How far do you agree that, for the GDR, the results of the building of the Berlin Wall proved to be mainly negative?

2. Financial Costs:

• The wall was very expensive to maintain
• 50,000 troops devoted to protecting the inner German border and the Berlin Wall along with vast numbers of weapons and other equipment

3. Human costs

• Friends and families were divided by the wall overnight
• It was difficult, if not impossible, for many people to get to see people on the other side of the wall for at least two years and even after that it remained hard for a long time
• The building of the wall, therefore, did nothing for the popularity of the SED government within the GDR, even if the opportunities for open protest were minimal

Positive effects for the GDR

On the other hand, these negative effects were certainly a price worth paying for the GDR government and, in many respects, the people benefited too.

1. Benefits to the economy:

• The wall immediately stopped the flow of emigration (over 3.5 million from 1949-61) of those people the GDR most needed to build its economy.
• It also made planning domestic and economic policies much easier now that the labour supply was guaranteed.
• As a result, the GDR economy did begin to improve significantly by the late 1960s with rising wages and increased production. By the mid-1970s, there had been considerable progress. Arguably this would not have happened without the wall.

2. Repression:

• It made repression much easier for the GDR government. They could control the population much more easily now that they could not run away.

3. Stability:

• It increased stability within the GDR more broadly; people now had to accept division and get on with life. There is evidence to suggest that this encouraged many people to settle down, work hard and try to help build a successful socialist society. This helped both government and people.
• Once it was clear that the Americans were happy to accept the wall (JFK: ‘it’s not a nice solution, but it’s a hell of a lot better than a war’), the wall reduced threat of conflict over West Berlin.
• It allowed the SED to begin building an even more markedly socialist society (e.g. Honecker’s demarcation policies in the 1970s)

Conclusion

On balance, the positives for the GDR government far outweighed the negatives. It allowed them security in terms of controlling the population, planning economic policy and building a more socialist society. For the ordinary people, however, the benefits were more mixed and the evidence is less clear because it is difficult to assess the extent of support for the government during the period. It certainly had some very painful effects in terms of separation from friends and families, but on the other hand it can be argued that they did gain from the increased stability. Overall, the migration before 1961 and the events from 1989 make it difficult to escape the conclusion, that for the East German people, they would prefer the wall had never been built.