Irish Examiner View: Around the world we are still building walls

Big borders are back

Construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961

On this day in 1961 workers used barbed wire and cinder blocks to start building a wall that would become the symbol of the Cold War. The Berlin Wall divided Germany physically and ideologically and, in the 28 years that followed, it became a physical manifestation of the ‘iron curtain’.

Its fall in 1989, celebrated with much euphoria, reunited Germany and acted as trigger for the collapse of many Eastern European regimes, which fell domino-like over the next decade.