition provides a document-based exploration of how Germany succumbed to Nazism - and the consequences of this descent for Europe and the rest of the world.

In the Jewish Museum in Kreuzberg, the lists of dozens of anti-Jewish laws hanging from long scrolls constitute a heart-breaking testament to Nazi racial persecution in all its petty vindictive malice and escalating cruelty. At the same museum an installation of screaming metal faces which clank mournfully as the visitor walks over them commemorates the ‘innocent victims of war and violence.’

All over Berlin, little brass stolpersteine (stepping stones) in the pavements bear the names of Jewish residents who once lived in the adjacent buildings. Outside the Jewish cemetery in the Grosse Hamburger Strasse, a haunting sculpture on the site of a Jewish retirement home commemorates the Jews sent to Theresienstadt Concentration Camp, and needs no further explanation:

In one of the Hackesche Hőfe courtyards in the former Jewish district, a small museum is dedicated to the Otto Weidt Workshop for the Blind - where the Jewish 'anarchist individualist' Otto Weidt saved a number of blind and nearly-blind Jews by employing them in his brushmaking factory.

This humble workshop, with its hidden room, and its stories of extraordinary bravery and humanity of the people who made up Weidt’s network was deeply moving, and the murals on the wall outside that remembered the ‘disappeared’ victims of Latin American dictatorships complemented the museum’s message of resistance to oppression and solidarity across races and borders.

We also visited the villa in Wannsee, where the Reich Security Main Office SS- Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich , convened a meeting of fourteen third or fourth level bureaucrats on 20 January 1942 to coordinate the ‘Final Solution to the Jewish Question.’

This meeting is often depicted as the ‘beginning of the Holocaust’, in part because its written protocols constitute one of the few occasions in which these decisions were written down. In fact the extermination of the Jews was already unfolding. But Heydrich’s meeting was intended to take advantage of ‘opportunities’ opened up by the war in the east, and escalate the killing to a new level, through mass deportations, forced labour and - though this was not spelt out explicitly - through physical extermination.

All this was discussed and decided in little more than ninety minutes, with nibbles, cigarettes and cognac, in the villa that has now become a Holocaust memorial and archive. When we were there, a group of teenagers from an international school were being given a tour. They sat in the same room where Heydrich and his associates coolly planned the deaths of millions, and listened to their German teacher explain to them who such a thing could have happened.

Some were bored and sleepy. Others were sombre, attentive and curious. In one room a group of girls gossiped about their classmates. ‘His cologne gives me headaches’, one girl complained about one of her peers.

I don’t mention this as a generational condemnation. It’s difficult for any generation to assimilate what was discussed that day. An information board at the house warned that ‘dealing with history…goes beyond processing historical information and includes reflecting on one’s own experiences’ and expresses the hope that memorial sites ‘might protect against antisemitism, right-wing extremism, racism, and other forms of group-related enmity.’

Physical memorials, no matter how well-constructed, are only part of the process of remembering, and the Haus de Wannsee-Konferenz (House of the Wannsee Conference) invites visitors to consider the motives of the perpetrators as well as the suffering of their victims.

It explains that ten of the participants were university-educated, that eight were lawyers, that many of them had already been active in murdering Jews on the Eastern Front. It gives potted biographies of Heydrich, Eichmann and the others, which show the decisions they agreed on that day as a logical extension of their careers and ideologies. One photograph of Eichmann padding around his Israeli prison in his slippers was a jarring visual confirmation of Hannah Arendt’s famous formulation of the ‘banality of evil’ to describe the impossibility of matching such a petty individual to the enormity of his crimes.

Berlin is clearly trying to come to terms with this past, and to bring the past to the attention of the present. All the museums we visited were filled with youngsters on school trips. Some arrived laughing, with the exuberance that you find in any school expedition. In others, the laughter gave way to bewildered silence.

There were also more recent memorials, in which the cruelties of the past are intertwined with the cruelties of the 21st century.

Outside the New Synagogue on Oranienburger Strasse, we saw police guarding the magnificently-restored building that was badly-damaged during Kristallnacht and nearly destroyed by Allied bombing. A mural and photographs of Israeli hostages were clearly intended to conflate the Holocaust with the war in Gaza - a juxtaposition that effectively erases the 40,000 Palestinians who have been killed in Gaza and the 622 Palestinians killed in the West Bank since 7 October.

National guilt can have many different outcomes, and not all of them are positive or helpful in laying the basis for a better future. Germany’s harsh response to Palestinian protests, its intolerance of pro-Palestinian voices, and its uncritical support for Israel cannot be separated from the horrific events that Berlin seeks to remember.

It was impossible to think of Berlin’s past, without thinking of the present. One afternoon, we visited the little-known memorial to the Polish revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, at the Lichtenstein Bridge where she was shot in the head and thrown into the Landwehr Canal by Freicorps cavalry soldiers in January 1919, only a few hundred yards from the lake where her fellow-revolutionary comrade Karl Liebnecht met the same fate that day.

Next to the memorial, a plaque pays tribute to the ‘convinced socialist’ who campaigned against ‘oppression, militarism and war’ and became ‘a victim of a ruthless political assassination.’

Standing by the monument, we watched a young woman on the other side of the canal posing for a photo shoot. It was an incongruous juxtaposition, even if the model and photographers were unaware of it, but Berlin is filled with sometimes bewildering interactions between its dark past and its brighter present. It was not for nothing that Wim Wenders once placed the late great Bruno Ganz’s angel on the Victory Monument Bismarck and the Hohenzollerns erected to mark the advent of the First German Reich.

This a city where beauty and boundless creative energy have often co-existed with humanity at its worst, the city of the SA, the KPD and the Spartacists, of Joseph Roth and Alfred Doblin, of Brecht and Lotte Lenya, Marlene Dietrich, of Christopher Isherwood, Georg Grosz and Kathe Kollwitz - a city where you can still admire the beauty of Max Liebermann’s lovingly-restored garden just around the corner from the Wannsee House:

Hitler never liked the city he wanted to be Germany’s ‘world capital.’ Berlin was too cosmopolitan, too experimental, too liberal and leftwing, too sexy or ’degenerate’. He would not have liked it now, with its women in hijabs; its groups of multi-racial primary schoolchildren hopping on and off trains; its resolute - if sometimes wrong-headed - repudiation of everything his vile movement stood for.

I often imagined Bruno Ganz’s angel listening to the thoughts of Berlin’s commuters, as I observed the passengers on the metro, immersed in their mobile phones, in a city that is as charming and engaging as its past has often been horrifying. Ganz was also famous for his other Berlin role - the mad, collapsing Fuhrer whose ranting monologue has been incorporated into so many Downfall videos.

But when I look back on Berlin, I prefer to think of the Turkish schoolchildren playing in a Kreuzberg street that had been closed off for the purpose:

There was a time, right into the early nineties, when Turkish immigrants were considered mere gastarbeiters - guestworkers - without any political or civil rights. Now they have become a permanent presence in a city that is now, racially-speaking, the opposite of everything the Nazis once wanted it to be.

And when I look back on the last week, I can still hear the delighted laughter of the little girl as she was spun round in a giant wheel in that same Kreuzberg park. One day she will discover the history of the country that is now her homeland, and learn that a city which has written some of the darkest pages in the history of humanity might have something to teach a world where too many sinister movements dream of making their countries ‘great again.’

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20 Jun A Photo Essay: Berlin, Germany

Berlin, Germany, is a city that has always intrigued me. There really is no place quite like it. The history from the past combined with the culture of today has created a contrasting mix full of surprises. During our five days exploring the city, we dove headfirst into some fascinating experiences. We learned about the evolution of Berlin’s coffee culture, dug into the street art scene, learned about WWII history on a Berlin Bunker Tour and at the Topography of Terror Museum, and visited iconic sights such as the Reichstag dome, The Holocaust Memorial, Brandenburg Gate, Checkpoint Charlie, and the Berlin Wall, to name a few. And of course, we found some great spots to eat, as well. Our visit also coincided with the holiday season, so we just had to make our way through plenty of fantastic Christmas Markets, too.

Even though our days were filled with all of the above sights, we left Berlin with an even bigger list of things we still want to do and places we want to see. I guess that is what makes a destination great—when you feel the need to return before you’ve even left, you know you found a match.

Here are some of our favorite experiences while exploring Berlin, Germany:

We didn’t go up the Fernsehturm, aka the Berlin TV Tower, but we admired it from the base and whenever we spotted it towering high above the city. It sure looks pretty against a bright blue sky, doesn’t it?! I’d love to go to the top someday, but it just didn’t make the cut this time around.

One of my favorite cafes we visited in Berlin was Distrikt Coffee. I ordered the buttermilk pancakes with bananas, maple berry preserve, citrus butter, and basil, and wow, was it good! I’m not sure if this exact item is still on the menu, but everything we ordered was delicious and the coffee was fantastic. It’s worth a stop either way!

One of our adventures in Berlin was joining in on a street art tour. We learned all about the different types of street art, the legalities of street art in Berlin and around the world, how it gets up on the walls, and about various artists and their different styles of art. I never realized how in depth of a topic this could be, but it was fascinating to dig in, especially in a city where street art has such a deep history.

We spent over an hour walking around town discussing street art and looking at different pieces, and then it was time to try out some painting of our own. We went back to a working artist garage and learned how to create our own piece of art with spray paint, stencils, and a variety of other tools. Micah and I had so much fun testing out our skills, and we were able to take a handmade souvenir home with us!

Markthalle Neun is a food hall located in the Kreuzberg neighborhood. It was the starting point of our coffee tour, which was perfect since we had it on our list to visit anyways. We enjoyed browsing all the offerings at the market and settled on lunch at the BBQ stand. It was tasty and a fun atmosphere to boot!

Kaffee 9, located at Markthalle Neun, was the starting point of our coffee tour. We spent the next couple of hours learning about the evolution of coffee, types of coffee, different brewing and roasting methods, and the local coffee culture in Berlin. At Kaffee 9 we did a coffee tasting where we learned about various roasts and elements of coffee. We stopped at a variety of coffee shops throughout our tour–one was located in an old warehouse and another was a Turkish coffee shop where we were served in the cutest little Turkish cups!

When I was researching restaurants in Berlin, I kept coming across Burgermeister, so we decided we had to give it a try. We loved the small location under the U-Bahn tracks, and the burgers and fries were delicious, too. They definitely lived up to the hype!

One of the Christmas markets that we went to was located on the roof of the Neukölln Arkaden shopping mall. It actually happened to be closed due to wind when we arrived, but thankfully they were still selling gluhwein for those of us who made the trip. Even though it was closed, we were still glad we took the time to find this special spot. The views from the roof were pretty and there was a lot of neat art there, as well. The area is normally a rooftop bar, so even if it’s not the holiday season, it’s still worth a visit!

The Brandenburg Gate is one of the most iconic landmarks in Berlin. During the Cold War, it was a symbol of division between Berlin and Germany. Now, the gate is a symbol of unity and peace in the city.

The Reichstag building is the current home of the German Parliament. You can visit the glass dome on the top of the building with advanced registration, and it is certainly quite the sight to see. Even with cloudy skies, the dome was beautiful. The staircase spirals around the inside of dome and all the way up to the top. Glass panels in the middle of the dome create an interesting stream of reflections, and you can look down into the room below to see the place where many government decisions are made. The unique construction brings light and ventilation into the building below, which creates a sustainable and energy efficient building.

The Holocaust Memorial, or The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, is located a short distance away from the Reichstag. This memorial was opened in 2005 and it is a central memorial site for contemplation, remembrance and warning. Architect Peter Eisenman designed the site with 2,711 concrete slabs of varying heights, and the sloping floor creates a different sight from every direction. There is an underground information center for the memorial that provides more information on the victims and locations of the war.

To dig into more Berlin history, we decided to go on a bunker tour called the Dark Worlds Tour which gave us a peek inside the hidden tunnels and shelters that were built underground during WWII. The bunker we walked through is one of the few remaining bunkers around today, and it is located behind an unassuming door in the stairway to the U-Bahn. We couldn’t take photos inside, but we did learn about what life was like for Berlin citizens during the war when 80% of the city was destroyed by air raids.

We also had to walk along the East Side Gallery which was the former Berlin Wall. Today, it’s one of the most popular sights in Berlin–the wall is 1,316 meters long and the longest stretch of the Berlin Wall still in existence. Right when the wall came down, over 100 artists came to paint the East Side Gallery and within a year it became a protected memorial.

History has always been one of my favorite subjects, so I have a hard time visiting a destination without learning about it’s history, even when it is heart-wrenching in a city like Berlin. So, we also paid a visit to the Topography of Terror Museum, which is located on the former site of the Gestapo and SS headquarters during the Nazi regime. The museum documents the timeframe from when the Nazis took power all the way through to the end of the war and it tells you about the crimes that were organized there. There are photos, articles, and videos that walk you through the history. It is an insightful, yet somber experience.

On a brighter note, much of our trip was focused around Holiday Markets! During our entire two week trip, we made our way through a variety of markets in Budapest, Vienna, Bratislava and Berlin . Each city put its own distinct spin on the markets, and we loved finding the similarities and differences in each one. In Berlin, we ate quite a few of our meals at the Christmas Markets and found several delicious treats.

Currywurst is a must try no matter when you visit Berlin–it’s a street food staple of German sausage and fries doused in ketchup and topped with curry powder.

Candy coated macadamia nuts were one of my favorite sweet treats that we found.

I can never resist sweet potato fries, especially when they are crispy like this!

And, you can’t go to a Christmas market without sampling some toasty, warm glühwein!

One of my favorite Christmas Markets in Berlin was the Christmas Rodeo Design market. I found so many items I wanted to purchase–it was filled with funky jewelry, artistic prints, and a large variety of other handmade goods.

We had a blast exploring Berlin, and even though we were only there for five days, we were happy to fit in a wide variety of experiences. Berlin has so much to offer, and it’s a city we’d certainly love to return to one day!

Have you ever been to Berlin? What are some of your favorite sights to see there?

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The Berlin Wall

Thierry Noir and The Berlin Wall

The Berlin Wall is perhaps the most famous human artefact in modern world history. Built in 1961 at the height of the Cold War, the Wall symbolised in physical form the ideological and political divide between the Western Bloc and the USSR. 15 years after Winston Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech in Fulton, Missouri, a monolithic and impenetrable barrier that cut across Europe became a reality, situating the city of Berlin at the fulcrum of Cold War antagonisms. 

In 1984,Thierry Noir became the first artist to illegally paint miles of the Berlin Wall. This revolutionary act inspired other artists, and over the next five years the Wall was covered with layers of artwork and images, creating a ‘palimpsest of protest’. As Noir says, painting the Wall made him feel stronger than it. For years, the Wall had stood as an oppressive symbol of a divided world, materialising a history of separation and struggle. Noir’s work subverted this iconic symbol of war into a symbol of hope, granting it a real human significance. 

The extracts below include Noir’s personal recollections of his experiences painting the Berlin Wall in the 1980s and  beyond . 

“This photo was taken in 1986 along Bethaniendamm in Berlin-Kreuzberg.  It was taken by my first wife Gabi Noir.  I was wearing a suit that day that I had found in a bag of old clothes on the street.  At that time West Berliners often left furnishings and clothes on the streets.  It was a recycling process.  During this period I would paint the Wall all day and then travel to the centre of West Berlin to sell canvases in restaurants.  That is how I survived back then.” –  Thierry Noir

Painting the Berlin Wall

“This is me painting in 1985 the Wall along Waldemarstrasse in Berlin-Kreuzberg.  I was painting these dinosaurs to represent a sort of mutation of nature because of the Berlin wall and the wall painting I created were like a mutation of the culture. Where else to find kilometres of painted concrete wall in Europe other than in West Berlin? I used to paint the Berlin Wall every day. That was how all the ideas came to me: not down from the sky, not from the head to the hand but from the hand to the head. From the beginning, with Christophe Bouchet, we used to collect left over paint and materials from the the renovation of the houses in Kreuzberg, for the 750th Anniversary of Berlin in 1987.  We made do with whatever we could find on the streets as we had no money to buy materials.” –  Thierry Noir

Red Dope on Rabbits

“I painted this at Potsdamer Platz in August 1985. It was dedicated to 
the thousands of wild rabbits that used to live on the huge Death Strip 
between the two walls around Potsdamer Platz. Those rabbits were a 
mutation of nature. Where else would you see so many rabbits running 
around freely in the middle of a big city? The only place was in divided 
Berlin Similarly, my paintings on the Berlin Wall were a mutation of 
culture. Where else would you find kilometre upon kilometre of 
continuously painted wall in the middle of a capital city other than in 
divided Berlin. Bartek Konopka later made an Oscar-nominated documentary 
about the wild rabbits of Berlin entitled Rabbit à la Berlin using the story of the death Strip rabbits 
as an allegory for the recent social history of Eastern Europe and its 
people.” – Thierry Noir 

Work Brothers

“This painting is called “The Gebrüder Arbeit (The Work Brothers)”.  It is a homage to the hard toil of painting the Berlin Wall every day. I created this work as a way of answering the questions of passers-by.  Unbelievably, people would sometimes think that I was a spy from France in the employ of the Berlin authorities to make to wall beautiful.  I would tell people that I was not trying to make the Wall beautiful because in fact that was absolutely impossible. 136 persons were killed trying to get across into West Berlin. No matter how many kilograms of paint that I covered the wall with, that fact remains the same.” –  Thierry Noir

Statues of Liberty

“It was the 100th anniversary of the Statue of Liberty in N.Y.C. so I 
found some spray cans and with Christophe Bouchet made a two metre high 
stencil. It was made from a plastic napkin fixed on a wooden frame. On 
the 4th of July, we put up 42 Statues of Liberty on the Wall at 
Checkpoint Charlie. It was well guarded and dangerous to paint here. We 
did not have enough money for more spray paint to finish the entire 
project and paint more the next day. As David Bowie said in his 1982 
song Heroes: ”You can be heroes, just for one day”.” –  Thierry Noir

Making friends with Keith Haring 

“On 23rd October 1986, three months after I had painted the Statues of Liberty, I heard on the radio that Keith Haring was in Berlin to paint the Wall at Checkpoint Charlie. I went there and I saw that my statues were all gone, painted over by a huge amount of yellow paint. I talked with Keith about this and he was embarrassed and apologised to me. He said that: “in New York you can get killed for that”.  He was invited over for just a couple of days and the section of Wall had been preprepared for him with a yellow base that went over the Statues that I had painted.  The yellow colour was very transparent so it was possible to see my Statues through it. I was angry but it was not his fault.  Keith was a great guy and a great artist.”  – Thierry Noir

Wim Wenders Wall Pieces

“This photo was taken in 1986 along the Waldemarstrasse in Kreurzberg. It shows my paintings and the paintings of Kiddy Citny. There were featured in the Wim Wenders film The Wings of Desire. Wim Wenders came back to Germany in 1985 after his success with the 1984 ‘Paris, Texas’. Wenders wanted to make a film in Berlin about angels. I met wit him every two or three days in a nearby restaurant called Meeting Points Restaurant where I used to sell small paintings. Wenders was a patron there. In the beginning of 1987 he decided to start the shoot of “The Wings of Desire” and this part of the Wall along the Waldemarstrasse in Berlin Kreuzberg was an important location for the film. In the film you can see my works and me painting the Wall on a ladder. If you pause the film at this point you will see that part of the wall in front of me.” –  Thierry Noir

Wings Of Desire

“Here is a famous scene from Wings of Desire in which Bruno Ganz, an Angel sees colour for the first time.  On the day of filming, 17th February 1987, it was minus 13 degress.  The scene, which I was also in, was repeated eight times until the director Wim Wenders was satisfied with it. Bruno Ganz would always be in the caravan waiting for the next take. A couple of day before I had painted all the big heads you can see behind in the film. It was just too cold to stop so I would paint for hours each day without a break.” –  Thierry Noir

Elephant Key

“This elephant was one of the earliest paintings that I made on the Berlin Wall. I began to paint outside because I wanted to say that it is good to put art in the streets and not solely in museums and galleries. At the time my influences were taken from many directions. By the Painters: Pablo Picasso, Joan Miro, Fernand Leger, Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, Gaston Chaissac, Jean Dubuffet, Alberto Giacometti. By the musicians: David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, Kraftwerk, Led Zeppelin and Nina Hagen.  This painting represented for me the key to success – heavy work every day. If you wait at home for inspiration, you can wait very long”  – Thierry Noir

Homage To Duchamp

“This piece was a homage to Marcel Duchamp’s 1917 New York exhibition and the enormous scandal provoked by him in exhibiting a urinal. I put this piece up in April 1984, shortly after starting to paint the Wall. A few days later I also displayed a hand basin.” –  Thierry Noir

Checkpoint Charlie

“It was a unique experience to live in West Berlin in the 1980s surrounded by a wall and in the middle of the GDR. West-Berlin had a special status, because its administration was formally conducted by the Western Allies and there was of course a strong military presence.  There was a also strong cultural scene in the city. West Berlin was the centre of the New Wave movement and everybody I met when I came from France in January 1982 seemed to be an artist.  A little like when I came to Shoreditch, East London in 2013. It was also intriguing to see the American GI’s with a big ghetto blaster on their shoulders, listening to Grand Master Flash or Sugar Hill Gang near the US military base.” – Thierry Noir

Berlin Wall Graffiti 

“This was a protest against the Population Census Boycott. Most of the citizens of Kreuzberg were against the population census of 1985 and the repetition of the heads makes the message stronger. That is why the person painted it there in the middle of my painting.  I was very upset when I saw that in 30 seconds one stupid guy put his name just in the middle of the painting I made in three hours. Then I thought. What shall I do? Shall I sleep in front of the wall? Shall I call the police? In the end  I just decided to repair the painting as quick as it was destroyed and this is what I continued to do.” –  Thierry Noir

Painting in the Death Strip

“Here I am painting on the other side of the Berlin Wall in the Death Strip. The photo was taken by the Associated Press photographer, Hans-Jörg Krauss, who was a war photographer.  It was taken while the Wall was falling down and people had hammered heavily on the wall, making holes in it. These holes were so big in some spots such as near to Checkpoint Charlie or the Reichstag, that it was possible to pass through the holes and paint the other side of the wall. It was great to paint this side after so many years of fear and harassment by the border guards.  With only a spray can or two, I would play cat and mouse for hours with the soldiers. To paint a lot of big heads, one after the other, very quick.  I would always jump back through the hole into West Berlin territory before the border guards could reach me.” –  Thierry Noir

The Berlin Wall Fallen

In 1989, the Wall fell, marking the end of the Cold War. 

“This is a so called Wall Graveyard in 1990 in Berlin Kreuzberg. A pile of blocks from the remnants of the Berlin Wall. These were put into special machines which ground them down and separated the metal bars and the concrete in order to reduce it all down to tons of granulates, perfect to build new roads in the former GDR.” –  Thierry Noir

The East Side Gallery

Sections of the Wall, such as those at Potsdamer Platz, on Bernauer Strasse and on Muhlenstrass were deliberately left as a lasting memorial: the East Side Gallery which is approximately 1,3 km in length. Many artists, including Noir, were invited to paint the Eastern face of these Wall fragments as a visual enactment of reunification.

“The East Side Gallery is located along the river, which crosses Berlin, The Spree. The river itself belonged to East Berlin. The GDR, which was not able to place the wall on the west shore of the river, asked the soldiers to build only one wall but withdrawal the east shore. The guards of the border, to replace the no man’s land, made instead patrols with grey speedboats on the river, 24 hours a day, going very near to the edge of the shore, to show the enemies where the border is.” – Thierry Noir

Sotheby’s sell salvaged Berlin Wall segments in Monaco (1990)

“Here you can see Madame Rizolli with a piece of Berlin Wall that I 
painted. It was purchased at an Auction in Monaco on the 23rd of June 
1990. Soldiers from the GDR came to remove the old Wall pieces one day 
and they were taken to Monaco to be sold. In total my pieces of wall 
sold for $1.5 million and I received none of the money. To this day it 
is still strange to see one of my Wall pieces inside a private house in 
the South of France. This particular piece was made by me in 1985 in the 
Waldemarstrasse. When I painted the Wall I never thought about money, I 
painted the Wall as a protest and because I had to do it.” –  Thierry Noir

520 Madison Avenue, New York City

Many segments of Berlin Wall were auctioned by Sotheby’s at the 1990 Monaco sale including the iconic stretch of Berlin Wall featured in Wings of Desire. 

“These 5 sections of the wall are now in a private courtyard at 520 Madison Avenue in NYC and the ladder I was using is in the permanent collection of the Wende Museum in the USA. What a destiny!”   – Thierry Noir

Commissioned Berlin Wall segments 

Years on from the fall of the Berlin Wall the historical significance of Noir’s ‘one real revolutionary’ act to paint the Wall has been evaluated by scholars and institutions around the World. Many institutions have commissioned Noir to paint Berlin Wall sections as a testament to the current freedoms we enjoy in the world today. This piece was commissioned in 2005 by the The Wende Museum of the Cold War in Los Angeles, USA. 

Thierry Noir Berlin Wall segment at the United Nations 

“This image was taken at Leipzigerplatz (near Potsdamer Platz) in July 
2001. Here you can see the Mayor of Berlin Klaus Wowereit, the President 
of the German Parliament, Wolfgang Thierse and UN Secretary-General Kofi 
Annan. Kofi Annan came to Germany to collect three pieces of the Berlin Wall to put in the garden of the UN Headquarters in New York.” –  Thierry Noir

Thierry Noir and STIK commissioned by Imperial War Museum London 

In 2019 Imperial War Museum London commissioned Noir and UK based artist, and long time Noir collaborator, STIK to paint two original Berlin Wall segments to commemorate the 30th Anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, 1989 to 2019. 

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© Thierry Noir 2024. All Rights Reserved

East German Perspectives: The Berlin Wall and its Evolution as Cultural Heritage

In a Tortoiseshell: In her paper examining changing perceptions of the Berlin Wall in the aftermath of the Cold War, Annabelle Mauri mines an extensive field of primary and secondary sources , including archives, statistics, and existing scholarly discussions. Annabelle skillfully weaves these sources together to build her own argument, which highlights the strategic political erasure of East German perspectives on the Wall in the process of reunification, and how that erasure contributed to the West German-led redefinition of the Berlin Wall as a symbol of unity and peace. In doing so, she boldly establishes her unique voice in a conversation about an oft-studied historical monument.

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Excerpt / annabelle mauri.

The disappearance of East German experiences from the public awareness affected how the Berlin Wall was viewed, and without this disappearance, our current understanding of the Wall would likely have been much different. Scholar Frederick Baker sees an important distinction between the two sides of the Wall, distinguishing between the Western ‘Wand,’ a word that means simply ‘wall,’ and the Eastern ‘Mauer,’ which refers specifically to the heavily guarded border between East and West Germany that restricted freedom for so many years. 1 The ‘Wand’ existed for West Germans, of course, but it did not represent their oppression or lack of opportunity the way the ‘Mauer’ did for East Germans. This distinction suggests that the effects of the Wall on Germans’ everyday life differed greatly between East and West, making it impossible for the Wall to be perceived and represented in media in the same way in both countries. This difference also casts new meaning on the Wall’s seemingly strange evolution as cultural heritage. The image of the Wall as a symbol of unity makes more sense for those who experienced it as the ‘Wand.’ But for those for whom the Wall was the ‘Mauer,’ it must be difficult to overlook the decades when the Wall meant the exact opposite of freedom. But how exactly did the Western, ‘Wand’ perspective come to dominate the Eastern, ‘Mauer’ perspective?

The push during reunification to forget certain no-longer-desired aspects of the past had far greater consequences than simply promoting unity: it also served to suppress East German perspectives on their own history. Dirk Kurbjuweit, a writer for Der Spiegel, outlined the grim expectations that some East Germans held for their future as a part of West Germany:

It is clear that, had East German perspectives been given more weight, the legacy of the Wall would have been different. Hope Harrison explains that “the last session of the East German parliament, the Volkskammer, voted on 2 October 1990 to grant the one-block-long section of remaining Wall at Bernauer Strasse…landmark historic preservation status,” which was in stark contrast with the unified Berlin Senate, who voted in 1992 not to preserve remnants of the Wall 9 . The decision to ignore the remains of the Wall was part of the push after reunification to promote unity at the expense of acknowledging the past, and this difference in opinion shows another instance in which West Germans was able to decide how to deal with the Wall.

Author Commentary / Annabelle Mauri

When I began writing this paper, I was completely overwhelmed by the sheer amount of available information about and sources pertaining to the Berlin Wall. I found a mountain of scholarly articles, interviews, biographies, newspaper articles, photographs, encyclopedia entries, movies, and books from across a period of decades that dealt with the Wall from many different perspectives, from political to artistic to personal and more. Needless to say, I had no idea where to begin.

Luckily, my Writing Seminar professor, Dr. Emma Ljung, was there to help me. She helped me choose specific types of source material to focus on in the beginning: articles and photographs related to the Wall that appeared in German magazines and newspapers around the time of the Mauerfall and the following few years. Through the University library, I had access to a number of databases of historical newspapers, and many current newspapers have made their archives accessible online, such as Die Zeit.

First, though, I had to do a lot of background reading in order to understand the topic I was researching. To start, I had found the call number of one book that I was interested in and went to find it in the stacks. I ended up staying there long after I’d found my book because there were so many other books on my topic on the same shelf, some of which were even more pertinent to my research question. Once I had accumulated a number of sources and was ready to read through them, I started keeping a research journal, which was a suggestion from one of the presenters at the Mary W. George Freshman Research Conference. In addition, for each book or scholarly article, I would put a sticky note on the cover with a few notes about what each author’s main points or arguments were, as well as interesting statistics or facts that I hadn’t seen in other sources and intriguing quotes. This tactic ended up being extremely helpful as I began to draft my paper, both in terms of being able to cite easily and accurately, and also in terms of finding a way to engage in a conversation with my sources. As a result, I was able to create and then revise my thesis since my evidence was well-organized.

Once I’d developed a basic understanding of my topic and looked at many newspapers and images from the time period, Dr. Ljung encouraged me to incorporate different types of sources that could add something new to my argument. This included current newspaper articles about the commemoration of the Mauerfall today or statistics about the lingering disparities between former East and West German citizens. It also included current opinion pieces about the Fall and an autobiography of a woman who grew up in East Germany.

Throughout the entire writing process, Zotero, a program that creates citations and helps organize sources, was extremely helpful, and it made creating a Works Cited really easy. All in all, I learned that finding and using a variety of sources, as well as thinking about how to keep them organized, made my paper more interesting and fun to write.

Editor Commentary / Catherine Wang

Days after returning from a trip to Berlin, I read Annabelle’s essay for the first time. What I realized immediately was that she had identified a question about the Berlin Wall that I had not thought to question, nor seen others question. This, to me, was the sign of an exciting research question for a paper on a universally recognizable historical moment. In her essay, Annabelle analyzes the changing perception of the Berlin Wall after the Cold War, examining why an object that signified death and division can now be a symbol of unity and freedom. However, this question is a research challenge for any writer to take on. How can perceptions of the Wall be measured and compared? A writer would need to find a way to examine both East and West German perspectives during the Cold War as well as in the aftermath of the Cold War, a daunting task to cover in just a ten page research paper.

However, Annabelle’s essay takes on this challenging scope with dexterity, effectively synthesizing a broad range of primary and secondary sources to support a rich and nuanced argument. In this excerpt, which focuses on perspectives in the transition period around the fall of the wall, she starts by bringing in a scholar, Frederick Baker, to support her argument about how the wall was viewed differently between West and East Germany. As she points out using Baker, the West Germans and East Germans’ linguistic differences when referencing the wall (‘Wand’ vs. ‘Mauer’) reflect different perceptions of the wall. She asks, if the West Germans used the broader term ‘Wand,” while East Germans used ‘Mauer’ to specifically reference the heavily guarded border between East and West Germany, why the ‘Wand’-perspective became the dominant perspective in the aftermath of the fall of the wall. This question allows her to effectively transition from referencing other scholarly sources to bringing in unique primary sources.

Annabelle calls upon her extensive research to answer her own question about the dominance of the ‘Wand’-perspective, incorporating newspaper archives to trace themes of East German disillusionment with reunification as well as statistics about voting decisions and political appointments in the aftermath of reunification. These sources allow her to build an argument that highlights the strategic political erasure of East German perspectives on the Wall in the process of reunification, and how that erasure contributed to the West German-led redefinition of the Berlin Wall as a symbol of unity and peace. Her thorough research and source use ultimately allows her to build an argument that adds significant nuance to the existing scholarly explanations for changing perception of the Berlin Wall, which had broadly referenced the economic benefits of tourism and the Wall’s political potential.

In taking on a question of such challenging scope, and then zooming up close in her research by piecing together narratives from archives, statistics, and other scholarly discussions, Annabelle boldly establishes her unique voice in a conversation about an oft-studied historical monument.

Professor Commentary / Emma Ljung, Princeton Writing Program

Research Beyond Walls

Historically, walls have been built to keep animals in and humans out. They have also been built to demarcate space: to separate this place from that place, and to make visible to any viewer that this place is not that place, no matter their numerous similarities. Historically, many walls have failed to achieve these lofty goals. For that reason alone, the Berlin Wall is an anomaly. Before its erection in 1961, 3.5 million East Germans defected to the West, a number that dwindled to a mere 5,000 in the period 1961 to 1989. This wall – this Mauer – so successful in restricting movement, has become a symbol of divided Germany and its unification. But despite the Wall being an East German creation, current narratives that surround it predominantly advocate a Western perspective: concepts of liberation, of unification, of freedom. Such slogans, Annabelle noticed, are at odds with East German experiences. And even more strangely, East Germany wanted to preserve the physical structure almost immediately after Mauerfall , but the West – for whom the structure eventually became a symbol of unity and power – had no interest in doing so. Why would the people for whom the Wall represented oppression want to preserve the structure? What has happened between Mauerfall in 1989 and today that has enabled the narrative of unification to completely suppress the narrative of loss? The Berlin Wall, despite the wealth of research on these 140 kilometers of fencing, seems oddly misunderstood. In her research, Annabelle had to not only overcome research walls – few late 1980s East German newspapers are accessible in the US – but also a series of scholarly walls, especially in terms of tacit assumptions. The vast majority of her sources simply assumed that East and West German perspectives were the same – German. But to Annabelle, the more interesting questions were the ones that no one seemed to ask: the questions that forced her to go beyond those scholarly walls to a place most scholars did not even know existed. And it is because of that impetus that this research paper is not only successful, but important. Annabelle shows us that this Wall that kept people in, that divided this place from that place, is in fact not simply a wall at all, but both Mauer and Wand : a single structure embodying a multiplicity of identities.

Works Cited

Baker, Frederick. “The Berlin Wall.” In Borders and Border Politics in a Globalizing World, edited by Paul Ganster and David E. Lorey, 21-50. Lanham, MD: SR Books, 2005.

“East Germany – New World Encyclopedia.” Accessed December 14, 2018. http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/East_Germany.

Knight, Ben. “East Germans Still Victims of ‘cultural Colonialism’ by the West | DW | 01.11.2017.” DW.COM. Accessed December 18, 2018. https://www.dw.com/en/east-germans-still-victims-of-cultural-colonialism-by-the-west/a-41199804.

Harrison, Hope M. “The Berlin Wall and Its Resurrection as a Site of Memory.” German Politics and Society 29, no. 2 (June 1, 2011): 78–106. https://doi.org/10.3167/gps.2011.290206.

Hensel, Jana. After The Wall : Confessions from an East German Childhood and the Life That Came Next. New York :Public Affairs, 2004.

Kurbjuweit, Dirk. “The Merkel Effect: What Today’s Germany Owes to Its Once-Communist East.” Spiegel Online , October 2, 2014, sec. International. http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/how-east-germany-influences-modern-day-german-politics-a-994410.html.

“West Germany – New World Encyclopedia.” Accessed December 14, 2018. http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/West_Germany.

ANNABELLE MAURI

Annabelle Mauri ’22 is a first year from Massachusetts. She enjoys traveling, learning foreign languages, and spending time with her friends. She wrote this essay as a freshman in a Writing Seminar called “The Fragmented Past.”

Catherine Wang ’19 is a senior in the Operations Research and Financial Engineering department. When she’s not coding or doing psets, she’s writing. She is a Writing Center Head Fellow, former Editor-in-Chief of Tortoise , and current managing editor of Unfound: The Asian American Studies Journal .

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The Cold War

The berlin wall.

In the early hours of August 13th 1961, the government of East Germany ordered the closure of all borders between East and West Berlin. As the sun rose, Berliners were awoken by the sound of trucks, jackhammers and other heavy machinery. Watched by Soviet troops and East German police, workmen began breaking up roads, footpaths and other structures, before laying thousands of metres of temporary but impassable fencing, barricades and barbed wire. They worked for several days, completely surrounding the western zones of Berlin and cutting them off from the city’s eastern sectors. Within three days, almost 200 kilometres of fence line and barbed wire had been erected. The East German government’s official name for the new structure was Die anti-Faschistischer Schutzwall , or the ‘Anti-fascist Protective Wall’. It became known more simply as the Berlin Wall. According to East Germany, the Berlin Wall was erected to keep out Western spies and stop West German profiteers buying up state-subsidised East German goods. In reality, the wall was erected to stop the exodus of skilled labourers and technicians from East to West Berlin.

The erection of the Berlin Wall made headlines around the world. For the Western powers, it was not entirely unexpected. The United States and West Germany immediately went on high alert, in case the events in Berlin were a prelude to a Soviet-backed invasion of the city’s western zones. Six days later, US president John F. Kennedy ordered American reinforcements into West Berlin. More than 1,500 soldiers were transported into the city along East German autobahns (unlike in the Berlin Blockade , access to West Berlin through East German territory was not blocked). To prepare for another Soviet blockade, Kennedy also ordered a contingent of US cargo planes to be sent to West Germany. Some experts considered the Berlin Wall an act of aggression against Berliners in both zones and demanded strong action. Kennedy was more sanguine, suggesting that a wall “is a hell of a lot better than a war”.

As weeks passed, the Berlin Wall became stronger and more sophisticated – and also more deadly. By June 1962, the East Germans had erected a second line of fencing, approximately 100 metres inside the first wall. The area between both fences was called ‘no man’s land’ or the ‘death strip’: under East German regulations, any unauthorised person observed there could be shot without warning. Houses within the ‘death strip’ were seized by the East German government, destroyed and levelled. The area was floodlit and covered with fine gravel that revealed footprints, which prevented people from sneaking across unnoticed. Structures that overhung the ‘death strip’, like balconies or trees, were booby-trapped with nails, spikes or barbed wire. In 1965, following several escape attempts where cars or trucks were used to punch through the fenceline, many sections of the barrier were replaced with pre-fabricated sections of concrete. This 3.4-metre high concrete barrier became the Berlin Wall’s most

Needless to say, crossing the border between the two Berlins became even more restrictive. Prior to the late 1950s, it had been comparatively easy for West Berliners to visit relatives in eastern sectors, using a day pass issued by East German authorities. Travelling in the other direction was more difficult. East Berliners wanting to cross the city had to show a government permit, and these were difficult to obtain. Elderly East Berliners found these permits easier to obtain because their potential defection was not detrimental to East Germany’s economy. Those with business ties or immediate family in the West could be granted permits – though these permits were often denied or revoked without reason. Permit-holders could cross the Berlin Wall at several points, the best known of which was ‘Checkpoint Charlie’ in Friedrichstrasse.

There were, of course, many attempts to cross the wall illegally. Some tried climbing, scampering or abseiling over the wall – however, the fortifications, barbed wire and armed Grepo (border police) made this a dangerous activity. Ramming through the wall or checkpoints in vehicles was a common tactic in the early years of the wall. This tactic was nullified when the East Germans rebuilt all roads approaching the wall as narrow zig-zags, preventing vehicles from accelerating. Others tried tunnelling under the wall or flying over it, using makeshift hot-air balloons, with varying levels of success. Around 230 people died attempting to cross the Berlin Wall. In 1962 Peter Fechter, an 18-year-old East German factory worker, was shot in the hip by a border patrol. Fechter bled to death in the ‘death strip’ while helpless onlookers on both sides watched impotently. Siegfried Noffke, who had been separated from his wife and daughter by the wall, dug a tunnel underneath it, only to be captured and machine-gunned by Stasi agents.

The Berlin Wall became a stark and foreboding symbol of the Cold War. In the West, its presence was exploited as propaganda: the Berlin Wall was evidence that East Germany was a failing state, that thousands of its people did not want to live under communism. US secretary of state Dean Rusk called the Wall “a monument to communist failure” while West German mayor Willy Brandt called it “the wall of shame”. In Washington, there was considerable debate about how the US should respond to the erection of the Berlin Wall. Ever the realist, President Kennedy knew that threats or shows of aggression might provoke confrontation or war. He instead focused his attention on West Berlin, hailing it as a small but determined bastion of freedom, locked inside an imprisoned state. Kennedy visited West Berlin in June 1963 and was greeted by ecstatic crowds, which cheered wildly and showered his motorcade with flowers and confetti. In the Rudolph Wilde Platz (later renamed the John F. Kennedy Platz), the US president told a rapt audience:

“There are many people in the world who really don’t understand, or say they don’t, what is the great issue between the free world and the Communist world. Let them come to Berlin. There are some who say that communism is the wave of the future. Let them come to Berlin. And there are some who say in Europe and elsewhere we can work with the Communists. Let them come to Berlin. And there are even a few who say that it is true that communism is an evil system, but it permits us to make economic progress. ‘Lass sie nach Berlin kommen’: let them come to Berlin… Freedom is indivisible, and when one man is enslaved, all men are not free… All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words: ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’ (I am a citizen of Berlin).”

The Berlin Wall stood in place for almost 30 years. It remained the most tangible evidence of the Cold War and Iron Curtain separating the Soviet bloc from the West. Western leaders often referred to it as a symbol of Soviet repression. US president Ronald Reagan visited West Berlin in June 1987 and urged his Soviet counterpart, Mikhail Gorbachev , to “ tear down this wall “. It was the people of Berlin themselves who tore it down , during a public demonstration in November 1989.

1. The Berlin Wall was erected by the East German government in 1961. It was constructed to halt the exodus of people, particularly skilled workers, from communist East Berlin.

2. Construction of the Berlin Wall began before dawn on August 13th 1961. Borders were initially closed with fences and barbed wire, then later fortified with large concrete walls

3. The West condemned the Berlin Wall and exploited it as anti-communist propaganda. The wall was evidence, they said, that Soviet communism was failing and East Germany was now a prison state.

4. Over time, the Berlin Wall was heavily fortified, booby-trapped and policed by armed guards. Despite this, many Berliners tried to cross it, and around 230 were killed in the process.

5. The Berlin Wall would stand for almost three decades as a tangible sign of the Iron Curtain and the divisions between the Soviet bloc and the democratic West. The political changes of the late 1980s, the weakening of the East German government and a popular uprising led to the Berlin Wall being torn down in November 1989.

Walter Ulbricht and Nikita Khrushchev discuss closing the Berlin border (August 1961) The Allies protest the closure of borders in Berlin and the Soviets respond (August 1961) Walter Ulbricht to Nikita Khrushchev on outcomes of erecting the Berlin Wall (September 1961) John F. Kennedy’s “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech (June 1963) The United States and the Soviet Union exchange diplomatic cables on the Berlin Wall (August 1963) Ronald Reagan: “Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” (June 1987) A radio address by Ronald Reagan on the Berlin Wall (August 1987)

Content on this page is © Alpha History 2018. This content may not be republished or distributed without permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use . This page was written by Jennifer Llewellyn, Jim Southey and Steve Thompson. To reference this page, use the following citation: J. Llewellyn et al, “The Berlin Wall”, Alpha History, accessed [today’s date], https://alphahistory.com/coldwar/berlin-wall/.

Berlin Wall’s Importance for Germany Essay

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
• As a template for you assignment

Introduction

Reasons for berlin wall construction, berlin wall construction, effects of berlin wall, flattening of the wall.

The post Second World War was characterized by many political challenges in Europe. In Germany, the government struggled to consolidate its political power through various mechanisms.

In August 1961, “a fence was erected by the German Democratic Republic that is popularly referred to as East Germany” (Rose & Bailey 2004, p.34). The wall demarcated the West Berlin territory from East Germany. Watch towers were also erected strategically at various intervals along the wall with an aim of checking on illegal intrusion or exit from East Germany.

The Eastern Bloc contended that the barrier would save its masses from the fascist influence that was likely to jeopardize the development of socialism in the nation. Ideally, the wall was meant to suppress mass departure of citizens from East Germany after the Second World War. It was also meant to prevent the citizens from supporting fascist ideologies. This historic wall was formally known as the Anti-Fascist Defense Fortification.

Prior to the creation of the Berlin Wall, it is estimated that over three million citizens breached the stringent immigration codes and moved into Western Berlin territory (Tilman 1990, p. 78). From this place, they relocated to other Western European countries. These massive emigrations were proscribed in 1961 upon the creation of the Wall. The ban lasted until 1989 when the wall was flattened and it paved way for the reunification of Germany (Buckley 2004, p. 56).

After World War Two, the war torn Germany was split into four sub territories that were under the control of the Allied forces. The capital of Berlin that acted as the main operation zone of the Allied powers was also partitioned into four territories despite being situated within the Soviet territory.

After one and half years, political rivalries ensued between the occupying forces and the Soviets. One of the key disputes was the failure of the Soviets to accept the reconstruction strategies for revamping the economy and political stability of Germany. “Britain, France, the United States and the Benelux countries later combined the non-Soviet zones of the country into one zone for reconstruction and approved the extension of the Marshall Plan” (Waters 1990, p. 89).

In post 1945, Joseph Stalin governed an amalgamation of countries in the Western Border. He also desired to take control of the weakened Germany that was at that time under the management of the Soviet. Stalin, therefore, informed the leaders of Germany that he was planning to gradually destabilize the British occupation of German territories. According to Stalin, this was the most viable way to get rid of foreign powers and reunite Germany (Tusa 2008, p. 237).

The most important mission of the Leninist Party in the Soviet region was to direct Soviet instructions to both the government machinery and the other alliance parties. Leninist ideologies would eventually be exercised as internal procedures (Pearcy 2009, p.123). The teaching of Marxism ideologies was made mandatory in learning institutions (Morton & Adler 2010, p. 324).

From 1948, Stalin started reacting to the disagreements on how to rebuild the fallen Germany. In this case, he introduced the Berlin Cordon that debarred West Berlin from accessing necessary material supplies including food (Reeves 2011, p. 301). On the other hand, the Allied powers responded to Stalin’s actions by airlifting food and logistics to West Berlin.

The Soviets carried out public crusade in opposition to western strategy change. In late 1948, the members of the Communist Party tried to interfere with the food aids, but over three hundred Berliners picketed in demand for the continuation of the airlifts. Finally, Stalin withdrew the barricade in mid 1949; thus, allowing the hauling of supplies to Berlin (Miller 2008, p. 81).

West Germany embraced a capitalist economy and created a democratic legislative body. These political and economic reforms spurred quick economic growth in Western Germany. The robust economic growth that was witnessed in the western part of Germany attracted the people of Eastern Germany who were eying the better opportunities (Cherny 2009, p. 456).

In the 1950s, the Eastern Bloc also embraced the strategies that the Soviet applied to check on emigration. The restriction posed a great challenge to some countries that had gained economic prosperity in the Eastern Bloc. Before 1952, there was no limitation to frustrate movement of people from the Eastern Bloc to Western Germany.

This freedom of movement was curtailed in April 1952, when Eastern Germany officials held a meeting with Stalin (Soviet leader). “During the discussions, it was proposed that the East Germans should introduce a system of passes so as to stop the free movement of Western agents in the German Democratic Republic” (Childs 2001, p.156).

Stalin supported the idea and encouraged the Eastern Bloc to demarcate their territories by erecting a high rise wall. Therefore, the internal German boundary between East and West was totally cordoned with a fence. However, “the boundary between the Western and Eastern sectors of Berlin remained open, but traffic between the Soviet and Western sectors was somewhat restricted” (Harrison 2003, p.145).

Consequently, Berlin attracted immigrants that were fleeing the Eastern Bloc due to the unbearable living conditions. At first, East Germany would intermittently allow its citizens to visit the Western Bloc, but that freedom was short lived. In 1956, there was a total ban on emigration to West Germany after several citizens deserted East Germany.

The introduction of stringent immigration codes in 1952 led to the blockading of the interior Germany boundary. Therefore, East Germans used the Berlin border as the only gateway point to Western Germany. The German Democratic Republic acted very quickly to contain the exodus of its citizens by introducing more pass laws in late 1957. Individuals that were found crossing over to Berlin without authentic documentation were severely punished.

However, these emigration codes remained ineffective since people could still move to West Berlin by train. Besides, there were no physical barriers that could curb illegal movement of citizens out of East Germany. The Western Border was left open for some time to avoid disrupting connections to East Germany. The construction of an alternative railway that connected Western Berlin began in 1951 and ended in 1961. This led to the complete railing of the West Berlin boundary.

East German lost its industrious residents through massive emigrations; hence, it experienced a severe problem of brain drain. Most of the emigrants were in their formative years and were well trained in various disciplines. This meant that East Germany was left with no technocrats to spur industrial growth in the country.

On the other hand, West Germany gained considerably from the high supply of trained professionals which enabled it to improve its economy. “The brain drain of professionals had become so damaging to the political credibility and economic viability of East Germany that the re-securing of the German Communist frontier was imperative” (Dale 2005, p. 256).

“The East Germany officials authorized the construction of the wall on 12, August 1961 and the German military began securing it immediately” (Gaddis 2005, p. 312). The boundary was slightly erected within the land of East Berlin to avoid trespassing on the West Berlin soil.

During its construction, it was under strict surveillance of the German combat troops who were authorized to shoot any emigrant that made desperate efforts to escape. Additionally, “chain fences, walls, minefields and other obstacles were installed along the length of East Germany’s western borders with the West Germany proper” (Dowty 2009, p. 345).

An extensive no man’s territory was also created to facilitate shooting of fleeing individuals. However, some citizens still used dubious mechanisms to move to other territories. For example, “East Germans successfully defected by a variety of methods: digging long passageways under the wall, waiting for favorable winds and sliding along aerial wires” (Thackeray 2004, p. 52).

The creation of the Berlin Wall had serious implications on the lives of the Germans both in the Eastern and Western Blocs. After the construction of the fence, several individuals that had crossed over to the Western Bloc were completely detached from their families. Berliners that lived in the East, but worked in the West were all rendered jobless because they could not cross the border.

With the erection of the wall, West Berlin was separated; thus, West Berliners staged massive strikes in demand for the flattening of the wall. The Allied forces that had vested interests in post war Germany also encouraged the creation of the wall because they felt that it would thwart the ambitions of Eastern Germany to gain control of the entire Berlin. The wall, therefore, quelled the simmering tension in Germany Blocs which was likely to end in a serious military confrontation.

“The East German government claimed that the Berlin Wall was an anti-fascist protective rampart intended to dissuade aggression from the West” (Wettig 2008, p.189). Eastern German officials also complained that subsidized goods were being smuggled out of the country by West Berliners. The Wall caused extreme anxiety and repression in East Berlin because people were quarantined in their territories; thus, making it impossible for them to transact business.

West Berliners faced the most difficult challenge of gaining access to East German. Between 1961 and 1963, West Berliners were totally banned from entering the East German territory. However, negotiations between the two governments in 1963 led to slight revision of the immigration codes in East Germany.

Thus, West Berliners could visit the country intermittently. An Individual that wanted to travel to East Germany had to seek a visa. “Citizens of other East European countries were generally subjected to the same prohibition of visiting Western countries as East Germans, though the applicable exception varied from country to country” (Pearson 2008, p.318). During the ban, it is estimated that approximately 5,000 individuals desperately tried to jump over the fence and some of them lost their lives.

In late 1989, East Germans increasingly got disillusioned by emigration restrictions. Hence, they staged protests in various parts of East Germany in demand for the flattening of the wall. Most of the individuals that participated in the Peaceful Revolution were willing to defect to the Western Bloc.

The strike worsened in November when the majority of East Germans protested against the Wall. These demonstrations compelled the leaders of East Germany to amend the border laws. One of the amendments that were passed in the late 1989 favored the pulling down of the wall. The tearing down of the wall begun in late 1989, but its official flattening started on 13 th June 1990. However, “the West Germans and West Berliners were allowed visa-free travel starting from 23 December 1989” (Turner 2010, p. 456).

The destruction of the wall sparked-off mixed reactions from foreign powers. Some European countries became very jittery when they learnt that the Germans were planning to come together. In September 1989, “British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher pleaded with the Soviet president not to let the Berlin Wall fall” (Cate 2007, p. 178). Indeed, Britain was comfortable with the division and chaos in Germany because its reunion could cause the altering of the post war territorial demarcations.

They also felt that a unified Germany would destabilize international economy and possibly frustrate the post 1945 initiatives that were meant to restore international peace (Gaddis 2005, p. 249). The Germans saw the flattening of the wall as a great development that would guarantee them both economic and political prosperity which they had been yearning for over two decades.

Buckley, W 2004, The Fall of the Berlin Wall, Wiley, New York.

Cate, C 2007, The Ideas of August: The Berlin Wall Crisis—1961, M. Evans, New York.

Cherny, A 2009, The Candy Bombers: The Untold Story of the Berlin Airlift and America’s Finest Hour, Berkley Trade, Berkley.

Childs, D 2001, The Fall of the GDR, Longman, London.

Dale, G 2005, Popular Protest in East Germany, 1945–1989: Judgements on the Street, Routledge, Routledge.

Dowty, A 2009, Closed Borders: The Contemporary Assault on Freedom of Movement, Yale University Press, New York.

Gaddis, L 2005, The Cold War: A New History, Penguin Press, New York.

Harrison, M 2003, Driving the Soviets Up the Wall: Soviet-East German Relations, 1953–1961, Princenton University Press, New York.

Miller, R 2008, To Save a City: The Berlin Airlift, 1948-1949, Texas A&M University Press, Houston.

Morton, J & Adler, P 2010, American Experience: The Berlin Airlift, Wiley, New York.

Pearcy, A 2009, Berlin Airlift, Swan Hill Press, Berlin.

Pearson, R 2008, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire, Wiley, Chicago.

Reeves, R 2011, Daring Young Men: The Heroism and Triumph of The Berlin Airlift-June 1948-May 1949, Simon & Schuster, Berlin.

Rose, B & Bailey, A 2004, The Lost Border: The Landscape of the Iron Curtain, Princeton Architectural Press, New York.

Thackeray, F 2004, Events that changed Germany, Greenwood Publishing Group, London.

Tilman, T 1990, The Writings on the Wall: Peace at the Berlin Wall, Prenctice Hall, Ohio.

Turner, A 2010, The Two Germanies Since 1945: East and West, Yale University Press, New York.

Tusa, J 2008, Berlin Airlift, Da Capo Press, Berlin.

Waters, R 1990, Wall: Live in Berlin 1990, Oxford University Press, London.

Wettig, G 2008, Stalin and the Cold War in Europe, Rowman & Littlefield, Berlin.

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All the Ways People Escaped Across the Berlin Wall

By: Erin Blakemore

Updated: August 1, 2024 | Original: November 8, 2019

Ida Siekmann had been holed up for days. Nine days earlier, workers had sealed the border to her country by dead of night. Three days earlier, the front entrance to her apartment had been blocked off by police.

She had committed no crime, but Siekmann was in the wrong place at the wrong time: August 1961. Her apartment building was located in what had become East Berlin, while the street, including the sidewalk in front of her building entrance was now part of West Berlin.

Siekmann wanted out, so she took a chance . She shoved her bedding and other possessions out of her window and jumped. She died on the way to the hospital. She had just become the first fatality of the Berlin Wall.

Between 1961 and 1989, thousands of East Germans made risky border crossings. Around 5,000 of them crossed over the Berlin Wall at great personal risk—and their attempts to do so ranged from sneaky to suicidal.

German Democratic Republic officials decided to close the Berlin border for good in 1961, spurred by a spate of defections from refugees who used Berlin’s relatively permeable border to escape East Germany. By August 1961, when officials abruptly sealed the border, up to 1,700 people a day were leaving through Berlin and claiming refugee status once they reached the west. On the night of August 12-13, 1961, workers erected barbed wire and temporary barriers, trapping East Berliners.

As Barriers Intensify, So Do Escape Efforts

At first, people used structures like Siekmann’s apartment building to escape west. These border houses had doors and windows that opened into West Berlin, and people used those buildings to escape. West German emergency personnel and others waited on the west side and helped people as they climbed through windows or jumped off of roofs. Soon, though, East German troops forced residents to move and sealed the apartment buildings along the border.

They soon erected a more permanent barrier through Berlin. The 27-mile-long wall was actually two walls with a no-man’s-land known as the “death strip” in between. Armed with landmines, attack dogs and barbed wire and regularly patrolled by East German troops ready to shoot and kill any would-be escapee, it intimidated most East Berliners into staying put.

But some were determined to leave at any cost. Two days after the wall was built, Conrad Schumann, an East German border guard, was photographed leaping over barbed wire toward freedom. Train engineer Harry Deterling stole a steam train and drove it through the last station in East Berlin, bringing 25 passengers to the west and prompting big changes to the railroad lines. And Wolfgang Engels, an East German soldier who had helped build the barbed-wire fences that initially separated both Berlins, stole a tank and drove it through the wall itself. Despite getting caught in the barbed wire and shot twice, he managed to escape.

Dozens Cross the Border in Tunnels

Tunnels were another daring mode of escape, and people on both sides attempted to dig them. Many were left unfinished when their makers were ratted out; others failed because of difficult conditions. But a few were successful.

In 1962, a group of West German students assisted by an East German refugee received funding from NBC as they built a 131-foot-long tunnel beneath a factory. As part of the deal, NBC planned to broadcast a special about the tunnel and escapees. Twenty-nine people escaped through it before it was discovered. The subsequent NBC News' documentary , "The Tunnel," was originally scheduled to air on October 31, 1962 but the air date was postponed after NBC came under pressure to not escalate tensions with the Soviet Union after the Cuban missile crisis.

Another student-dug tunnel sparked the most successful escape attempt in the wall’s history— 57 people escaped over the two days it was open. The well publicized escapes so shook East Germany’s secret police, the Stasi, that they installed listening devices across the death strip and monitored the ground for tunneling activity 24/7.

The Surprising Human Factors Behind the Fall of the Berlin Wall

First came the botched press conference. Then the actions of an angry, tired secret police officer who thought he had nothing to lose. Soviet reaction wasn't good.

10 Things You May Not Know About the Berlin Wall

More than 5,000 people managed to escape over or under the the iconic Cold War symbol—which is all the more impressive considering the Berlin Wall was actually two walls.

How Long Was the Berlin Wall?

Few symbols better captured the Cold War divide between western Europe and the Soviet bloc than the Berlin Wall, a concrete and barbed wire barrier that divided Germany’s largest city for nearly 30 years. As World War II wound to a close, Germany and Berlin were divided into four zones, each administered by one of […]

Desperation drove creativity as others tried to get over the border. Hartmut Richter swam across the cold Teltow Canal that separated the East German region of Brandenburg from West Berlin. It was a four-hour ordeal—and then he returned again and again to take friends west in his car trunk. Acrobat Horst Klein got over the border on a tightrope ; Ingo and Holger Bethke used a complex zip line , then flew ultralight planes back over the wall to pick up their brother, Egbert.

Deaths at the Berlin Wall

But others weren’t so lucky. According to the Berlin Wall Memorial , 140 people died at the Berlin Wall or were killed there in connection with the border. Another 251 travelers also died during or after passing through border checkpoints. And “unknown numbers of people suffered and died through distress and despair in their personal lives as a consequence of the Berlin Wall being built.”

Ingenuity and desperation drove individuals and small groups to make their escapes, but it would take a massive movement to bring down the wall itself.

In August 1989, the Spitzner family became the last East Germans to escape across the wall. Three months later, massive pro-democracy protests and confusion among East German officials prompted a rush on the border and the wall that had divided Berlin for nearly 30 years. The wall was finally breached on November 9, 1989, and Germany reunited in 1990. 

HISTORY Vault: Declassified: Rise and Fall of the Wall

Mine formerly guarded vaults and archives around the world to reveal untold stories about the brutal life and catastrophic death of the Berlin Wall, a central symbol of the 20th century's longest and deadliest war.

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Home — Essay Samples — Geography & Travel — Berlin — The history of Berlin wall

The History of Berlin Wall

• Categories: Berlin Germany

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Published: Sep 20, 2018

Words: 1569 | Pages: 3 | 8 min read

Table of contents

Berlin wall essay outline, berlin wall essay example, introduction.

• The significance of the Berlin Wall in dividing East and West Berlin
• The political context of the Allies and Soviets in post-World War II Berlin

The Berlin Wall's Construction and Purpose

• Nikita Khrushchev and Walter Ulbricht's decision to build the Berlin Wall
• The role of the Berlin Wall in preventing East Berliners from fleeing to the West
• Efforts to retain essential workers in East Berlin

The Challenges of Crossing the Berlin Wall

• Description of the physical barriers, including the "Death Strip"
• The desperation of East Berliners and creative methods used to cross
• The impact on families and professional lives due to the wall

The Fall of the Berlin Wall

• Schabowski's announcement and its consequences
• The destruction of the wall by the people
• The broader implications of the Berlin Wall's fall, including the end of the Cold War and reunification of Germany

Consequences and Legacy

• The lasting impact of the Berlin Wall on the people of Berlin
• The role of the wall in shaping the city's landscape
• Reflections on the significance of both the rise and fall of the Berlin Wall

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Positive and Negative Liberty

Negative liberty is the absence of obstacles, barriers or constraints. One has negative liberty to the extent that actions are available to one in this negative sense. Positive liberty is the possibility of acting — or the fact of acting — in such a way as to take control of one’s life and realize one’s fundamental purposes. While negative liberty is usually attributed to individual agents, positive liberty is sometimes attributed to collectivities, or to individuals considered primarily as members of given collectivities.

The idea of distinguishing between a negative and a positive sense of the term ‘liberty’ goes back at least to Kant, and was examined and defended in depth by Isaiah Berlin in the 1950s and ’60s. Discussions about positive and negative liberty normally take place within the context of political and social philosophy. They are distinct from, though sometimes related to, philosophical discussions about free will . Work on the nature of positive liberty often overlaps, however, with work on the nature of autonomy .

As Berlin showed, negative and positive liberty are not merely two distinct kinds of liberty; they can be seen as rival, incompatible interpretations of a single political ideal. Since few people claim to be against liberty, the way this term is interpreted and defined can have important political implications. Political liberalism tends to presuppose a negative definition of liberty: liberals generally claim that if one favors individual liberty one should place strong limitations on the activities of the state. Critics of liberalism often contest this implication by contesting the negative definition of liberty: they argue that the pursuit of liberty understood as self-realization or as self-determination (whether of the individual or of the collectivity) can require state intervention of a kind not normally allowed by liberals.

Many authors prefer to talk of positive and negative freedom . This is only a difference of style, and the terms ‘liberty’ and ‘freedom’ are normally used interchangeably by political and social philosophers. Although some attempts have been made to distinguish between liberty and freedom (Pitkin 1988; Williams 2001; Dworkin 2011), generally speaking these have not caught on. Neither can they be translated into other European languages, which contain only the one term, of either Latin or Germanic origin (e.g. liberté, Freiheit), where English contains both.

1. Two Concepts of Liberty

2. the paradox of positive liberty, 3.1 positive liberty as content-neutral, 3.2 republican liberty, 4. one concept of liberty: freedom as a triadic relation, 5. the analysis of constraints: their types and their sources, 6. the concept of overall freedom, 7. is the distinction still useful, introductory works, other works, other internet resources, related entries.

Imagine you are driving a car through town, and you come to a fork in the road. You turn left, but no one was forcing you to go one way or the other. Next you come to a crossroads. You turn right, but no one was preventing you from going left or straight on. There is no traffic to speak of and there are no diversions or police roadblocks. So you seem, as a driver, to be completely free. But this picture of your situation might change quite dramatically if we consider that the reason you went left and then right is that you’re addicted to cigarettes and you’re desperate to get to the tobacconists before it closes. Rather than driving , you feel you are being driven , as your urge to smoke leads you uncontrollably to turn the wheel first to the left and then to the right. Moreover, you’re perfectly aware that your turning right at the crossroads means you’ll probably miss a train that was to take you to an appointment you care about very much. You long to be free of this irrational desire that is not only threatening your longevity but is also stopping you right now from doing what you think you ought to be doing.

This story gives us two contrasting ways of thinking of liberty. On the one hand, one can think of liberty as the absence of obstacles external to the agent. You are free if no one is stopping you from doing whatever you might want to do. In the above story you appear, in this sense, to be free. On the other hand, one can think of liberty as the presence of control on the part of the agent. To be free, you must be self-determined, which is to say that you must be able to control your own destiny in your own interests. In the above story you appear, in this sense, to be unfree: you are not in control of your own destiny, as you are failing to control a passion that you yourself would rather be rid of and which is preventing you from realizing what you recognize to be your true interests. One might say that while on the first view liberty is simply about how many doors are open to the agent, on the second view it is more about going through the right doors for the right reasons.

In a famous essay first published in 1958, Isaiah Berlin called these two concepts of liberty negative and positive respectively (Berlin 1969). [ 1 ] The reason for using these labels is that in the first case liberty seems to be a mere absence of something (i.e. of obstacles, barriers, constraints or interference from others), whereas in the second case it seems to require the presence of something (i.e. of control, self-mastery, self-determination or self-realization). In Berlin’s words, we use the negative concept of liberty in attempting to answer the question “What is the area within which the subject — a person or group of persons — is or should be left to do or be what he is able to do or be, without interference by other persons?”, whereas we use the positive concept in attempting to answer the question “What, or who, is the source of control or interference that can determine someone to do, or be, this rather than that?” (1969, pp. 121–22).

It is useful to think of the difference between the two concepts in terms of the difference between factors that are external and factors that are internal to the agent. While theorists of negative freedom are primarily interested in the degree to which individuals or groups suffer interference from external bodies, theorists of positive freedom are more attentive to the internal factors affecting the degree to which individuals or groups act autonomously. Given this difference, one might be tempted to think that a political philosopher should concentrate exclusively on negative freedom, a concern with positive freedom being more relevant to psychology or individual morality than to political and social institutions. This, however, would be premature, for among the most hotly debated issues in political philosophy are the following: Is the positive concept of freedom a political concept? Can individuals or groups achieve positive freedom through political action? Is it possible for the state to promote the positive freedom of citizens on their behalf? And if so, is it desirable for the state to do so? The classic texts in the history of western political thought are divided over how these questions should be answered: theorists in the classical liberal tradition, like Benjamin Constant, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Herbert Spencer, and J.S. Mill, are typically classed as answering ‘no’ and therefore as defending a negative concept of political freedom; theorists that are critical of this tradition, like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx and T.H. Green, are typically classed as answering ‘yes’ and as defending a positive concept of political freedom.

In its political form, positive freedom has often been thought of as necessarily achieved through a collectivity. Perhaps the clearest case is that of Rousseau’s theory of freedom, according to which individual freedom is achieved through participation in the process whereby one’s community exercises collective control over its own affairs in accordance with the ‘general will’. Put in the simplest terms, one might say that a democratic society is a free society because it is a self-determined society, and that a member of that society is free to the extent that he or she participates in its democratic process. But there are also individualist applications of the concept of positive freedom. For example, it is sometimes said that a government should aim actively to create the conditions necessary for individuals to be self-sufficient or to achieve self-realization. The welfare state has sometimes been defended on this basis, as has the idea of a universal basic income. The negative concept of freedom, on the other hand, is most commonly assumed in liberal defences of the constitutional liberties typical of liberal-democratic societies, such as freedom of movement, freedom of religion, and freedom of speech, and in arguments against paternalist or moralist state intervention. It is also often invoked in defences of the right to private property. This said, some philosophers have contested the claim that private property necessarily enhances negative liberty (Cohen 1995, 2006), and still others have tried to show that negative liberty can ground a form of egalitarianism (Steiner 1994).

After Berlin, the most widely cited and best developed analyses of the negative concept of liberty include Hayek (1960), Day (1971), Oppenheim (1981), Miller (1983) and Steiner (1994). Among the most prominent contemporary analyses of the positive concept of liberty are Milne (1968), Gibbs (1976), C. Taylor (1979) and Christman (1991, 2005).

Many liberals, including Berlin, have suggested that the positive concept of liberty carries with it a danger of authoritarianism. Consider the fate of a permanent and oppressed minority. Because the members of this minority participate in a democratic process characterized by majority rule, they might be said to be free on the grounds that they are members of a society exercising self-control over its own affairs. But they are oppressed, and so are surely unfree. Moreover, it is not necessary to see a society as democratic in order to see it as self-controlled; one might instead adopt an organic conception of society, according to which the collectivity is to be thought of as a living organism, and one might believe that this organism will only act rationally, will only be in control of itself, when its various parts are brought into line with some rational plan devised by its wise governors (who, to extend the metaphor, might be thought of as the organism’s brain). In this case, even the majority might be oppressed in the name of liberty.

Such justifications of oppression in the name of liberty are no mere products of the liberal imagination, for there are notorious historical examples of their endorsement by authoritarian political leaders. Berlin, himself a liberal and writing during the cold war, was clearly moved by the way in which the apparently noble ideal of freedom as self-mastery or self-realization had been twisted and distorted by the totalitarian dictators of the twentieth century — most notably those of the Soviet Union — so as to claim that they, rather than the liberal West, were the true champions of freedom. The slippery slope towards this paradoxical conclusion begins, according to Berlin, with the idea of a divided self. To illustrate: the smoker in our story provides a clear example of a divided self, for she is both a self that desires to get to an appointment and a self that desires to get to the tobacconists, and these two desires are in conflict. We can now enrich this story in a plausible way by adding that one of these selves — the keeper of appointments — is superior to the other: the self that is a keeper of appointments is thus a ‘higher’ self, and the self that is a smoker is a ‘lower’ self. The higher self is the rational, reflecting self, the self that is capable of moral action and of taking responsibility for what she does. This is the true self, for rational reflection and moral responsibility are the features of humans that mark them off from other animals. The lower self, on the other hand, is the self of the passions, of unreflecting desires and irrational impulses. One is free, then, when one’s higher, rational self is in control and one is not a slave to one’s passions or to one’s merely empirical self. The next step down the slippery slope consists in pointing out that some individuals are more rational than others, and can therefore know best what is in their and others’ rational interests. This allows them to say that by forcing people less rational than themselves to do the rational thing and thus to realize their true selves, they are in fact liberating them from their merely empirical desires. Occasionally, Berlin says, the defender of positive freedom will take an additional step that consists in conceiving of the self as wider than the individual and as represented by an organic social whole — “a tribe, a race, a church, a state, the great society of the living and the dead and the yet unborn”. The true interests of the individual are to be identified with the interests of this whole, and individuals can and should be coerced into fulfilling these interests, for they would not resist coercion if they were as rational and wise as their coercers. “Once I take this view”, Berlin says, “I am in a position to ignore the actual wishes of men or societies, to bully, oppress, torture in the name, and on behalf, of their ‘real’ selves, in the secure knowledge that whatever is the true goal of man ... must be identical with his freedom” (Berlin 1969, pp. 132–33).

Those in the negative camp try to cut off this line of reasoning at the first step, by denying that there is any necessary relation between one’s freedom and one’s desires. Since one is free to the extent that one is externally unprevented from doing things, they say, one can be free to do what one does not desire to do. If being free meant being unprevented from realizing one’s desires, then one could, again paradoxically, reduce one’s unfreedom by coming to desire fewer of the things one is unfree to do. One could become free simply by contenting oneself with one’s situation. A perfectly contented slave is perfectly free to realize all of her desires. Nevertheless, we tend to think of slavery as the opposite of freedom. More generally, freedom is not to be confused with happiness, for in logical terms there is nothing to stop a free person from being unhappy or an unfree person from being happy. The happy person might feel free, but whether they are free is another matter (Day, 1970). Negative theorists of freedom therefore tend to say not that having freedom means being unprevented from doing as one desires, but that it means being unprevented from doing whatever one might desire to do (Steiner 1994. Cf. Van Parijs 1995; Sugden 2006).

Some theorists of positive freedom bite the bullet and say that the contented slave is indeed free — that in order to be free the individual must learn, not so much to dominate certain merely empirical desires, but to rid herself of them. She must, in other words, remove as many of her desires as possible. As Berlin puts it, if I have a wounded leg ‘there are two methods of freeing myself from pain. One is to heal the wound. But if the cure is too difficult or uncertain, there is another method. I can get rid of the wound by cutting off my leg’ (1969, pp. 135–36). This is the strategy of liberation adopted by ascetics, stoics and Buddhist sages. It involves a ‘retreat into an inner citadel’ — a soul or a purely noumenal self — in which the individual is immune to any outside forces. But this state, even if it can be achieved, is not one that liberals would want to call one of freedom, for it again risks masking important forms of oppression. It is, after all, often in coming to terms with excessive external limitations in society that individuals retreat into themselves, pretending to themselves that they do not really desire the worldly goods or pleasures they have been denied. Moreover, the removal of desires may also be an effect of outside forces, such as brainwashing, which we should hardly want to call a realization of freedom.

Because the concept of negative freedom concentrates on the external sphere in which individuals interact, it seems to provide a better guarantee against the dangers of paternalism and authoritarianism perceived by Berlin. To promote negative freedom is to promote the existence of a sphere of action within which the individual is sovereign, and within which she can pursue her own projects subject only to the constraint that she respect the spheres of others. Humboldt and Mill, both advocates of negative freedom, compared the development of an individual to that of a plant: individuals, like plants, must be allowed to grow, in the sense of developing their own faculties to the full and according to their own inner logic. Personal growth is something that cannot be imposed from without, but must come from within the individual.

3. Two Attempts to Create a Third Way

Critics, however, have objected that the ideal described by Humboldt and Mill looks much more like a positive concept of liberty than a negative one. Positive liberty consists, they say, in exactly this growth of the individual: the free individual is one that develops, determines and changes her own desires and interests autonomously and from within. This is not liberty as the mere absence of obstacles, but liberty as autonomy or self-realization. Why should the mere absence of state interference be thought to guarantee such growth? Is there not some third way between the extremes of totalitarianism and the minimal state of the classical liberals — some non-paternalist, non-authoritarian means by which positive liberty in the above sense can be actively promoted?

Much of the more recent work on positive liberty has been motivated by a dissatisfaction with the ideal of negative liberty combined with an awareness of the possible abuses of the positive concept so forcefully exposed by Berlin. John Christman (1991, 2005, 2009, 2013), for example, has argued that positive liberty concerns the ways in which desires are formed — whether as a result of rational reflection on all the options available, or as a result of pressure, manipulation or ignorance. What it does not regard, he says, is the content of an individual’s desires. The promotion of positive freedom need not therefore involve the claim that there is only one right answer to the question of how a person should live, nor need it allow, or even be compatible with, a society forcing its members into given patterns of behavior. Take the example of a Muslim woman who claims to espouse the fundamentalist doctrines generally followed by her family and the community in which she lives. On Christman’s account, this person is positively unfree if her desire to conform was somehow oppressively imposed upon her through indoctrination, manipulation or deceit. She is positively free, on the other hand, if she arrived at her desire to conform while aware of other reasonable options and she weighed and assessed these other options rationally. Even if this woman seems to have a preference for subservient behavior, there is nothing necessarily freedom-enhancing or freedom-restricting about her having the desires she has, since freedom regards not the content of these desires but their mode of formation. On this view, forcing her to do certain things rather than others can never make her more free, and Berlin’s paradox of positive freedom would seem to have been avoided.

This more ‘procedural’ account of positive liberty allows us to point to kinds of internal constraint that seem too fall off the radar if we adopt only negative concept. For example, some radical political theorists believe it can help us to make sense of forms of oppression and structural injustice that cannot be traced to overt acts of prevention or coercion. On the one hand, in agreement with Berlin, we should recognize the dangers of that come with promoting the values or interests of a person’s ‘true self’ in opposition to what they manifestly desire. Thus, the procedural account avoids all reference to a ‘true self’. On the other, we should recognize that people’s actual selves are inevitably formed in a social context and that their values and senses of identity (for example, in terms of gender or race or nationality) are shaped by cultural influences. In this sense, the self is ‘socially constructed’, and this social construction can itself occur in oppressive ways. The challenge, then, is to show how a person’s values can be thus shaped but without the kind of oppressive imposition or manipulation that comes not only from political coercion but also, more subtly, from practices or institutions that stigmatize or marginalize certain identities or that attach costs to the endorsement of values deviating from acceptable norms, for these kinds of imposition or manipulation can be just another way of promoting a substantive ideal of the self. And this was exactly the danger against which Berlin was warning, except that the danger is less visible and can be created unintentionally (Christman 2013, 2015, 2021; Hirschmann 2003, 2013; Coole 2013).

While this theory of positive freedom undoubtedly provides a tool for criticizing the limiting effects of certain practices and institutions in contemporary liberal societies, it remains to be seen what kinds of political action can be pursued in order to promote content-neutral positive liberty without encroaching on any individual’s rightful sphere of negative liberty. Thus, the potential conflict between the two ideals of negative and positive freedom might survive Christman’s alternative analysis, albeit in a milder form. Even if we rule out coercing individuals into specific patterns of behavior, a state interested in promoting content-neutral positive liberty might still have considerable space for intervention aimed at ‘public enlightenment’, perhaps subsidizing some kinds of activities (in order to encourage a plurality of genuine options) and financing such intervention through taxation. Liberals might criticize this kind of intervention on anti-paternalist grounds, objecting that such measures will require the state to use resources in ways that the supposedly heteronomous individuals, if left to themselves, might have chosen to spend in other ways. In other words, even in its content-neutral form, the ideal of positive freedom might still conflict with the liberal idea of respect for persons, one interpretation of which involves viewing individuals from the outside and taking their choices at face value. From a liberal point of view, the blindness to internal constraints can be intentional (Carter 2011a). Some liberals will make an exception to this restriction on state intervention in the case of the education of children, in such a way as to provide for the active cultivation of open minds and rational reflection. Even here, however, other liberals will object that the right to negative liberty includes the right to decide how one’s children should be educated.

Is it necessary to refer to internal constraints in order to make sense of the phenomena of oppression and structural injustice? Some might contest this view, or say that it is true only up to a point, for there are at least two reasons for thinking that the oppressed are lacking in negative liberty. First, while Berlin himself equated economic and social disadvantages with natural disabilities, claiming that neither represented constraints on negative liberty but only on personal abilities, many theorists of negative liberty disagree: if I lack the money to buy a jacket from a clothes shop, then any attempt on my part to carry away the jacket is likely to meet with preventive actions or punishment on the part of the shop keeper or the agents of the state. This is a case of interpersonal interference, not merely of personal inability. In the normal circumstances of a market economy, purchasing power is indeed a very reliable indicator of how far other people will stop you from doing certain things if you try. It is therefore strongly correlated with degrees of negative freedom (Cohen 1995, 2011; Waldron 1993; Carter 2007; Grant 2013). Thus, while the promotion of content-neutral positive liberty might imply the transfer of certain kinds of resources to members of disadvantaged groups, the same might be true of the promotion of negative liberty. Second, the negative concept of freedom can be applied directly to disadvantaged groups as well as to their individual members. Some social structures may be such as to tolerate the liberation of only a limited number of members of a given group. G.A. Cohen famously focused on the case proletarians who can escape their condition by successfully setting up a business of their own though a mixture of hard work and luck. In such cases, while each individual member of the disadvantaged group might be negatively free in the sense of being unprevented from choosing the path of liberation, the freedom of the individual is conditional on the unfreedom of the majority of the rest of the group, since not all can escape in this way. Each individual member of the class therefore partakes in a form of collective negative unfreedom (Cohen 1988, 2006; for discussion see Mason 1996; Hindricks 2008; Grant 2013; Schmidt 2020).

Another increasingly influential group of philosophers has rejected both the negative and the positive conception, claiming that liberty is not merely the enjoyment of a sphere of non-interference but the enjoyment of certain conditions in which such non-interference is guaranteed (Pettit 1997, 2001, 2014; Skinner 1998, 2002; Weinstock and Nadeau 2004; Laborde and Maynor 2008; Lovett 2010, forthcoming; Breen and McBride 2015, List and Valentini 2016). These conditions may include the presence of a democratic constitution and a series of safeguards against a government wielding power arbitrarily, including popular control and the separation of powers. As Berlin admits, on the negative view, I am free even if I live in a dictatorship just as long as the dictator happens, on a whim, not to interfere with me (see also Hayek 1960). There is no necessary connection between negative liberty and any particular form of government. Is it not counterintuitive to say that I can in theory be free even if I live in a dictatorship, or that a slave can enjoy considerable liberty as long as the slave-owner is compassionate and generous? Would my subjection to the arbitrary power of a dictator or slave-owner not itself be sufficient to qualify me as unfree? If it would be, then we should say that I am free only if I live in a society with the kinds of political institutions that guarantee the independence of each citizen from such arbitrary power. Quentin Skinner has called this view of freedom ‘neo-Roman’, invoking ideas about freedom both of the ancient Romans and of a number of Renaissance and early modern writers. Philip Pettit has called the same view ‘republican’, and this label has generally prevailed in the recent literature.

Republican freedom can be thought of as a kind of status : to be a free person is to enjoy the rights and privileges attached to the status of republican citizenship, whereas the paradigm of the unfree person is the slave. Freedom is not simply a matter of non-interference, for a slave may enjoy a great deal of non-interference at the whim of her master. What makes her unfree is her status, such that she is permanently exposed to interference of any kind. Even if the slave enjoys non-interference, she is, as Pettit puts it, ‘dominated’, because she is permanently subject to the arbitrary power of her owner.

According to Pettit, then, republicans conceive of freedom not as non-interference, as on the standard negative view, but as ‘non-domination’. Non-domination is distinct from negative freedom, he says, for two reasons. First, as we have seen, one can enjoy non-interference without enjoying non-domination. Second, one can enjoy non-domination while nevertheless being interfered with, just as long as the interference in question is constrained to track one’s avowed interests thanks to republican power structures: only arbitrary power is inimical to freedom, not power as such.

On the other hand, republican freedom is also distinct from positive freedom as expounded and criticized by Berlin. First, republican freedom does not consist in the activity of virtuous political participation; rather, that participation is seen as instrumentally related to freedom as non-domination. Secondly, the republican concept of freedom cannot lead to anything like the oppressive consequences feared by Berlin, because it has a commitment to non-domination and to liberal-democratic institutions already built into it.

Pettit’s idea of freedom as non domination has caught the imagination of a great many political theorists over the last two decades. One source of its popularity lies in the fact that it seems to make sense of the phenomena of oppression and structural injustice referred to above, but without necessarily relying on references to internal constraints. It has been applied not only to relations of domination between governments and citizens, but also to relations of domination between employers and workers (Breen and McBride 2015), between husbands and wives (Lovett forthcoming), and between able-bodied and disabled people (De Wispelaere and Casassas 2014).

It remains to be seen, however, whether the republican concept of freedom is ultimately distinguishable from the negative concept, or whether republican writers on freedom have not simply provided good arguments to the effect that negative freedom is best promoted, on balance and over time , through certain kinds of political institutions rather than others. While there is no necessary connection between negative liberty and democratic government, there may nevertheless be a strong empirical correlation between the two. Ian Carter (1999, 2008), Matthew H. Kramer (2003, 2008), and Robert Goodin and Frank Jackson (2007) have argued, along these lines, that republican policies are best defended empirically on the basis of the standard negative ideal of freedom, rather than on the basis of a conceptual challenge to that ideal. An important premise in such an argument is that the extent of a person’s negative freedom is a function not simply of how many single actions are prevented, but of how many different act-combinations are prevented. On this basis, people who can achieve their goals only by bowing and scraping to their masters must be seen as less free, negatively, than people who can achieve those goals unconditionally. Another important premise is that the extent to which people are negatively free depends, in part, on the probability with which they will be constrained from performing future acts or act-combinations. People who are subject to arbitrary power can be seen as less free in the negative sense even if they do not actually suffer interference, because the probability of their suffering constraints is always greater ( ceteris paribus , as a matter of empirical fact) than it would be if they were not subject to that arbitrary power. Only this greater probability, they say, can adequately explain republican references to the ‘fear’, the ‘sense of exposure’, and the ‘precariousness’ of the dominated (for further discussion see Bruin 2009, Lang 2012, Shnayderman 2012, Kirby 2016, Carter and Shnayderman 2019).

In reply to the above point about the relevance of probabilities, republicans have insisted that freedom as non-domination is nevertheless distinct from negative liberty because what matters for an agent’s freedom is the impossibility of others interfering, not the mere improbability of their doing so. Consider the example of gender relations with the context of marriage. A husband might be kind and generous, or indeed have a strong sense of egalitarian justice, and therefore be extremely unlikely ever to deny his wife the same opportunities as he himself enjoys; but the wife is still dominated if the structure of norms in her society is such as to permit husbands to frustrate the choices of their wives in numerous ways. If she lives in such a society, she is still subject to the husband’s power whether he likes it or not. And whether the husband likes it or not, the wife’s subjection to his power will tend to influence how third parties treat her – for example, in terms of offering employment opportunities.

Taken at face value, however, the requirement of impossibility of interference seems over demanding, as it is never completely impossible for others to constrain me. It is not impossible that I be stabbed by someone as I walk down the street this afternoon. Indeed, the possible world in which this event occurs is very close to the actual world, even if the event is improbable in the actual world. If the mere possibility of the stabbing makes me unfree to walk down the street, then unfreedom is everywhere and the achievement of freedom is itself virtually impossible. To avoid this worry, republicans have qualified their impossibility requirement: for me to be free to walk down the street, it must be impossible for others to stab me with impunity (Pettit 2008a, 2008b; Skinner 2008). This qualification makes the impossibility requirement more realistic. Nevertheless, the qualification is open to objections. Is ‘impunity’ a purely formal requirement, or should we say that no one can carry out a street stabbing with impunity if, say, at least 70% of such stabbings lead to prosecution? Even if 100% of such stabbings lead to prosecution, there will still be some stabbings. Will they not be sources of unfreedom for the victims?

More recently some republicans have sidelined the notion of impunity of interference in favour of that of ‘ignorability’ of interference (Ingham and Lovett 2019). I am free to make certain choices if the structure of effective societal norms, whether legal or customary, is such as to constrain the ability of anyone else to frustrate those choices, to the point where the possibility of such frustration, despite existing, is remote enough to be something I can ignore. Once I can ignore that possibility, then the structure of effective norms makes me safe by removing any sense of exposure to interference. Defenders of the negative concept of liberty might respond to this move by saying that the criterion of ignorability looks very much like a criterion of trivially low probability: we consider ourselves free to do x to the extent that the system of enforced norms deters others’ prevention of x in such a way as to make that prevention improbable.

The jury is still out on whether republicans have successfully carved out a third concept of freedom that is really distinct from those of negative and positive liberty. This conceptual uncertainty need not itself cast doubt on the distinctness and attractiveness of republicanism as a set of political prescriptions. Rather, what it leaves open is the question of the ultimate normative bases of those prescriptions: is ‘non-domination’ something that supervenes on certain configurations of negative freedom and unfreedom, and therefore explainable in terms of such configurations, or is it something truly distinct from those configurations?

The two sides identified by Berlin disagree over which of two different concepts best captures the political ideal of ‘liberty’. Does this fact not denote the presence of some more basic agreement between the two sides? How, after all, could they see their disagreement as one about the nature of liberty if they did not think of themselves as in some sense talking about the same thing ? In an influential article, the American legal philosopher Gerald MacCallum (1967) put forward the following answer: there is in fact only one basic concept of freedom, on which both sides in the debate converge . What the so-called negative and positive theorists disagree about is how this single concept of freedom should be interpreted. Indeed, in MacCallum’s view, there are a great many different possible interpretations of freedom, and it is only Berlin’s artificial dichotomy that has led us to think in terms of there being two.

MacCallum defines the basic concept of freedom — the concept on which everyone agrees — as follows: a subject, or agent, is free from certain constraints, or preventing conditions, to do or become certain things. Freedom is therefore a triadic relation — that is, a relation between three things : an agent, certain preventing conditions, and certain doings or becomings of the agent. Any statement about freedom or unfreedom can be translated into a statement of the above form by specifying what is free or unfree, from what it is free or unfree, and what it is free or unfree to do or become . Any claim about the presence or absence of freedom in a given situation will therefore make certain assumptions about what counts as an agent, what counts as a constraint or limitation on freedom, and what counts as a purpose that the agent can be described as either free or unfree to carry out.

The definition of freedom as a triadic relation was first put forward in the seminal work of Felix Oppenheim in the 1950s and 60s. Oppenheim saw that an important meaning of ‘freedom’ in the context of political and social philosophy was as a relation between two agents and a particular (impeded or unimpeded) action. However, Oppenheim’s interpretation of freedom was an example of what Berlin would call a negative concept. What MacCallum did was to generalize this triadic structure so that it would cover all possible claims about freedom, whether of the negative or the positive variety. In MacCallum’s framework, unlike in Oppenheim’s, the interpretation of each of the three variables is left open. In other words, MacCallum’s position is a meta-theoretical one: his is a theory about the differences between theorists of freedom.

To illustrate MacCallum’s point, let us return to the example of the smoker driving to the tobacconists. In describing this person as either free or unfree, we shall be making assumptions about each of MacCallum’s three variables. If we say that the driver is free , what we shall probably mean is that an agent, consisting in the driver’s empirical self, is free from external (physical or legal) obstacles to do whatever he or she might want to do. If, on the other hand, we say that the driver is unfree , what we shall probably mean is that an agent, consisting in a higher or rational self, is made unfree by internal, psychological constraints to carry out some rational, authentic or virtuous plan. Notice that in both claims there is a negative element and a positive element: each claim about freedom assumes both that freedom is freedom from something (i.e., preventing conditions) and that it is freedom to do or become something. The dichotomy between ‘freedom from’ and ‘freedom to’ is therefore a false one, and it is misleading to say that those who see the driver as free employ a negative concept and those who see the driver as unfree employ a positive one. What these two camps differ over is the way in which one should interpret each of the three variables in the triadic freedom-relation. More precisely, we can see that what they differ over is the extension to be assigned to each of the variables.

Thus, those whom Berlin places in the negative camp typically conceive of the agent as having the same extension as that which it is generally given in ordinary discourse: they tend to think of the agent as an individual human being and as including all of the empirical beliefs and desires of that individual. Those in the so-called positive camp, on the other hand, often depart from the ordinary notion, in one sense imagining the agent as more extensive than in the ordinary notion, and in another sense imagining it as less extensive: they think of the agent as having a greater extension than in ordinary discourse in cases where they identify the agent’s true desires and aims with those of some collectivity of which she is a member; and they think of the agent as having a lesser extension than in ordinary discourse in cases where they identify the true agent with only a subset of her empirical beliefs and desires — i.e., with those that are rational, authentic or virtuous. Secondly, those in Berlin’s positive camp tend to take a wider view of what counts as a constraint on freedom than those in his negative camp: the set of relevant obstacles is more extensive for the former than for the latter, since negative theorists tend to count only external obstacles as constraints on freedom, whereas positive theorists also allow that one may be constrained by internal factors, such as irrational desires, fears or ignorance. And thirdly, those in Berlin’s positive camp tend to take a narrower view of what counts as a purpose one can be free to fulfill. The set of relevant purposes is less extensive for them than for the negative theorists, for we have seen that they tend to restrict the relevant set of actions or states to those that are rational, authentic or virtuous, whereas those in the negative camp tend to extend this variable so as to cover any action or state the agent might desire.

On MacCallum’s analysis, then, there is no simple dichotomy between positive and negative liberty; rather, we should recognize that there is a whole range of possible interpretations or ‘conceptions’ of the single concept of liberty. Indeed, as MacCallum says and as Berlin seems implicitly to admit, a number of classic authors cannot be placed unequivocally in one or the other of the two camps. Locke, for example, is normally thought of as one of the fathers or classical liberalism and therefore as a staunch defender of the negative concept of freedom. He indeed states explicitly that ‘[to be at] liberty is to be free from restraint and violence from others’. But he also says that liberty is not to be confused with ‘license’, and that “that ill deserves the name of confinement which hedges us in only from bogs and precipices” ( Second Treatise , parags. 6 and 57). While Locke gives an account of constraints on freedom that Berlin would call negative, he seems to endorse an account of MacCallum’s third freedom-variable that Berlin would call positive, restricting this variable to actions that are not immoral (liberty is not license) and to those that are in the agent’s own interests (I am not unfree if prevented from falling into a bog). A number of contemporary liberals or libertarians have provided or assumed definitions of freedom that are similarly morally loaded (e.g. Nozick 1974; Rothbard 1982; Bader 2018). This would seem to confirm MacCallum’s claim that it is conceptually and historically misleading to divide theorists into two camps — a negative liberal one and a positive non-liberal one.

To illustrate the range of interpretations of the concept of freedom made available by MacCallum’s analysis, let us now take a closer look at his second variable — that of constraints on freedom.

Advocates of negative conceptions of freedom typically restrict the range of obstacles that count as constraints on freedom to those that are brought about by other agents. For theorists who conceive of constraints on freedom in this way, I am unfree only to the extent that other people prevent me from doing certain things. If I am incapacitated by natural causes — by a genetic handicap, say, or by a virus or by certain climatic conditions — I may be rendered unable to do certain things, but I am not, for that reason, rendered unfree to do them. Thus, if you lock me in my house, I shall be both unable and unfree to leave. But if I am unable to leave because I suffer from a debilitating illness or because a snow drift has blocked my exit, I am nevertheless not unfree, to leave. The reason such theorists give, for restricting the set of relevant preventing conditions in this way, is that they see unfreedom as a social relation — a relation between persons (see Oppenheim 1961; Miller 1983; Steiner 1983; Kristjánsson 1996; Kramer 2003; Morriss 2012; Shnayderman 2013; Schmidt 2016). Unfreedom as mere inability is thought by such authors to be more the concern of engineers and medics than of political and social philosophers. (If I suffer from a natural or self-inflicted inability to do something, should we to say that I remain free to do it, or should we say that the inability removes my freedom to do it while nevertheless not implying that I am un free to do it? In the latter case, we shall be endorsing a ‘trivalent’ conception, according to which there are some things that a person is neither free nor unfree to do. Kramer 2003 endorses a trivalent conception according to which freedom is identified with ability and unfreedom is the prevention (by others) of outcomes that the agent would otherwise be able to bring about.)

In attempting to distinguish between natural and social obstacles we shall inevitably come across gray areas. An important example is that of obstacles created by impersonal economic forces. Do economic constraints like recession, poverty and unemployment merely incapacitate people, or do they also render them unfree? Libertarians and egalitarians have provided contrasting answers to this question by appealing to different conceptions of constraints. Thus, one way of answering the question is by taking an even more restrictive view of what counts as a constraint on freedom, so that only a subset of the set of obstacles brought about by other persons counts as a restriction of freedom: those brought about intentionally . In this case, impersonal economic forces, being brought about unintentionally, do not restrict people’s freedom , even though they undoubtedly make many people unable to do many things. This last view has been taken by a number of market-oriented libertarians, including, most famously, Friedrich von Hayek (1960, 1982), according to whom freedom is the absence of coercion, where to be coerced is to be subject to the arbitrary will of another. (Notice the somewhat surprising similarity between this conception of freedom and the republican conception discussed earlier, in section 3.2) Critics of libertarianism, on the other hand, typically endorse a broader conception of constraints on freedom that includes not only intentionally imposed obstacles but also unintended obstacles for which someone may nevertheless be held responsible (for Miller and Kristjánsson and Shnayderman this means morally responsible; for Oppenheim and Kramer it means causally responsible), or indeed obstacles created in any way whatsoever, so that unfreedom comes to be identical to inability (see Crocker 1980; Cohen 2011, pp. 193–97; Sen 1992; Van Parijs 1995; Garnett forthcoming).

This analysis of constraints helps to explain why socialists and egalitarians have tended to claim that the poor in a capitalist society are as such unfree, or that they are less free than the rich, whereas libertarians have tended to claim that the poor in a capitalist society are no less free than the rich. Egalitarians typically (though do not always) assume a broader notion than libertarians of what counts as a constraint on freedom. Although this view does not necessarily imply what Berlin would call a positive notion of freedom, egalitarians often call their own definition a positive one, in order to convey the sense that freedom requires not merely the absence of certain social relations of prevention but the presence of abilities, or what Amartya Sen has influentially called ‘capabilities’ (Sen 1985, 1988, 1992; Nussbaum 2006, 2011). (Important exceptions to this egalitarian tendency to broaden the relevant set of constraints include those who consider poverty to indicate a lack of social freedom (see sec. 3.1, above). Steiner (1994), grounds a left-libertarian theory of justice in the idea of an equal distribution of social freedom, which he takes to imply an equal distribution of resources.)

We have seen that advocates of a negative conception of freedom tend to count only obstacles that are external to the agent. Notice, however, that the term ‘external’ is ambiguous in this context, for it might be taken to refer either to the location of the causal source of an obstacle or to the location of the obstacle itself. Obstacles that count as ‘internal’ in terms of their own location include psychological phenomena such as ignorance, irrational desires, illusions and phobias. Such constraints can be caused in various ways: for example, they might have a genetic origin, or they might be brought about intentionally by others, as in the case of brainwashing or manipulation. In the first case we have an internal constraint brought about by natural causes, and in this sense ‘internally’; in the second, an internal constraint intentionally imposed by another human agent, and in this sense ‘externally’.

More generally, we can now see that there are in fact two different dimensions along which one’s notion of a constraint might be broader or narrower. A first dimension is that of the source of a constraint — in other words, what it is that brings about a constraint on freedom. We have seen, for example, that some theorists include as constraints on freedom only obstacles brought about by human action, whereas others also include obstacles with a natural origin. A second dimension is that of the type of constraint involved, where constraint-types include the types of internal constraint just mentioned, but also various types of constraint located outside the agent, such as physical barriers that render an action impossible, obstacles that render the performance of an action more or less difficult, and costs attached to the performance of a (more or less difficult) action. The two dimensions of type and source are logically independent of one another. Given this independence, it is theoretically possible to combine a narrow view of what counts as a source of a constraint with a broad view of what types of obstacle count as unfreedom-generating constraints, or vice versa . As a result, it is not clear that theorists who are normally placed in the ‘negative’ camp need deny the existence of internal constraints on freedom (see Kramer 2003; Garnett 2007).

To illustrate the independence of the two dimensions of type and source, consider the case of the unorthodox libertarian Hillel Steiner (1974–5, 1994). On the one hand, Steiner has a much broader view than Hayek of the possible sources of constraints on freedom: he does not limit the set of such sources to intentional human actions, but extends it to cover all kinds of human cause, whether or not any humans intend such causes and whether or not they can be held morally accountable for them, believing that any restriction of such non-natural sources can only be an arbitrary stipulation, usually arising from some more or less conscious ideological bias. On the other hand, Steiner has an even narrower view than Hayek about what type of obstacle counts as a constraint on freedom: for Steiner, an agent only counts as unfree to do something if it is physically impossible for her to do that thing. Any extension of the constraint variable to include other types of obstacle, such as the costs anticipated in coercive threats, would, in his view, necessarily involve a reference to the agent’s desires, and we have seen (in sec. 2) that for those liberals in the negative camp there is no necessary relation between an agent’s freedom and her desires. Consider the coercive threat ‘Your money or your life!’. This does not make it impossible for you to refuse to hand over your money, only much less desirable for you to do so. If you decide not to hand over the money, you will suffer the cost of being killed. That will count as a restriction of your freedom, because it will render physically impossible a great number of actions on your part. But it is not the issuing of the threat that creates this unfreedom, and you are not unfree until the sanction (described in the threat) is carried out. For this reason, Steiner excludes threats — and with them all other kinds of imposed costs — from the set of obstacles that count as freedom-restricting. This conception of freedom derives from Hobbes ( Leviathan , chs. 14 and 21), and its defenders often call it the ‘pure’ negative conception (M. Taylor 1982; Steiner 1994; Carter and Kramer 2008) to distinguish it from those ‘impure’ negative conceptions that make at least minimal references to the agent’s beliefs, desires or values.

Steiner’s account of the relation between freedom and coercive threats might be thought to have counterintuitive implications, even from the liberal point of view. Many laws that are normally thought to restrict negative freedom do not physically prevent people from doing what is prohibited, but deter them from doing so by threatening punishment. Are we to say, then, that these laws do not restrict the negative freedom of those who obey them? A solution to this problem may consist in saying that although a law against doing some action, x , does not remove the freedom to do x , it nevertheless renders physically impossible certain combinations of actions that include doing x and doing what would be precluded by the punishment. There is a restriction of the person’s overall negative freedom — i.e. a reduction in the overall number of act-combinations available to her — even though she does not lose the freedom to do any specific thing taken in isolation (Carter 1999).

The concept of overall freedom appears to play an important role both in everyday discourse and in contemporary political philosophy. It is only recently, however, that philosophers have stopped concentrating exclusively on the meaning of a particular freedom — the freedom to do or become this or that particular thing — and have started asking whether we can also make sense of descriptive claims to the effect that one person or society is freer than another, or of liberal normative claims to the effect that freedom should be maximized or that people should enjoy equal freedom or that they each have a right to a certain minimum level of freedom. The literal meaningfulness of such claims depends on the possibility of gauging degrees of overall freedom, sometimes comparatively, sometimes absolutely.

Theorists disagree, however, about the importance of the notion of overall freedom. For some libertarian and liberal egalitarian theorists, freedom is valuable as such. This suggests that more freedom is better than less (at least ceteris paribus ), and that freedom is one of those goods that a liberal society ought to distribute in a certain way among individuals. For other liberal theorists, like Ronald Dworkin (1977, 2011) and the later Rawls (1991), freedom is not valuable as such, and all claims about maximal or equal freedom ought to be interpreted not as literal references to a scalar good called ‘liberty’ but as elliptical references to the adequacy of lists of certain particular liberties, or types of liberties, selected on the basis of values other than liberty itself. Generally speaking, only the first group of theorists finds the notion of overall freedom interesting.

The theoretical problems involved in measuring overall freedom include that of how an agent’s available actions are to be individuated, counted and weighted, and that of comparing and weighting different types (but not necessarily different sources) of constraints on freedom (such as physical prevention, punishability, threats and manipulation). How are we to make sense of the claim that the number of options available to a person has increased? Should all options count for the same in terms of degrees of freedom, or should they be weighted according to their importance in terms of other values? If the latter, does the notion of overall freedom really add anything of substance to the idea that people should be granted those specific freedoms that are valuable? Should the degree of variety among options also count? And how are we to compare the unfreedom created by the physical impossibility of an action with, say, the unfreedom created by the difficulty or costliness or punishability of an action? It is only by comparing these different kinds of actions and constraints that we shall be in a position to compare individuals’ overall degrees of freedom. These problems have been addressed, with differing degrees of optimism, not only by political philosophers (Steiner 1983; Carter 1999; Kramer 2003; Garnett 2016; Côté 2020; Carter and Steiner 2021) but also by social choice theorists interested in finding a freedom-based alternative to the standard utilitarian or ‘welfarist’ framework that has tended to dominate their discipline (e.g. Pattanaik and Xu 1991, 1998; Hees 2000; Sen 2002; Sugden 1998, 2003, 2006; Bavetta 2004; Bavetta and Navarra 2012, 2014).

MacCallum’s framework is particularly well suited to the clarification of such issues. For this reason, theorists working on the measurement of freedom tend not to refer a great deal to the distinction between positive and negative freedom. This said, most of them are concerned with freedom understood as the availability of options. And the notion of freedom as the availability of options is unequivocally negative in Berlin’s sense at least where two conditions are met: first, the source of unfreedom is limited to the actions of other agents, so that natural or self-inflicted obstacles are not seen as decreasing an agent’s freedom; second, the actions one is free or unfree to perform are weighted in some value-neutral way, so that one is not seen as freer simply because the options available to one are more valuable or conducive to one’s self-realization. Of the above-mentioned authors, only Steiner embraces both conditions explicitly. Sen rejects both of them, despite not endorsing anything like positive freedom in Berlin’s sense.

We began with a simple distinction between two concepts of liberty, and have progressed from this to the recognition that liberty might be defined in any number of ways, depending on how one interprets the three variables of agent, constraints, and purposes. Despite the utility of MacCallum’s triadic formula and its strong influence on analytic philosophers, however, Berlin’s distinction remains an important point of reference for discussions about the meaning and value of political and social freedom. Are these continued references to positive and negative freedom philosophically well-founded?

It might be claimed that MacCallum’s framework is less than wholly inclusive of the various possible conceptions of freedom. In particular, it might be said, the concept of self-mastery or self-direction implies a presence of control that is not captured by MacCallum’s explication of freedom as a triadic relation. MacCallum’s triadic relation indicates mere possibilities . If one thinks of freedom as involving self-direction, on the other hand, one has in mind an exercise-concept of freedom as opposed to an opportunity-concept (this distinction comes from C. Taylor 1979). If interpreted as an exercise concept, freedom consists not merely in the possibility of doing certain things (i.e. in the lack of constraints on doing them), but in actually doing certain things in certain ways — for example, in realizing one’s true self or in acting on the basis of rational and well-informed decisions. The idea of freedom as the absence of constraints on the realization of given ends might be criticised as failing to capture this exercise concept of freedom, for the latter concept makes no reference to the absence of constraints.

However, this defence of the positive-negative distinction as coinciding with the distinction between exercise- and opportunity-concepts of freedom has been challenged by Eric Nelson (2005). As Nelson points out, most of the theorists that are traditionally located in the positive camp, such as Green or Bosanquet, do not distinguish between freedom as the absence of constraints and freedom as the doing or becoming of certain things. For these theorists, freedom is the absence of any kind of constraint whatsoever on the realization of one’s true self (they adopt a maximally extensive conception of constraints on freedom). The absence of all factors that could prevent the action x is, quite simply, equivalent to the realization of x . In other words, if there really is nothing stopping me from doing x — if I possess all the means to do x , and I have a desire to do x , and no desire, irrational or otherwise, not to do x — then I do x . An equivalent way to characterize the difference between such positive theorists and the so-called negative theorists of freedom lies in the degree of specificity with which they describe x . For those who adopt a narrow conception of constraints, x is described with a low degree of specificity ( x could be exemplified by the realization of any of a large array of options); for those who adopt a broad conception of constraints, x is described with a high degree of specificity ( x can only be exemplified by the realization of a specific option, or of one of a small group of options).

What perhaps remains of the distinction is a rough categorization of the various interpretations of freedom that serves to indicate their degree of fit with the classical liberal tradition. There is indeed a certain family resemblance between the conceptions that are normally seen as falling on one or the other side of Berlin’s divide, despite there being some uncertainty about which side to locate certain particular conceptions. One of the decisive factors in determining this family resemblance is the theorist’s degree of concern with the notion of the self. Those on the ‘positive’ side see questions about the nature and sources of a person’s beliefs, desires and values as relevant in determining that person’s freedom, whereas those on the ‘negative’ side, being more faithful to the classical liberal tradition, tend to consider the raising of such questions as in some way indicating a propensity to violate the agent’s dignity or integrity. One side takes a positive interest in the agent’s beliefs, desires and values, while the other recommends that we avoid doing so.

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• Introduction

Prelude to the crisis

Berlin divided.

• When did the Berlin Wall fall?
• What was the “death strip”?
• Where is Berlin located?
• Berlin is famous for what cultural institutions?
• Berlin is the capital of what country?

Berlin crisis of 1961

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• John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum - The Cold War in Berlin
• GlobalSecurity.org - Berlin Crisis
• National Archives - A Brief History of the Berlin Crisis of 1961
• U.S. Department of State - Office of the Historian - The Berlin Crisis
• The Alpha History - The Berlin crisis
• Table Of Contents

Berlin crisis of 1961 , Cold War conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States concerning the status of the divided German city of Berlin . It culminated in the construction of the Berlin Wall in August 1961.

In 1948, when the Soviet Union’s blockade of Berlin prevented Western access to that city, the United States and the United Kingdom responded by initiating the Berlin airlift to keep food and supplies flowing to West Berlin and to maintain its connection to the West. After the blockade was lifted in 1949, the United States, the United Kingdom, France , and the Soviet Union maintained the status quo in Berlin, whereby each of the former World War II allies governed its own sector and had free access to all other sectors. The free city of West Berlin, surrounded by the communist German Democratic Republic (East Germany), was a Cold War crucible for the United States and the Soviet Union, in which both superpowers repeatedly asserted their claims to dominance in Europe.

On November 10, 1958, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev demanded that the United States and its allies relinquish their occupation roles in Berlin. He also declared that if they did not sign an agreement to this effect within six months, the Soviet Union would no longer honour their postwar agreement and would enter into a separate treaty with East Germany. U.S. Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower refused Khrushchev’s demands, insisting that their Berlin agreement still held. On November 27 the Soviet Union announced that it had rejected the postwar agreements concerning the occupation and governance of Germany and West Berlin. Khrushchev also proposed that Berlin become a free city. Although Khrushchev did not indicate that the Soviet Union would use military force if the United States did not comply , it was widely understood that the Soviet Union intended to back up its threat.

The United States and Britain refused to agree to the Soviet demands, arguing that a free Berlin, with no guaranteed access to the West, would soon be controlled by communist East Germany. Multiple attempts to find a diplomatic solution were fruitless. In September 1959 U.S.-Soviet talks took place at Camp David , but no agreement was reached, and a May 1960 summit in Paris collapsed in the wake of the so-called U-2 Affair , sparked by the shooting down of a U.S. spy plane over the Soviet Union.

As the new administration of U.S. Pres. John F. Kennedy took office in 1961, the Berlin situation heated up. At the Vienna Summit in June 1961, Khrushchev reiterated his threat that if a Berlin agreement was not achieved by December, the Soviet Union would sign a separate treaty with East Germany (an arrangement that West Berlin Mayor Willy Brandt disparagingly characterized as Khrushchev “marrying himself”). Kennedy made it clear that Berlin was of supreme strategic importance to the United States and that free access to the city had to be maintained.

By July 1961 American officials estimated that over 1,000 East German refugees were crossing into West Berlin each day, an economic and demographic drain that, left unchecked, would spell disaster for the East. On the night of August 12–13, 1961, the East German government, backed by the Soviet Union, began to build a barrier between East Berlin (the Soviet-occupied sector) and West Berlin. The United States did not intervene because the Soviet Union was exercising control over its sector. When Khrushchev’s December 1961 deadline passed without incident, the conflict over the future of the city receded with no further Soviet agitation concerning a treaty.

A major outcome of the Berlin crisis was a new understanding between the United States and the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union would continue to have dominance over its eastern European allies and East Berlin, while the United States and its allies would claim western Europe, West Germany , and West Berlin within their sphere of influence.