Chronicles of the Berlin wall

On November 9 this year, it will turn 20 years since the day the wall destroyed by the Berliners fell, sharing the city, and together the East and the West. A large chronicle exhibition, which opened in the Moscow Manege "Fall of the Berlin Wall", is devoted to this event. She tells the story of the main symbol of the Cold War.

Waking up on the morning of Sunday August 13, 1961, the inhabitants of Berlin experienced shock. Over one night, their city was divided into two non -combined, isolated parts. The border was guarded by armed military units, along its entire length they began to stretch the rows of barbed wire. This was the beginning of the Berlin Wall, dividing by almost three decades of family and friends, GDR and Germany, the East and the West.

The post -war city was divided into two parts since 1948, but the border was not closed. People who used to live in Germany and in Berlin, now who were citizens of different states, could still meet and communicate. By the 60s, the relationship between Germany and the GDR escalated. Not all residents of Eastern Berlin sought to build a socialist future along with the GDR. People fled to the West, to freedom and the possibilities of decent earnings, dozens, hundreds of thousands. The country could no longer lose its potential, young qualified specialists. In August 1961, it was decided to close the border by building a wall. The history of the construction, existence and overthrow of the main symbol of the Cold War is shown by the exhibition "The Fall of the Berlin Wall".

An exhibition opened in the Manege of the Moscow House of Photography, the metropolitan government and the German Embassy, is built as a chronicle. Here is a photo taken on August 14, 1961, a day after the report of the construction of the wall: the rows of barbed wire laid over the night seem to cross out the Brandenburg gates. After the wire site, a powerful partition from the blocks will appear - in the next picture you can see how the worker holds them with cement. Near the reinforced concrete fence a control and next strip was arranged, anti-tank hedgehogs were installed, and a fence along which the current was walking. In fact, the Berlin wall was not just a wall, but a serious fortification of a few meters wide, shot by a "death strip", sometimes cutting a peaceful city in appearance directly through residential buildings.

At first, people who turned out to be on different sides of the walls came to her to at least look at friends and relatives on top of barbed wire. At one of the frames of the exhibition, a man lifts the baby over the crowd at the barrier, but in the other, the opposite crowd, nothing to see: far away. After and such dates at a distance were prohibited - the authorities installed special screens. Attempts to overcome the wall began.

The first Berliner, who tried to break through the wall, which was then still with a wire fence, was the non-commissioned officer of the GDR Conrad Shumank. The picture, who glorified both the officer and the young photographer Peter Leibing (Schumank, running away, throwing a gun on the go, jumps over the wire), is also at the exhibition. Desperate people tried to overcome the wall by any means. This is told by photographs of the exhibits of the Museum of the Berlin Wall. Breaking to the west, the Berliners gathered submarines and mini-samers with their own hands; To deceive the cordons, hid in the secret compartments arranged in hoods and seats of cars; One woman managed to carry her child across the border in a bag of purchases.

But luck did not accompany everyone. According to various sources, when trying to overcome the wall, from 125 to 1245 people died. In a separate photo - the ranks of their graves.

The wall lost the meaning of its existence almost 30 years after the construction, in 1989. Then, under the influence of perestroika in the USSR, Hungary destroyed the fortifications standing on the border of the country with Austria. Residents of the GDR got the opportunity to get west through Hungary, and thousands of people immediately took advantage of this opportunity. Excitement and demonstrations began in the country. The government was forced to declare new, much milder rules for crossing the borders of the GDR. Without waiting for the beginning of these rules, in the evening of November 9, 1989, the Eastern Berliners rushed to the wall. On the other hand, they were met by Western neighbors. The wall was beaten with hammers, scraps, just with their bodies, through the breaks, people rushed to hug, reap hands. The famous series of photographs of Anthony Suo tells about this assault and the fall of the Berlin wall.

Personnel of the start of the assault - soldiers, waterlets, bloodied fists - resemble an uprising or riot. Photos taken after the wall fell similar to a report from a popular holiday: everywhere flags, banners, smiles, bouquets of flowers. Interview with a photo reporter - on the screen next to it. Remembering the events of those days, Suo cannot hold back tears.

Today, only a few fragments remained from the wall, which it was decided to save as a symbol of the recent past. They are decorated with graffiti, inscriptions and paintings; Hundreds of tourists come to them in order to break a piece to memory. Photos of the remnants of the structure that once shared Berlin and Europe, and now becoming art objects, at the exhibition are adjacent to a tower knocked from a tree. This is an exact copy of one of the structures built by the Eastern Berliners near the wall to look behind it, to the west. It is worth climbing to the tower - the barking of dogs is heard, as if guarding the wall. It is better to go down and again consider graffiti and children's drawings on the remains of the wall.