East Germans and the Berlin Wall: Popular Opinion and Social Change before and after the Border Closure of August 1961

Based on sources from the East German regime’s internal archives, this article considers how the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 affected both the regime’s political authority as well as wider processes of social change. After first considering the domestic problems that the East German communist leadership sought to solve by sealing the border, it proceeds to examine the immediate popular response to the building of the Wall and the longer-term consequences for the regime’s ability to realize some of its central socio-political aims at the grass-roots level. It argues that although the Wall was in many respects a turning-point in state-society relations, there were nonetheless many important threads of continuity that spanned the events of 12-13 August 1961. The period of enhanced political stability apparently ushered in by the Wall was arguably the product of a shift not only in popular political attitudes, but equally in the increasingly pragmatic expectations of the party leadership.