ade of materials originally intended for housing construction—a circumstance that contributes to its generally implausible appearance. At the base of the wall, there is usually a row of upright prefabricated concrete slabs about four and a half feet square and a foot thick. These were not set into excavated foundations but merely laid on the ground. As a result, when the ground heaved during last spring’s thaws the wall fell down in a few places, and East German workers had to put it up again. On top of the slabs there may be a couple of rows of regulation-size concrete building blocks and, above them, a piece of smoothly finished concrete about thirty inches long and twelve inches square. All these blocks and slabs are held together with mortar that drips messily down the sides. Surmounting the structure at intervals of about three feet are Y-shaped pieces of metal, on which are strung strands of barbed wire that have become rusty. These are the usual components, but they are not always assembled in the same way. Sometimes, the master builders slapped a second piece of finished concrete on top of the first. Other times, they didn’t. Occasionally, they put up a stretch using building blocks exclusively. Not surprisingly, the wall varies a good deal in height. As a rule, it is about ten feet high, but in some places it is twice that, and it may vary by a couple of feet as many as three or four times in the course of a city block. There is, however, one consistent thing about the wall, and that is shoddy workmanship. It looks, as a Berlin sculptor has remarked, as if it had been thrown together by a band of backward apprentice stonemasons when drunk.
No matter how unprepossessing it is, the wall has largely realized its main immediate objective—the elimination of West Berlin as an escape hatch for residents of East Germany. From 1945 until August 13, 1961, when the wall went up, nearly four million citizens of East Germany—roughly, one out of every four—fled to the West. As a result, East Germany earned the distinction of being the only country in Europe, if not in the world, that had both an excess of births over deaths and a steadily declining population. The mass emigration was not only politically embarrassing but economically crippling. For the first few years following the Second World War, exact records were not kept of the numbers and occupations of the refugees. After the early nineteen-fifties, however, sixty-one per cent of those who fled had been gainfully employed. Among the émigrés were a hundred and fifty thousand farmers and farm workers; forty-seven hundred doctors and dentists; eight hundred judges, lawyers, notaries, and state attorneys; more than seventeen thousand teachers; and an almost equal number of engineers and technicians. About half of all the refugees were under the age of twenty-five; thirty thousand were students. Though East Germany could ill afford to lose any of its people (its population is now seventeen million, and that of West Germany fifty-three million), it was the exodus of young workers that was of most concern to the regime and its leader, Walter Ulbricht. As he complained in Pravda last year, “It cost us more than thirty billion marks [about $1,500,000,000] just to prepare a labor force, which was then recruited by West Germany.” Two weeks before the wall went up, he told a reporter from the London Evening Standard, “This is no political emigration but filthy man-trade, which is carried out with large sums of money invested by Bonn authorities, West Germany monopoly capital, and the United States spy centers in West Berlin.” Ulbricht and his colleagues also described the mass departure as “filthy head-hunting” and “filthy slave trading,” and they did what they could to stop it. One step was to pass a law in 1956 making Republikflucht (fleeing the republic) a crime punishable by three years’ imprisonment. (The Constitution of the German Democratic Republic guarantees the freedom to emigrate, which it calls “one of the truly basic freedoms.” However, like so many other Communist g