![]() The disassembly of the Iron Curtain began when Hungary openedits Austrian border, which showed the world that the divisions of post-war Europe were coming to an end. ![]() This became known as the Berlin Wall and became the world’s most tangible symbol of the Cold War and communism, and served a demarcation point of the Iron Curtain.Īs countries behind the Iron Curtain began to face economic hardships as state-run economies in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and even the Soviet Union began to falter, the Iron Curtain began to crumble. Typically described as a communist state in the West, it described itself as a socialist “workers’ and peasants’ state.”Įast Germany closed its borders to the West in 1952 and, nine years later, erected a wall that ran through the center of Berlin and past the Brandenburger Tor, or Brandenburg Gate, to keep its citizens from fleeing to the prosperous West. ![]() East Germany, also formed in 1949, became a satellite of the Soviet Union. West Germany was formed on and was comprised of the sectors that had been under the control of United States, Great Britain, and France. Immediately after the end of the Second World War, the United States, Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union each governed a single zone, but Cold War politics transformed the divide into a de facto East-West split. The victorious Allied Powers divided Germany into four occupation zones, and did the same with the capital, Berlin. ![]() The original separation between East and West goes back to the collapse of the National Socialist regime in 1945. German reunification, or Deutsche Wiedervereinigung, marked the point in time at which the Deutsche Demokratische Republik, or not-so-aptly named German Democratic Republic, colloquially known as East Germany, became part of the Bundesrepublik Deutschland, or the Federal Republic of Germany, known then as West Germany under Article 23 of West Germany’s Grundgesetz or constitution. ![]() The occasion, the New York Times, reported, was marked with “pealing bells, national hymns, and the jubilant blare of good old German oompah-pahs.” Thirty years ago on this day, West Germany and East Germany ended 45 years as a divided country and united to become a single nation. The Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, a site that came to symbolize the city’s Cold War division between East and West ![]()
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