When Mario Relig fell in love with a man from West Berlin at the age of 17, he stood between them Berlin wall. Although his friend could visit him in DDR. But the Ministry of State Security (Stasi) kept an eye on the two. Relig was asked to spy on the man so he could be blackmailed. When the pressure became too much, the young East Berliner tried to escape via Bulgaria. He was caught and ended up in Stasi prison. It was 1987.
Relig told his story during the visit of Bundestag President Julia Kleckner (CDU) to the Hohenschenhausen Memorial Center on the eve of the 65th anniversary of the construction of the Wall on August 13, 1961, writes Deutsche says.
The Berlin Wall itself disappeared almost without a trace after the peaceful revolution in the GDR in 1989 brought it down. Today, only its fragments can be seen in the city center, as well as a vividly painted gallery in the Friedrichshain quarter.
Here, however, in the shadow of the observation rooms of this grey-brown prison complex, the GDR still seems very tangible. "For the citizens of the GDR, the Wall was a concrete prison," says Kleckner.
"No one has any intention..."
The GDR leadership under Walter Ulbricht did start building the Wall to stop the exodus.
According to data from the Berlin Wall Foundation, between the founding of the state in 1949 and August 1961, as many as four million people left the GDR. The border with the Federal Republic of Germany was closed in 1952. But the crossings between the four sectors of divided Berlin remained a loophole in the system. Only from August 1 to 13, 1961, 47.000 East Germans left the country that way, looking for freedom or prosperity in the West. They created holes in the GDR.
In the summer of 1961, it was already clear that this would not be possible for much longer. In June of that year, a reporter from the "Frankfurter Rundschau" asked Ulbricht if a "state border" was planned at the Brandenburg Gate. He dismissed it: "Nobody has any intention of building a wall." Two months later it still happened.
My piece of the Berlin Wall
155 kilometers
In the early morning hours of August 13, soldiers and construction units, on the order of the top of the SED, began to block the border of the Soviet sector with pieces of asphalt, blocks and concrete pillars. It was the beginning of a wall that would eventually be 155 kilometers long.
"East Berlin closed", read the headline of the special edition of the West Berlin newspaper "Morgenpost". And Willy Brandt, the mayor of West Berlin, chose a drastic comparison for the border facilities:
"This means that through the middle of Berlin is drawn not just some kind of state border, but the dividing wall of a concentration camp."
The single socialist party of the GDR, the SED, spoke of an "anti-fascist protective bulwark." Central Committee member Horst Zinderman admitted, however, in 1990 that the goal was to keep people in the state: "We didn't want to bleed out, we wanted to preserve the anti-fascist-democratic order that existed in the GDR."
The division continues.
What does this milestone mean more than six decades later, almost 36 years after the end of the GDR?
Federal Commissioner for East Germany Elisabeth Kaiser, born in Gera in 1987, reminds us of something that is almost unimaginable for many today: risking your life to leave your own country.
"What it really meant - it's very impressive to me," says the SPD politician in an interview with the German News Agency. Barbed wire, observation posts, dog units, gunfire: just for Berlin The Berlin Wall Foundation lists 140 deaths linked to the GDR's border regime. Attempts to escape from the GDR are thought to have cost the lives of 915 people.
Another aspect that Kaiser points out is that the division still has consequences today, because both parts of Germany developed differently for decades. Incomes, collective agreements, pensions - all this is still at a lower level in eastern Germany today, while unemployment is higher. There is also a lack of civil society with a strong financial basis, as well as large structures of social welfare organizations, churches or companies. "All these are the consequences of the division that the Wall made visible and permanent," says the Commissioner for East Germany.
East and West, a shared memory
And the review of the GDR sometimes looks different: in the East it seems more complex and less categorical. This, for example, is shown by a survey conducted by the Forsa agency in 2025 among approximately 1.643 residents of Berlin.
Of the respondents who lived in the West until 1990, 52 percent rated the GDR as a dictatorship. Among those from the East, only 38 percent made that assessment. As many as 29 percent of East Berliners surveyed saw the GDR as "people-oriented" or "caring"; only four percent of West Berliners thought so.
Recently, the cabaret artist Uwe Steimle made a joke by singing the GDR anthem at an AfD rally. The left-wing youth organization Solid praised former head of state Erich Honecker. The founder of BSW, Sara Wagenknecht, likes to point out in her pre-election speeches that today's times remind her of the last phase of the GDR. All this is present in the political discourse of 2026.
"Beautifying the past is dangerous"
This angers the commissioner for SED victims, Evelin Cupka. "The further the GDR is behind us, the more beautiful it supposedly becomes," a former civil rights activist in the GDR told dpa. "Nostalgia in private life can be understandable. Political embellishment of dictatorship is dangerous."
The director of the Foundation for Confronting the SED Dictatorship, Ana Kaminski, sees things similarly. For her, August 13 is a reminder of "the disastrous consequences of that dictatorship on the economy, society and political culture, with which a united Germany is still struggling today."
Mario Relig, who spent four months in solitary confinement in the Stasi prison in Hohenschenhausen because of an escape attempt in 1987, carries that memory with him every day. At that time, the guards used to check at night through the opening in the cell door whether the prisoners were sleeping on their backs, as was prescribed. Spinning was strictly prohibited. Even today, he sometimes wakes up terrified when he lies down on his side in his own bed at home, says the 58-year-old.
"When you hear today that we already have DDR 2.0, it's mocking the people who were once persecuted, you just have to say it that way," says Relig. That relativization of injustice scares him.
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