East Germany, the so-called German Democratic Republic, was never a nation as much as a prison. Held together under the pressure of outside force, the moment the Soviet thumb pulled back in the fall of 1989, East Germany began to collapse.
The History Channel documentary “Rise and Fall of the Berlin Wall” (out on DVD) chronicles the barrier that isolated East Berlin from the German capital’s West Zone, and eventually sealed the entire border with West Germany. Mixing decently done reenactments with interviews and fascinating archival material, the documentary relates that between the establishment of the Democratic Republic in 1949 and the erection of the wall in 1961, over three million East Germans fled to the West, lured by prospects of the personal freedom their government refused to grant and the prosperity the state was unable to deliver.
As the documentary shows, the Wall slowed but never entirely stopped the exodus. Forty thousand East Germans managed to get under, around, through or over the Wall by tunneling, crawling through barbed wire or swimming rivers, driving trucks through barricades or flying in hot air balloons. At least 1,300 died trying to escape. “Rise and Fall” concludes with the happy ending—the tens of thousands of East Germans who poured across the border in 1989. Like a bad spell suddenly broken, East Germany evaporated once it became clear that the reformist Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, would not send in the tanks to prop up the unpopular East German Communist regime.
