Kids - "Ich bin ein Berliner"

We attached the movie “The Lives of Others” produced in Germany which won an academy award for best foreign language film in 2006. It was a political thriller and human drama.

The setting is just before the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent unification of East and West Germany. It showed the oppression of communism and various tactics used by the East German State Secret Police or Stasi to monitor the population via informants, wire tapping homes, intimidation and control of the media and arts.

I explained to my sons about the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain. How the economic and social conditions were so poor under communism/socialism that communist leaders sealed off the free part of Berlin in August 1961 to prevent people fleeing communism. They built a wall and barbed wire fencing and shot anyone trying to escape to the West.

“I am a Berliner” was one of John F. Kennedy’s greatest speeches in 1963.



I had thought I would never see the Berlin Wall fall in my lifetime until Ronald Reagan become president.



[Credit video post by thehistoricalarchieve for JFK and forguigon or RR]