It is the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall today.

Berliner Mauer, as it is called in German, was a concrete wall that divided Germany into East and West Germany respectively.

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The wall was not just a physical barrier that divided the capital, Berlin into two parts, but also an ideological divide that became symptomatic of the Iron Curtain and the Cold War.

The Berlin Wall symbolized the heightened state of tensions of the Cold War from 1961 to 1989.

Google celebrated the fall of the Berlin Wall with a doodle marking the 30th-anniversary celebrations that are to take place across the world on 9 November 2019.

The Eastern bloc( German Democratic Republic, or GDR) of the country lived by socialism standards and was under the control of the Soviet Union as agreed post- WW2 Treaty, the Potsdam Conference in July 1945, while the Western block was together governed by Germany, France, and Britain as the FRG ( Federal Republic of Germany).

The gradual cooperative spirit between the four Allies ( as they were called during the WW2 against Germany, Japan, Italy that were the Axis powers) deteriorated and was replaced by competitive aggression that led to major economic differences between the East and West.

While West Germany grew to become an ‘economic miracle’, the East was drained of its resources by the Soviet Union. The population from East Germany thereby wished to migrate to the West, but any efforts to do so were severely punished.

In 1989, after civil unrest and revolutions against communist regimes in Eastern European countries like Poland and Hungary spread to Germany, the East German government announced on 9 November 2019 that all citizens from East Germany could visit the Western part of the country. And, thus began the disintegration of the wall over the next few weeks.

The fall and demolition of the Berlin Wall was completed in November 1991, though the formal reunification of Germany took place on 3 October 1990.

Here are a few photographs from the era that give a glimpse of the Berlin Wall and the stories around it.