Guest commentary by Christian Wolff: On 13 August 2026 – The Wall

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I can still remember it very clearly: we were on holiday as a family in Westkapelle, the Netherlands, in August 1961. I was 11 years old at the time. My father had to cut short our holiday because he wanted to visit his mother on her 75th birthday. When he returned on 14 August 1961, he brought the news that Ulbricht was having a wall built in Berlin. There was neither a radio nor a television in the holiday home in Westkapelle. So we hadn’t yet heard anything about this dramatic act of violence. As we had no family ties in the GDR, this news was associated above all with fear for my parents: this could lead to another war, in which Germany would once again be turned into a battlefield. Thus, a sombre atmosphere cast a shadow over our holiday mood.

It is now 65 years since the Wall was built. Until 9 November 1989 – a period of over 28 years – the Wall and the barbed wire ensured the arbitrary and violent separation of people who, despite all their differences, belong together. Furthermore, the Wall was a visible symbol of the fact that the legacy of the Nazi regime of terror and the Second World War was distributed very unevenly between West Germany and the GDR. We should therefore be careful not to equate the actual construction of the Wall and the brutality of its function too readily with the use of the Wall as a metaphor for what divides people. That trivialises all the human suffering that the Wall caused over almost three decades.

At the same time, however, we should realise that walls can only ever mark temporary divisions. For no wall can change the fact that we humans fundamentally belong together and are dependent on one another. Locking people away behind walls is always only a temporary measure and offers only limited protection. For whatever we seek to secure or separate from one another through walls – what is separated remains part of this one Earth. This applies just as much to the wall we erect around our own property as it does to the real walls with which people and countries believe they can protect themselves from one another. This may be necessary and right for a certain period of time – but it does not alter the fact that we humans must continually re-establish our understanding of living together without dividing walls: both within our local communities and within the global community. The countries of Europe embarked on such a process of understanding after 1945 and, thanks in part to the commitment of courageous citizens, succeeded in overcoming walls and cutting through barbed wire.

The question remains: why, then, are real walls still being built today and existing ones reinforced – as in Israel/Palestine, on the US-Mexican border, or soon at the EU’s external borders? Why do the wealthy secure their property with walls and barbed wire? Why does the actual separation caused by walls and barbed wire continue to have such a lasting impact even after it has been overcome? Clearly, we humans find it very difficult to

• accepting differences between people and adapting to diversity,
• and to organise equitable participation amongst us as human beings.

These two challenges are the prerequisites for keeping internal social barriers, as well as borders between countries and the defences surrounding them, as low as possible – in other words, for allowing diversity and ensuring reasonably fair living conditions. The fact that this is only possible under the conditions of liberal democracy and a policy geared towards peace is demonstrated precisely by Europe’s development over the past 80 years. That is why it is now crucial that the current ‘wall-builders’ of right-wing nationalist parties such as the AfD do not be allowed to call the shots. For they prioritise cultural and ethnic homogeneity over fair living conditions, and nationalism over understanding between different sections of the population. Against this backdrop, it is understandable that the AfD, in particular, is using propaganda to stoke a so-called ‘Eastern identity’, even though during the GDR era the situation was rather the opposite: many citizens of the GDR saw themselves as Germans in a divided country and increasingly pressed for freedom and reunification. However, the AfD’s propaganda aims to achieve nothing other than erecting new walls behind which all those who are a nuisance are to disappear – a dangerous endeavour which the citizens of Saxony-Anhalt, Berlin and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania will, hopefully, spare themselves and the rest of us.