Berlin Wall

On the night of August 13th, 1961, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) began the construction of a massive wall to enclose West Berlin and seal it off from the rest of East Germany, though the real purpose of the structure was to keep East German citizens from defecting to the West. The Wall stood until November 9th, 1989. Radical political changes had been underway in Eastern Europe, and civil unrest had wracked the East German government for weeks. Thousands of citizens from East and West Berlin met at the wall and smashed it down with sledgehammers. This specimen is a fragment of the wall collected after the fall in 1989.