--- title: The Lesson of the Berlin Wall, 30 Years Later description: When historian David Frye wrote a book about walls, everyone asked him about Berlin. But what is the meaning of a wall that is no more? canonical: https://time.com/5720385/berlin-wall-lessons/ author: David Frye article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2019-11-08T16:00:18.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:52:29.420Z article:section: History og:title: The Lesson of the Berlin Wall, 30 Years Later og:description: What are we to make of a Wall that is no more? og:url: https://time.com/5720385/berlin-wall-lessons/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt1dd15cece07f6cd9/698a056986f68e5c486edd86/wall-kid.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 2405 og:image:height: 1353 og:image:alt: Opening Of The Berlin Wall In Berlin In 1989 og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: The Lesson of the Berlin Wall, 30 Years Later twitter:description: What are we to make of a Wall that is no more? twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt1dd15cece07f6cd9/698a056986f68e5c486edd86/wall-kid.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # The Berlin Wall Is a Reminder That Barriers Last Only As Long as the Political Will to Defend Them > Sponsored content. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: TIME Remembers: The Day The Berlin Wall Fell [Watch (HLS stream): TIME Remembers: The Day The Berlin Wall Fell](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/jV5CSSDl.m3u8) (2:02)  _Published 2014-11-07. Take a look back in time to the fall of the Berlin Wall with two reporters who were working when it happened_ by [David Frye](https://time.com/author/david-frye/) ## David Frye Nov 8, 2019 4:00 PM UTC  A boy chips at the Berlin Wall on Nov. 12, 1989, in Berlin. A boy chips at the Berlin Wall on Nov. 12, 1989, in Berlin. Pool CHUTE DU MUR BERLIN/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images by [David Frye](https://time.com/author/david-frye/) ## David Frye Nov 8, 2019 4:00 PM UTC In retrospect, the Wall didn’t last especially long. Twenty-eight years—roughly the span of our youth—and then it was gone: broken into chunks, carted away as souvenirs, placed on mantles and shelves, displayed like a trophy of some cherished victory we had all somehow won together. For those who needed additional reminders, the Wall was turned into refrigerator magnets and paper weights. But how could we forget it? For nearly three decades, the Berlin Wall figured in our culture. Still just weeks old, the Wall became the stuff of made-for-TV movies and documentaries. Twenty-nine East Germans escaped through a tunnel that NBC financed in return for the rights to [broadcast the escape](http://www.nbcnews.com/video/nbc-news/33623268#33623268). When television wasn’t big enough, the Wall leapt to the big screen. It played [alongside](http://entertainment.time.com/2011/08/11/top-10-berlin-wall-movies/slide/funeral-in-berlin-1966/) Richard Burton, Paul Newman and Michael Caine, overshadowing them all with its screen presence. The Wall preened for magazine pictorials and played the heavy in spy novels. It turned Berlin into a bucket-list destination, as foreigners crowded to take photographs at Checkpoint Charlie and Potsdamer Platz. And its demise was spectacular—albeit in a cheesy, ’80s sort of way, [broadcast](https://www.theguardian.com/media/2009/nov/02/mtv) live on MTV. Thirty years after the opening of Berlin, the Wall lingers in our collective memory. Its physical remains—many stamped with an MTV logo—have been relegated to basements and attics. The refrigerator magnets slip and clatter across our kitchen floors, releasing their grip on grocery lists and coupons, but the Wall still [shows up](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/27/world/europe/ukraine-zelensky-cold-war-trump-giuliani.html) [frequently](https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/10/elizabeth-warren-tax-plan-lock-in-high-earning-americans/) in op-eds and political debates. [_Get your history fix in one place: sign up for the weekly TIME History newsletter_](http://time.com/newsletter-history) When I was working on a book about the [history of walls](https://www.amazon.com/Walls-History-Civilization-Blood-Brick/dp/1501172700), the Berlin Wall was typically the only monument anyone asked about. Later, at lectures and book signings, I would show photographs of grander structures, ancient walls stretching over foreign horizons: The Romans had built hundreds of miles of walls, as had the Persians. So, too, the Chinese, the Mesopotamians, the Ukrainians, Danes, English, Peruvians, and dozens of other peoples. But it was always Berlin which that dominated discussion. The movies, television shows, spy novels and concerts had made sure of that. Or perhaps we cling to its memory because it seemed so damned simple, as if historical lessons were ever really straightforward. What are we to make of a Wall that is no more? Something about impermanence, I imagine. The work of our hands never lasts. The Mesopotamians, who built a civilization out of sun-dried mud brick, knew that nothing lasted, and they knew that even when they constructed the world’s first historically-attested border wall, earliest ancestor to Berlin’s. The First Emperor of China forgot that truism. He spent his life in a vain quest for immortality, and the great tamped-earth walls which he intended to immortalize his empire eroded almost as quickly as they went up. A wall, it seems, lasts only as long as the political will to maintain and defend it. The most successful walls stood for decades or even centuries until the state that supported them rotted from some cause or other. In Cold War-era Eastern Europe, the rot was economic, environmental, demographic, arguably spiritual. Rust triumphed over ideology. Hungary decided it could no longer afford the upkeep on its hundreds of miles of guarded and electrified barriers. With a vast section of the old Iron Curtain opening up, the Berlin Wall no longer made sense. The ideologies that build walls and the ideologies that oppose them are no more enduring than the structures themselves. For nearly three decades, from 1961 to 1989, much of the Western world viewed the Berlin Wall as a symbol for the evils of Communism. Another 30 years have passed and that view of the Wall has been almost entirely forgotten. Today, the Berlin Wall is more commonly [invoked](https://medium.com/@nkolakowski/the-berlin-wall-offers-lessons-on-why-trumps-wall-won-t-work-ee96f5e278fd) in political debates as a symbol for the evil of all walls, the original ideology behind the Wall being completely forgotten or at least given a pass. The 30 years since the end of the Wall have seen barriers arise on borders around the world. Only this time we can’t agree on what they mean. The walls around Israel have been hailed for their role in drastically reducing terrorism and reviled for segregating a region. The barriers on the southern U.S. border walls have been [dramatically extended](https://www.apnews.com/ab1b07e15e6f4e9a9274b576ff3a1d45) by recent presidents—Clinton, Bush, Obama and Trump—while politicians have performed acrobatic flip-flops in their positions on border security. Nowhere do we find the simplicity of Berlin, or at least what we once took for simplicity. If there was a simple truth to the Berlin Wall perhaps it was this: that party bosses once tried to divide a nation that longed to be united. The Wall was always too weird, too unique, a monument to serve adequately as a symbol for all walls, but as a symbol for the willingness of political leaders to embrace division, it serves nicely, even if that lesson requires a little too much self-reflection to be popular. And so the Wall has been gone for 30 years now, and we continue to create our villains out of impermanent things and fleeting ideologies—rarely acknowledging that barbed wire rusts away, but political division regenerates and renews, dividing us more thoroughly than any physical barrier ever could. **_Historians’ perspectives on how the past informs the present_** _David Frye is the author of_ [_Walls: A History of Civilization in Blood and Brick_](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1501172700/ref=as%5Fli%5Fqf%5Fasin%5Fil%5Ftl?ie=UTF8&tag=time037-20&creative=9325&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN=1501172700&linkId=a0a52554680749e0c4e6db8e1012f58a)_._ ## Transcript [ NOISE ] 1989 was, was a year no one expected to be very interesting, and it turned out to be just revolutionary. That night is one that just stands out, it, it's like yesterday. That was huge. Well it was, it was stunning. I mean, nobody knew what was going on. Something was bubbling early in that week. They weren't sure what. And I was thinking the Wall will never fall. What are you thinking now? The Wall will fall. I mean, this represents a huge victory. Straight to the United States, after 40 years of the Cold War. It was huge. I mean, we got to the moon. We built three different kinds of nuclear weapons. [ MUSIC ] [ APPLAUSE ] People were cheering, and shouting, and laughing. And, it was very confused, nobody knew what to do. These people didn't know if they were going back or not. And he hooks the hand of stopping the West Berlin. And it's destroying the world with soot ash, it's dumped. And probably my most distinct memory of the whole night was this huge crowd, very happy, partying. I mean they were screaming tore out, tore out, open the gate. The reply was swift. And the next day, it was this bright, clear, just blindingly sunny day and I went out to one of the crossings. And if someone had laid planks across the sand into no man's land. And people were streaming through. They were just walking through from the east to the west. And as I got to the west side there was a crowd oh, several hundred people, West Germans. And they were just applauding. Nothing else no cheering, just applauding. And it was really just a stunning moment and I think I realized at that point, you know, this is done. I don't know what's gonna go on with reunification but the wall is, is history. It's over [ MUSIC ] ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/5720385/berlin-wall-lessons/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/5720385/berlin-wall-lessons/"},"headline":"The Berlin Wall Is a Reminder That Barriers Last Only As Long as the Political Will to Defend Them","datePublished":"2019-11-08T16:00:18.000Z","dateModified":"2026-08-04T07:52:29.420Z","description":"When historian David Frye wrote a book about walls, everyone asked him about Berlin. 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