From 1961 to 1989, the Berlin Wall was the literal manifestation of a world divided by the Cold War—a concrete barrier, eventually 12-feet high at points, demarcating East and West Berlin, and by extension, the Soviet and Western worlds. Patrolled by armed guards, eerily clean and white on its Eastern side, covered with graffiti on its Western face, the Wall turned West Berlin into a veritable island of democracy in the middle of a Soviet client state, and served as a mute, and seemingly immutable, reminder of how tenuous peace between East and West really was.
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