Berlin Wall

noun

1. a guarded concrete wall, 28 miles (45 km), with minefields and controlled checkpoints, erected across Berlin by East Germany in 1961 and dismantled in 1989.

Berlin Wall

¹

1. Fortified concrete and wire barrier that separated East and West Berlin from 1961 to 1989. It was built by the government of what was then East Germany to keep East Berliners from defecting to the West.

Berlin wall

²

1. A wall that separated West Berlin , Germany , from East Germany , which surrounded it until 1989. At the end of World War II , the victorious Allies divided Berlin, the German capital, into four sectors. The eastern, or Russian, sector became the capital of communist East Germany. The French, British, and American sectors continued as a prosperous Western “island” city surrounded by East Germany. From then until 1961, many East Germans, sometimes two thousand a day, fled to West Berlin, often with nothing more than the clothes they had on their backs. In the summer of 1961, the wall was built, and East Germany forbade its citizens to cross the wall, at the risk of being shot immediately by border guards. In November 1989, the East German government reopened the border and issued visas to East Berliners. The Berliners celebrated by breaking off pieces of the wall at a mass demonstration, which lasted into the next day. The wall has since been demolished.

Notes

The Berlin Wall was a symbol (see also symbol ) of the inability of a communist state to keep its citizens from leaving when they have a choice.

Example Sentences

Bush also understood the power of presidential proclamations and was thus largely mute when the Berlin Wall finally fell in 1989.

From Los Angeles Times

Instead, a Manhattan real-estate developer bought a 20-foot chunk of the Berlin Wall for display near Madison Avenue, a sight barely noticed by busy shoppers.

From Salon

Pummeled by these and similar crises from other climate-change hot spots, the international cooperation that lay at the heart of Washington’s world order for the past 90 years would simply wither, leaving a legacy even less visible than that block of the Berlin Wall in midtown Manhattan.

From Salon

The upcoming votes underscore a persistent sense of political grievance and alienation in the country’s east, nearly 35 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

From Los Angeles Times

The problem is primarily in western Germany which is creaking under infrastructure built in the sixties and seventies, while the east saw fresh investment after the Berlin Wall came down in 1989.

From BBC