[brc]

25 years is a very short time to expect some of the longer term economic and cultural changes to take place. Just like the street light bulbs, they'll get replaced as the old ones die off.

On a related note, I've never understood how you could live in West Berlin and yet travel freely to the rest of west Germany, because the city itself was deep in East Germany. I know the city was supplied by airlift during the blockade, but that eventually stopped. So how did someone from West Berlin travel to, say, Frankfurt by car? What was to stop someone from East Germany doing the same thing? The wall only went through the city, right?

I have travelled in East Germany and I found it to be a pleasant place, with very friendly people. Though they tended to have bizarre fashion sense and much more limited English compared to west Germany.

[brownbat]

This puzzled me too.

Wikipedia has a good overview under the Travel section of the article on West Berlin though: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Berlin#Transport_and_trans...

Seems like there were a few ways out, and they all had systems of monitoring in place. Westerners on the highways could interact with Easterners, but their trip was monitored at check points, down to how much time they took for the journey, to make sure they weren't fraternizing too much.

Apparently the GDR, who was bearing the cost of the transit roads and was facing economic difficulties, began levying fees on travel from West Berlin and West Germany. They tried to increase these fees, but eventually the FRG, probably realizing it was over a barrel on the issue, just started paying the GDR a yearly fee to keep the roads toll free.

The flight travel bit is interesting. If you had fled into West Berlin, you can't exactly drive through East Germany like everyone else. The Western government subsidized a flight service between West Berlin and West Germany primarily for such travelers.

Fascinating period.

[Erwin]

The 1948-49 blockade was also fascinating moment. The Western parts of Berlin (at the time split between France, UK and USA) had their roads blocked off; rather than start getting supplies from the Soviet side and thus lose control over West Berlin, an airlift was instituted which did an amazing 200,000 flights to Tempelhof over 11 months. In comparison, Chicago ORD had 580,000 combined landings and takeoffs in the whole of 2014.

Conflict-wise it's interesting to contrast the general Cold War with the non-wars if Afghanistan, Iraq.

[mmarx]

> So how did someone from West Berlin travel to, say, Frankfurt by car?

There were few approved transit routes from West Berlin to West Germany. So you could get a transit visa (which you had to pay for in west german currency) upon getting on one of those routes and present it to exit the GDR again (you weren't allowed to leave the transit route midway, and if you took to long to pass through, you'd be questioned). Note that transit between West Berlin and West Germany is different from simply crossing between the two Germanies[0], which was relatively easy for est german citizens, but particularly difficult to do for east german citizens.

> What was to stop someone from East Germany doing the same thing? The wall only went through the city, right?

The wall may have only gone through the city, but there still were border checkpoints[1] outside of Berlin.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_the_inner_German_borde... [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner_German_border

[TazeTSchnitzel]

> 25 years is a very short time to expect some of the longer term economic and cultural changes to take place.

And yet, the GDR only existed for 40 years.

[dantheman]

It's much easier to destroy than to create.

[antocv]

Unless you wish to create ruins.

[mxfh]

The Transitabkommen of 1971 guaranteed free Travel for Citizens of the Federal Republic of Germany.

http://books.google.de/books?id=GiCgOUq96dgC&lpg=PA115&ots=G...

[NegativeK]

The airlift had to happen because the USSR cut off the highway access to West Berlin.

I believe the highway was cordoned off from the rest of East Germany.

[fosk]

One thing that I never understood is that in order to make this happen, planes had to fly above the USSR controlled East Germany, what prevented the soviets from just shooting down every plane since it was their airspace at the time?

[ubernostrum]

The agreements put in place regarding the partition of authority over Germany after the war did not require keeping the roads and railways open, but did require keeping air access open along certain corridors.

So the East/Soviet leadership was able to close the roads and railways without violating any agreement; the Western/US/UK/France leadership had simply not anticipated originally that this would happen.

There were documented cases of harassment of planes, but shooting them down would have provoked another war immediately. And the Soviets knew they were not prepared to fight another war. Especially because the Soviets did not yet have nuclear weapons at the time of the blockade/airlift (the blockade lasted June 1948-May 1949, and the USSR did not conduct its first successful nuclear-weapons test until August 1949).

[bewo001]

Western intelligence services used the flights in those corridors for arial photography. So the Soviets had reasons for harassing planes that tested the limits of the corridor.

[martingordon]

Nuclear war?

[mikeash]

The same forces that prevented active warfare between the superpowers throughout the Cold War period. It came down to how much provocation they could get away with. In the case of the blockade, preventing ground traffic was doable but shooting down airplanes would have rapidly led to an all-out war.