East vs. West Berlin

One thing that struck me as particularly interesting in class this week was what we learned about the division of East and West Berlin after World War II. The fact that a city of the same people could be so completely different due to the governmental influences placed over them was an odd aspect of the history. With West Germany under Adenauer things were improving greatly. Both their economic situation and their foreign policies were advancing as to fix relationships with the countries they had gone to war with so recently.
In contrast, the Eastern side of the Germany was in so much disarray that the people were having much more trouble under the Soviet control. There isn’t anything inherently evil with the concept of Communism; it’s how the people under its banner deal with its tenets. The utopian ideal just doesn’t work, especially when there is always someone who can benefit from communism in some way or another. While both sides had their problems, it just seems that the Soviets would have seen that the Western side of the city was better off than theirs and attempted to improve Eastern Berlin; if not for the people than at least for their own interests. I try to understand the German mindset at this point but it is difficult to imagine how this change could have seemed them. At one point they feel as they are going to conquer the world and they will be the most prosperous nation on the earth, next they are being occupied by the Americans, the British, and the Soviets (I’d personally rather have to deal with anyone but the Soviets).
As far as the Soviet- run side of Berlin went, anyone who wasn’t a full on communist was gotten rid of in the worker’s state. Even though the Germans weren’t in the best position to rebel against the kind of rule that was being imposed on them, the fact that they attempted some kind of uprising is impressive. The fact that on June 17, 1953, Germans stood up to the Soviets in such large number (300,000-400,000 people) is astounding and shows that the will of the German people wasn’t completely broken. The unfortunate thing is that even at this point I think the Soviets in Germany saw this as an excuse to impose stricter laws on the citizens. With the Russians, the idea of more payback must have been looming over them for years to come, and the worker’s uprising was quickly put down. I suppose that when the wall finally went up the Soviets no longer cared if the German people saw the communist system as bankrupt. They only needed the system in Berlin to be productive, I’ve never thought that the communist system cared for the happiness of its people.