Category History

The Wall and attempts to cross it

Willi Seifert, commander of the GDR’s interior troops was tasked with erecting the barrier. Constructed in August 1961, the Berlin Wall was actually two walls separated by a heavily guarded, mined corridor of land known as the “death strip”. There was also around 50km of heavy wire mesh, existing cemetery walls and house facades that made up part of the Wall. The entire length of the Wall was 163 km.

Lined with nearly 300 watchtowers, the Wall was under the constant surveillance of the East German border guards. They were authorized to shoot at anyone attempting to cross the Wall.

Several attempts were made by people to cross over the Berlin Wall. It claimed the lives of at least 140 people. The most public incident of the attempt to cross over was that of Peter Fetcher. Peter and his friend, both teenagers, sprinted across no-man’s land near a border crossing-point nicknamed Checkpoint Charlie on August 17, 1962. While his friend made it over, 18-year-old Peter was shot in the back and collapsed. As western photographers pleaded with the guards to rescue the teen, the guards refused to help.

Amidst the lull, there were several East Germans who managed to cross the Wall using different ways. While some used sports cars and armoured trucks, some dug tunnels and built a hot air balloon.

The fall of the Wall

Things started to deteriorate for the Eastern bloc in the 1980s with the start of an energy crisis and political struggle within the bloc. Rising civil unrest also put pressure on the East Germany government. However, what started the downfall of the GDR was the fall of the Iron Curtain between Hungary and Austria. The opening of that border led to several East Germans migrating to West Germany through Hungary. However, this attempt was quickly blocked, but East Germans began to camp at West German embassies across the Eastern bloc and refused to return. Meanwhile, demonstrations began within East Germany in full swing.

East Germany was pressured to relax some of its regulations on travel to West Germany. On November 9, 1989, at a pressconference to announce the same, East German spokesman Gunter Schabowski announced that East Germans would be free to travel into West Germany, starting immediately. However, he failed to clarify that some regulations would still apply. This led to the western media reporting that the border had been opened, leading to large crowds gathering at either side of the checkpoints. Eventually, passport checks were abandoned and people crossed the border unrestricted.

The Berlin Wall had fallen, and this fall marked the beginning of the unification of Germany, which took place on October 3, 1990.

 

Picture Credit : Google

A guarded concrete wall that physically and ideologically divided Germany’s capital, the Berlin Wall stood tall between 1961 and 1989.

Construction of the Wall commenced on August 13, 1961 by the German Democratic Republic (GDR) to ensure people from East Germany did not emigrate to West Germany. The Wall finally fell on November 9, 1989 after East Germany declared all the crossing points along the wall open.

Backdrop to the building of the Wall

In 1949, a war-torn Germany formally split into two independent nations – the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic – with the FDR allied to the western democracies led by the U.S. and the GDR allied to the Soviet Union led by Russia. These superpowers had growing geopolitical tension between them, in what is today known as the Cold War. The city of Berlin, was at the centre of this heated split, with one part under the Eastern bloc and the remaining three with the West under the U.S, Britain and France.

Why was the Wall built?

Free flow of people between the two parts was allowed through Berlin as East Germany had sealed its mainland border from the West along the Elbe river and the mountains of Harz with barbed wire and fire zones.

As time passed, many people from East Germany migrated to the West in search of better jobs and infrastructure.

One in six people fled from the East to the West. This irked the GDR as its economy was deeply affected due to this ‘brain drain’. Thus, in a bid to halt this migration, East German communists were given the permission by Moscow to close the border and build a physical barrier along it.

With information from their informers in the western part that the West will not react, East German Police, in a top-secret operation, established a human cordon along the border with West Berlin. The border forces then went on to build a solid breeze-block wall trapped with barbed wire, from what was earlier just provisional wire-mesh fences.

 

Picture Credit : Google

The scrolls are believed to contain mostly Greek philosophy. They may also provide insights into the lives of ancient Romans.

The hot ash and gases from the volcanic eruptions have charred and carbonized the scrolls, turning many into impenetrable log-like cylinders. The scrolls are also too fragile to unfurl and various attempts at unrolling the scrolls and deciphering the texts over the last 270 years, have mostly failed. Many scrolls have been damaged in the process.

Further, in the Herculaneum scrolls, the script has been written with carbon ink, unlike many ancient texts that were written with metal-based inks. The use of carbon ink is one of the main reasons these scrolls have evaded deciphering. Unlike metal-based inks, its density is similar to that of the carbonized papyrus on which its sits, and therefore appears invisible in X-rays.

Other challenges: Even if a scroll is successfully opened, the original ink – exposed to air – would begin to fade. In addition, this form of unrolling often leads to pages getting stuck together or damaged.

Scientists use the X-ray beam at Diamond Light Source and a virtual unwrapping software to detect the carbon ink on the scrolls. The technology is similar to a CT scanner where one would take a three-dimensional image of a person and then examine different organs.

Scientists will shine very intense light through the scroll, which will deliver three-dimensional images on the other side. From that, a three-dimensional image of the text will be constructed. The idea is to read the text in a non-destructive manner. But the digital scan is only the first step in the decoding process.

The research team is building a machine-learning algorithm that will go through the digital scan of the scrolls to detect evidence of ink. The text will have to be later deciphered.

 

Picture Credit : Google

Scroll is a roll of paper or papyrus usually with official writing on it. The scroll is usually unrolled so that one page is exposed at a time. The remaining pages are usually rolled up to the left and right. In Roman usage, the scrolls were written latitudinally.

Between 1752 and 1754, about 1,800 blackened unreadable papyrus scrolls were recovered from the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum. The Villa of the Papyri belonged to the family of Julius Caesar, but the ownership of the scrolls per se is unknown.

These scrolls became known as the Herculaneum papyri or scrolls, the majority of which are today stored at the National Library, Naples. But a handful of them ended up in England and France, as gifts from Ferdinand, son of Charles III and King of Naples and Sicily. The Institut de France has six scrolls in its possession. Two of those scrolls, in hundreds of pieces after past attempts to open them, have been taken for the current study.

 

Picture Credit : Google

Between 1752 and 1754, an excavation was carried out at the Herculaneum site in Italy. They recovered an astonishing collection of 1,800 scrolls from a house believed to have belonged to the family of Julius Caesar, the Roman dictator who was assassinated in 44BC.

A pair of unopened scrolls from the collection belonging to the Institut de France will be virtually unwrapped using sophisticated technology in the Diamond Light Force, the UK’s national synchrotron science facility, which houses a particle accelerator in which beams travel around a closed-loop path to produce light many times brighter than the sun.

But the digital scan is only the first step in the decoding process. There is a long way to go before a complete recreation of the text is ready.

Nearly 2,000 years ago, Pompeii and Herculaneum were busy wealthy Roman cities located in Campania region in southern Italy. But in 79 AD, the nearby Mount Vesuvius volcano erupted. The ensuing smoke and gas spread 32 km into the air. While the molten lava ravaged the city of Pompeii, a thick blanket of ash entombed the town of Herculaneum.

Herculaneum and Pompeii were basically lost and forgotten until they were rediscovered in 1709 and 1748, respectively.

 

Picture Credit : Google

 The Sao Francisco De Assis Church

The Sao Francisco De Assis Church remains in use as a church and is considered to be the greatest masterpiece amongst all the buildings in the ensemble. It was designed in the form of a parabolic wave with reinforced concrete. The church is popular for its bold, unusual and striking forms, which also prevented it from being consecrated as the then Archbishop declared the church unfit for religious purposes. After many struggles, the church finally got its status in 1959.

The Pampulha Art Museum

Now an art museum, this building was functioned as a casino till April 1946. The casino ceased to exist as Gaspar Dutra, the former president of Brazil, prohibited gambling across the territory, it was converted into an art museum in 1957. The museum now boasts a collection of over 1,600 works including a collection of pieces by plastic artists and modernists.

The Ballroom

The Casa de Baile, known as the ballroom house, was inaugurated with the other buildings in 1943. However, in 1948, it ceased to function due to lack of visitors. Today, it houses the Centre of Reference in Urbanism, Architecture and Design. Situated on an artificial islet, it can be reached by crossing a bridge.

The Golf Yacht Club

The Golf Yacht Club has been turned into the Yacht Tennis Club today. Used as a place for entertainment and sports until the 1960s, it changed hands due to lack of funds. The original building was in the shape of a boat overlooking the lake. But over the years several modifications have been made.

The Kubitschek House

This was also designed in the 1940s along with the other buildings. It was intended to be the weekend residence of Juscelino Kubitschek. Today, it is a cultural space and a museum where objects from the time of the construction of the Pampulha Modern Ensemble have been collected.

 

Picture Credit : Google