Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 144: The Berlin Wall

Episode Date: October 26, 2023

lotta walls in the news recently huh  Our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod/ Send us stuff! our address: Well There's Your Podcasting Company PO Box 26929 Philadelphia, PA 19134 DO NOT SEND US LETTER BOMBS thanks in advance in the commercial: Local Forecast - Elevator Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Zencaster. Hey, oh, but no, we don't get any that authentic banter the people want. Yeah, I mean, this is authentic, authentic banter right here. I can't do authentic banter because I've been on the internet driving myself insane. For the last, we've got to stop looking at it. I can't. No, I've been driving my. I do.

I do what I do where I do. Down on. I tweeted. I've been driving my I do what I do where I don't know how I tweet it to take Appalachian banter Something something something Donald Hollis, you know, yeah, we're here we're here in the holler recording a podcast. I have a possum with me The truth is we're just offstage just off stage. Yeah.

I, uh, yeah, we're, we're in West Virginia. Uh, the most beautiful of all 50 states. That's right. Our heads is the large lump of anthracite. Yeah, we're hearing that. No, that's not, that's by Tuminus in West Virginia. Uh, yeah. Yeah. No, anthracite is, uh, we have Joe Banshin dangling off a balcony. Yeah. Yeah. We're here. It's still beautiful. It's wonderful. See the word beautiful city of nitro. I think Joe Banschan might have a yacht. There's actually, I mean, the connoisseur is. Yeah, the connoisseur is. Oh my god. What did I do? The connoisseur is navigable. So, you know, what's the river now? I'll be able to think of the coosa.

Tom Bagee. No, that's missus happy alone. Welcome No, shut up I want to introduce our guests. I'm we're being rude. Yeah, that was an Appalachian Valley. Yeah, yeah Yeah, because he said yeah, we're being rude. Yeah, I fucking edit. No, edit the podcast. That's ridiculous. You said the corner. I'll tell you one to talk. Do you remember that 4chan green text that was like, uh, you know, to tell a German see you later. He says what time? Yeah. That is extremely accurate. And I have a lump of brown call from Germany today on this podcast.

Yeah. Very happy to be here. Coal mining handshake between West Virginia and Germany. Yeah, exactly. Terring up the world, one village at a time. Yeah, yeah. You could tear down a whole city of NATO, West Virginia. We've left West Virginia. West Virginians cannot be trusted with the bag of two A's. They just can't. Oh my god. You imagine that you you know, it took it took the world

four and a half billion years to wear down the Appalachians, but one bag or two eight eight. That's done in a couple that's done a couple months. It's going to it's going to look like fucking Holland after that. They just flat. Yeah. Zero zero feet above sea level can below sea level. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, the the holders of West Virginia. Hello, and welcome to Will there's your problem. It's a podcast about engineering disasters with slides.

I'm Justin Risenick. I'm the first news talking right now. My front-ends are here and him. Okay, go. Morgan Lippesonna. My name is I'm Scott O'Kelly. I'm the person who's speaking now. My pronouns are she and her and Z. I guess. Ye Liam. Yeah, hi. I blame Anderson. My pronouns are here.

You have a guest. We're going through. We have a guest. Guest introduce yourself. Yeah, I am Edwa. It's all We're going through it. We have a guest guest. Introduce yourself. Yes. Hello. I am Edouard. It's all you're going to learn about me because I might say something's only podcast that could get me fired from my job.

So I wish to remain anonymous. My pronouns are here. We have an anonymous guest. I'm very happy to be. Mm. Thanks for coming. Long time. It's the first time colonized we say.

Little better often are our last guest who may or may not be killed for the episode. Yeah, absolutely. I think say what you like about your employees. I think that's relatively unlikely to have you assassinate. My employer is boss. Well, actually, my employer is milkshake, but yeah, this is true. Milkshake milkshake.

Milkshake may kill me at any time. Yeah, we had to put all the company and milkshakes name, you know, yeah. The LLC, it's just like it's got a little paw print word signature field is. Oh my god. Yeah. I'm employed by the beautiful city of Berlin, Germany, which as far as I know, does not employ any squads of assassin. You never know.

I best of case, you know, keep one eye open, I think. Oh, you thought the pop-print was in red ink, but it's actually in blood. I blood from scratching me. And trying to eat your beard. Yes. So what you see on the screen in front of you is a wall. It's a photo of a central Berlin, so it feels like nice and easy. Yeah, it looks very Appalachian actually. Well, because that's what they do, the infill from all of the coal mining elsewhere in

Germany. They just kind of like dump it on Berlin and be nice. It's very scenic. It's why people come, which are worse than everything, it just comes from the mountains. So I kind of want to, they wanted to build that mountain in the disused airfield. What you're calling I should I can't remember. Temple half. Yeah. I mean Westpins to how to mount, you know, why can't why can't temple off, you know, exactly,

exactly. And you can't have a bow kind without a bow. So, you know, this is this is a good mountain eyes. This is good to failing. I can get on this mountain eyes Berlin I don't know what that means, but we've got to do it like We're gonna find out this is Skylines like uh like terrain editing tool and we're gonna dump a bunch of mountain Take Berlin and Charleston West Virginia and have them swap places

places. It's kind of makes me see. I mean, downtown Charleston is actually very nice, surprisingly good bus system too. But if you're in West Virginia, you go to Morgan town and take the the car. It's a car. It's a car. There we go. That's that's that's another episode. But yeah, so we're going to talk about a wall, which existed in Berlin, but this is actually the wrong wall. And it's a little joke.

Yeah, it's a little bit more. It's a joke. That's a yoke. So you can go to the board, which you can buy in Berlin and send to your relatives around the world to tell them it's in there. It today's disaster,ism with German characteristics. But, uh, but, um, oh boy, aren't you all excited for this one? But first we have to do.

Oh, she's the bad damn news. Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey I know it was on it. I also have given the yeah Benny Benny from Sheldon ham God dammit. Are you This is about the level of like this is how my brain feels also all the time now lately these last few days because I've been poisoning on Twitter. Yeah, stop Stop doing that. No, no, I can't This is a wellness check play the FBI drop Stop, stop doing that. No, no, I can't. I'm too angry. You have to. This is a wellness check. Play the FBI drop. I thought I thought sort of like as this is an episode that might run quite long in terms of time, we would pick a nice easy news item that we could bang out in like 10 minutes. So I was about to say, Israel, Palestine, who you got?

Palestine and five. Palestine and five, you want to parlay that with Ukraine. I was about to say Israel Palestine who you got I'm fine. I'm fine. You want to parlay that with Ukraine Yeah, I've got like Julia Fox is getting the helicopter to Atlantic Sissy to place my like 13 way parlay on every single international conflict Yeah, I'm calling every single one of them right. I'm a draft fox. Let us party Uh, it's bad. Yeah. Why is he Benny from Cheltenham? Not Benny from Cheltenham High,

because he went to Cheltenham High School. So I knew that Benjamin Daniel, who was like, like grew up partially in Philly, and is therefore like our least favorite Philadelphia. But like the fact that you like have it down to the exact sub of is like so. In so I want to know what his wall wall order is. Well, we discussed that in the last one. And we thought he made me too high brow to the last time we discussed this. I really don't know why he doesn't have a wall wall. No,

I think he might be too high brow to ever go to Wawa. That's an addition to being a rampaging mass murderer, Jealousy Illiniac, he also is too good for Wawa. Yeah. Who's to say, which is who? So Hamas instigated this attack on areas surrounding the Gaza Strip, involving people in paragliders and people over ran offence and they went and they got, they fucked up a rave that was happening right nearby.

They fucked up a whole bunch of people. This has been the worst attack that occurred in Israel for a long, long time. It's probably the off-Cupor war. Yeah. I think since before the off-Cupor war, depending on how you look at it, it's maybe like the worst thing since it's 484 Israelis. Yeah. And that is not good.

And so, you know, the Israelis are as usual responding with restrained and proportional attacks. That's the word I would, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Being sort of assisted in that by every Western leader, most notably Joe Biden. There's like US military aid coming into Israel. You know, they essentially have caught blanche to do genocide, which is what they want to do. It's what they want to do. Yeah. This is what we can't just love. This is what they want to do. It's what they want to do. Yeah, and this is what we can actually love. This is what Benjamin Nihar, who has always wanted. There's evidence that Hamas was funded by his job.

And so what 2019, I want to say, because that red brains genius strategy of being like, well, I don't have to deal with the like, the Palestinian Authority if I just boost Hamas, and it's going to make Palestine much more unpopular. Which I guess in this instance it kind of has at the cost merely of like what like over a thousand dead Israelis and then probably at least double that Palestinian in two days. It's amazing how the strategy is the same every single time and it has the same

fucking outcome every single time in the Middle East. Well, I don't want to deal with the secular guys because they're kind of socialist. So we better fund these religious Yahoo's instead. Yeah, I mean, it's, it's not as if the secular guys were above a bit of like indiscriminate murder now and then. Yeah. But you could at least talk to them sort of reason with them right.

And it's be fair. Like you could have talked to her mass before of reason with them right. And to be fair like you could have talked to her mass before this before this which is now like beyond the pale like they if you go and you look the number of like sort of ceasefire agreements they have proposed to Israel and yeah you can say this is like grandstanding and it's like a very cool and they're never going to do it but like they're the ones who like time after time have like come to the negotiating table. And the Israeli government, under Netanyahu, every time has been like, no, we can squeeze this more, you know, there are some more which is the goal. Yeah, we can just keep this going indefinitely.

We can kick this can down the road. It's never going to come back to buy us. Yeah. I mean, I, for our listeners, you know, the, the, the talk about the, I mean, I for our listeners, you know, they we've talked about the, you know, you hear in the abstract The Gaza Strip, you know, you hear about Israeli occupation. You got to understand this is a this is a place which is About exactly the same size as Philadelphia with twice the population Our children, baby 50% of who's a country will be the third most densely populated one in the world Yeah, they're with like, you know, Singapore and crap, you know, and this is, you know, and it's the famous nation of crap. Yes. There's like very dense.

You know, and Israel controls everything that goes in, everything, they run it like the Willy Wonka chocolate factory, you know, no one goes in, no one comes out. Um, you know, yeah, I wasn't ready for this is like Oompa Lumpur genocide. Yeah, well, you know, I wanted to say something other than open air prison, which is what everyone else is saying. Um, merely because it's an accurate description. I mean, the thing is though, we're kind of short on accurate descriptions because the discourse, man, not to make the worst thing about this to discourse because the worst thing is the things, right? But like, it is making me feel insane genuinely

to like see everyone in politics. And everyone in media go, these attacks were under votes. It's not true. That's right. Everyone in media go, these attacks were undervokes. Which is not true. I agree. They, you know, Israel has a right to defend itself by bombing civilians. By doing genocide. Yeah, yeah.

Great. Which is also not true. And therefore, we must fund this. And if you oppose any of this, you are an anti-Semite and you don't care about dead Israelis. Which is not true. Yeah. Right. Hi, I'm Jewish and I could tell you that about that, Israelis, which is not true. Yeah. Right. Hi, I'm Jewish, and I could tell you that,

yeah. It's not, it's not. I guess the thing that's been exhausting me the most is this idea that like, if you have any sort of feeling for Palestinians in this at all, what you are doing is refusing to condemn Hamas, right? And I would have hoped, and I know this is naive of me. I would have hoped, I would have imagined that, you know,

indiscriminate murder in the streets is something that does not require a lot of condemnation. You can just kind of assume, sort of goes without saying, you know, absent a couple of like very weird people on the internet. You can kind of assume nobody is that pleased, right, with the terrorist attacks. Yes. But no, apparently not. Apparently that's the thing that we have to talk about exclusively. Yeah, I had to say I had to preface every single statement that you say

with I condemn violence, but yeah, and it's like none of, none of anything else ever has to be cave acid with, you know, you don't ever have to condemn the occupation. You don't have to condemn the blockade. You don't have to condemn settlers. You don't have to condemn any of that. Um, and you will never ever be asked to. Um, it's, it's just infuriating. You know, so well, linguistically in the media, like Palestinians, Nahama, are slowly becoming synonyms, you know, like you're talking about terrorists. Why are you talking about Palestinians? They're one and the same, maybe.

Every child out there is a fight. Isn't it, is it terrorist? Yeah, I saw something that was like, oh, yeah, they're not children, they're soldiers. And it's like, child soldier kind of has child in the name. Yeah, like if that's where we are, where they're like, we're dehumanizing these people who live in an open air prison where their day-to-day is controlled by a fascist government.

And I can say, obviously, as a Jewish person, as a human being, there's a lot of emotions. Which I found as a profound sadness. Like, this is just, it's always going to fucking go this way. I just, the thing is I, I cannot imagine people being surprised, right, that Hamasav all people would behave horrifically, would commit horrific crimes, right? And just from even elementary knowledge of like, why Hamas exists, why it's there, why the Gaza Strip is in the open air prison situation that it is. Is it a surprise to those people that a fundamentalist, extremist movement that has been deliberately cultivated by the Israeli government is then both extremely powerful and also willing to act hatefully.

You know, it's just... Here's the other thing. It sounds like a lot of these reports, especially the most lurid ones, and there's been a lot of very lurid reports of violence from Hamas. It sounds like a lot of them are not true. Oh, yeah. Right, right. We can condemn attacks on civilians without resorting to, you know, at the time this morning, I believe retracted any reports of rape at the rave that they fight up for instance. Yeah, the one and then the big one that we've been sort of like going back and forth on in the media here is 40 decapitated babies is which to me, I true. I mean, you can you can find stuff like that and

like in like, you know, like anti-German propaganda from World War One, right? The real shit is bad enough. I mean, maybe it's going to come out that that's true. I don't know. But like in general, as a traumatizing myself looking at like reposted telegram go gore-ass person. Like mostly the impression I got is that no one was having the sort of like time for Barack killings. Mostly it's just like the regular depressing kind of thing. Yeah, it sounds like yeah, it's the lurid versus the banal. The banal stuff is much more plausible, which is, you know, they, they just shot a bunch of people as opposed to I don't know some kind of, some kind of saw movie torture scenario. I can't have a bunch of people, which means now this like God knows how many Israelis

in, in Gaza, which is now being bombed extensively. And really, this position is more direct bombed extensively. And really, this is the government's position. And the director. Yes. As we don't give a fuck. Like, I'm done. I'm done. The capture just literally there. Yeah, absolutely.

I'm surprised they don't just, you know, use the neutron bomb that they may or may not have. Oh, well, it's close, but. I'm doing it. Don't mind me a bit of a tough sound. Do the worst stories, please, don't touch that leaf. I swear to God. Yeah, so I mean, to me, the thing about this strategically

for Hamas, right, absent the moral consideration is what are the points of doing this is you prevent Saudi Arabia from normalizing relations for the Israel, right? It's another sort of like blow against occupation and theory. But like, it seems so kind of like confused and motive because you kidnap these civilians and soldiers and you're like, okay, we'll use these as bargaining chips.

And then you commit an attack that makes no one want to negotiate with you. It just seems sort of like self-defeating, you know? I feel like Thomas is Engel because I I I grew with that. Although I think at the same time desperate people desperate needs to show Yeah, Thomas is sort of like the dog that caught the car at this point I don't think anyone anyone who anyone who was

Heading towards that fence thought they were gonna make it over alive and once those guys made it over that wall There are force in nature at that point. There's not much you can do to like control or stop them. I mean, this reminds me a lot of like, I, the metaphor I thought of my head is like the Johnstown flood. A lot of rich people caused this to happen. They knew it was going to happen.

And the people who caused it are not, not the people who reap the consequences. I mean, I think about like peasant revallions, you know, calories, stuff like that. You know, I'm going to get yelled out for this comparison, but even like slave revallions and slave uprisings, where it's like, no, the first thing you do is you torture everyone who even looks like they've ever, you know, possibly benefited from your years of oppression. Yeah, it's anti-colonial violence, it's ugly, it's nasty, it's terrible,

it's, you know, there's a lot of ways to avoid it, but you have to actually try. I also have to want to avoid it. Yes, it's like the impression in itself isn't quite as bad as going into people's homes and killing them, but it's like you drop on the stone after a thousand years, you've got a hollow end. Well, so sometimes it is going into people's homes and killing them. Yeah, all sorts of things. And it's a stochastic, more distributed way. And again, just purely on the numbers, if you look at the numbers of dead, it doesn't even begin to kill you.

Yeah. And so I guess maybe one of the things we have, we see these videos in the media now of the most humane, harming history, bombing a parvin blocks, but it's okay because they've been warned. This one in particular, this is the Palestine tower. You can see being hit by some kind of very large missile. This is 11 story building. How the fuck are people supposed to evacuate out of there? What's the lock up? Best I know that they did the traditional roof knock, which is they send a small bomb to blow up the roof. Again, that's a spossing round as a good. Like that's all it is. Yeah, basically, I mean, it's like, and then, okay, you got 10, 20 minutes to evacuate. And, you know, you got to think, okay, we got lots of families with small kids, lots

of people who are disabled because they got their legs shot off by the IDF. Maybe you have people who, you know, it's very difficult to evacuate one of these buildings in time before it gets knocked over by this big shitty missile. And then, of course, once the building comes down, you have the huge debris cloud, and then everyone within two or three blocks gets the 9-11 cancer. Yeah, I mean, the thing that I saw right before logging on to do this was I saw, they just like essentially did a double tap strike and I saw like a mulched Palestinian ambulance.

Yeah, and then you got like the what's it they told everyone to evacuate to the town square in one of these suburbs in there and then they bombed the town square. That's cruelty for the sacred cruelty, not the pet prize anyone in this point, but um, and I had another thing to say, I forgot what it was. It was a good one though. It's probably like free Palestine. Like the only, you know, because like not as as vanishingly impossible as any of this looks now, the only way any of this is ever going to end is with the end of occupation and the end of the blockade and like, you know, the two state solution doesn't exist anymore. So it has to

be like one state solution. Yeah, like a, like a, a country called country with a codline called language. Yeah, let me run it. Yeah. It's like the no name groceries branded country. Right. Yes. Be kesperanto there. They do. They speak Esperanto there. You can fix this real fucking quick. All you have to do is tear down the fence, right? That's basically that's step one. Step two, if everyone is really citizenship, and then step three, hold elections.

Probably need a truth and reconciliation commission and there's somewhere. Well, that's true. I mean, I do think there is something also which is kind of positive and hardening about this, though, which is that you look at this sort of this, this, you know, the state of Israel relies very heavily on like defense as like a cornerstone of its economy, because it's like, okay, we have the most secure defense system in the world. We have all these very high tech systems. You can come and look at the Gaza Strip and look at how well all this is working. We got the handgun that kills a building. We got the iron dome system that shoots everything out of the air.

We have the automated century turn with the facial recognition that can headshot you instantly so you don't waste bullets. We have all this setup pointing at the Gaza Strip, all of the fucking time. And they sort of wink, wink, nudge, nudge at other nations, especially Western nations like okay, when the climate change water wars come up, you're going to need this shit. Yeah, I mean, they train cops and so does, you know, and they sell this stuff to them. And and all these systems worked great until they came up, they, they hit one piece of organized resistance, not even like great organized resistance was not even high of organized resistance. Not even like great organized resistance

was not even high tech organized resistance. All these systems shat the fucking bed. Yeah, there's gonna be a broader point about like the efficacy long term of border walls in here. Yeah, so I'm kinda like, okay, maybe we have a chance in the future if all these defense systems just don't fucking work. Yeah, I mean, I appreciate the after best all to you.

Yeah, because with the semistic Loishmills in the end, they you kill them all or maybe more go away. Yeah, I mean, that's where it looks like it's heading at time of recording. By the time this comes out, I mean, I don't even know. Yeah, who knows? Well, you know, that is a different thing, but it's good to know that you can get through the wall. It's true.

I mean, I kind of described this as like, Hamas deciding to go out like, butch and Sundance, right? But, and it's because this was kind of like, if you look at the far right, even within the already far right Israeli government, if you look at, um, Bang Veer and, and so on, it's like, this was always on the cards. They've always wanted to just like bulldoze it all into the ocean and have done with it. Um, and for her master, sort of like, just to bring up the schedule on that. And for them to do some killing in the opposite direction, as indiscriminately, it's, I mean, if nothing else,

humiliates those guys, which great. Yeah, this is a big humiliation for the IDF and the intelligence services. You know, I don't know. I think there's at least something to, you know, it's good to see these high-tech weapons systems just fucking, nah, they don't work. Nothing works. Yeah, nothing works. That's true. You know, I don't know. I get some, I get some, I feel hopeful for that, you know. Really, really mining for that silver lining, but got there on the way down in there. Yeah.

So yeah, that was a big goddamn news. But we have to, we're done talking about the Gaza wall. We have to talk about another wall. All right. So we do what the all. Yeah. I use the real fucking language. It's a it's a Dutch

Nazi paper. I've just always found ever since I saw it hit the dude what new to be. So as some of our audience I'm reliably informed are not in fact, 60-year-old trained enthusiasts, but are like teens. And because of no child left behind and stuff. We have to teach you.

You will be getting college credit for this, don't worry. None of you learned in school about anything that happened in Europe in the 20th century. And so, on a remedial basis. American education ends at like history, education ends at like just after the Civil War, right before reconstruction starts. Well, okay, so this is Adolf Hitler, bad dude. And, well, dude also in that sense. sense and yeah after he died and after World War

II ended the victorious allied powers decided to like we got to break up this Germany shit right um it's not working for anyone anymore yeah it's just like he kind of lose your your country privileges work the lot better when it was you, several million tiny warring provinces. I mean, that would have been a really funny thing to do is to break into, break into Germany, de-naughtify it by turning it into like 571 little like Frinstems again. We're bringing back the Holy Roman Empire. Which is reinvent pressure.

Like from first principle to yeah, it just reinvent Russia from first principality. Yeah, it just has to happen again, just start over again. Just like looking forward to some US general appointing the new Prince Bishop of Oom. As we see here, Germany is like Gaul, it's divided into parts. So Britain gets a sector, which is in green, it's the like Northwest bit. America gets a sector, which is like Bavaria and like a couple of other bits of the South. You get the fun bit. You get the fun bit. Yeah, yeah. So if you're an American soldier, you get to go to like October Fest. And if you're a British soldier, you get to like eat pickled herring by some

industrial dogs that you've bombed five minutes earlier. I think in the American case, we said the lasting effect on the image of Germany in the US, like because all the GIs going back, that's what they knew for the most part. And later on, 35 years of occupation and being mostly in Bavaria again, or in Berlin. And it's really all we know. So we got this really friendly, beautiful image of Germany, but it's not all like that. I've always said Bavaria's Germany's Texas.

It is. Meanwhile, the British image, the lasting British, like military memory of occupation is like a blue Mercedes van full of sausages and beer bouncing through like a like a tank training ground. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Should put in a picture of that. France also gets a sector just because you know they like to say they've done something.

Because the goal bullied everyone. Participation trophies are real and if you complain hard enough you can get one Tiny a tiny American sector up here are they I don't I don't know what city this is Is this like yeah? I don't know why the American city occupied Raymond. I think it was so we could have a port I thought it was I thought that was a port. I thought it was. I thought that was the free Hanseatic city of Bremen. And finally, finally, America has access to the open sea. That was bad to say.

Yeah, they got the, you know, I guess, because it's the free, the free city they gave it to America because we have freedom. That's true. And burgers. I mean, how do you solve any other questions? gave it to America because we have freedom. That's true. And burgers. I mean, I'm not going to be facing any other questions. And then, doing most of the heavy lifting here, you see this big red swath of East Germany. Yeah.

So part of the reason why the Soviet sector exists and why the sectorization exists is because, like the dying days of the war were the allies of racing east and the Soviets racing west in order to determine where those borders would be. And absent this kind of like negotiated settlement, the Soviets just sort of occupied most if not all of Germany. And it would have been an intriguingly entirely communist country. They might even have gone on. Okay, boy. The way to Antwerp, you know, which is where you get Churchill's fucking

Operation Unthinkable of like arming the SS. Oh, the German SS. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But you may notice this sort of like fun kaleidoscope, right in the heart of his Germany, the Soviet sector, and that his Germany, the Soviet sector. And that's Berlin, not actual size. Quite.

And premium is also quite large. It's not a big. So mega city Berlin, which in itself gets divided again. So there's like enclaves, enclaves, enclaves, yeah, quite sure which mix of British and French to use. Yeah. It's an enclave. Oh, yes, it's the word, probably honestly, it's the word clavical. Now that I think about it.

But you get a, you get a, like an enclave of each of the western sectors in Berlin, where you know, the Americans have a bit of West Berlin and the Brits and the French. For a while, there was a power show and thing where they would drive around. It was called the International Patrol, Vienna had this too, where all of the law enforcement in Berlin was a jeep with one guy from each nationality in it. And that's to me been the ultimate buddy cop movie. That's terrific. Oh yeah, that's terrific. It's like really not getting on with the French guy, you know, sort of an alliance forming in the back two suits.

Oh, so like World War II. Yeah, very much. So we've got to the next slide. We have a closer look at the divided Berlin. It's beautiful map. I love the font of the title. It's just very playful. Very cursive. Yeah. Yeah. You got some good. Well, the sans-sera font is also very good. I say this for the Germans, very,

very strongly-funted people. Oh, they're a lot of a font. Oh, god. Well, the problem was they, you know, once they hit, what's the swisted helvetica? It ruined sans-arifants because, you know, that was just over free business. Yeah, exactly. I think we're sort of an anti-Helvetica podcast. I think we can say that. Now, give me some accident grotesque, come on.

No, no. What? Uh-huh. I like, I listen, I like Gil Sans, and it's not, Eric Gil, not a good dude, but you have to, you have to separate the art from the artist. You have to separate the artist.

Yeah, and you sometimes have to separate the artist from the dog. It's all, yeah. How is this? Listen, he made a lot of fucking dogs. I know. That dogfucker could design a fox. All right, Trajan popped off as well. The Trajan have a font.

Yeah, it's the like, it's Eric Gills' Tracings of the like lettering on Trajan's column. My tattoo is in it. Do you have a tattoo? I didn't know either. Yeah. Ever. You know, I'll leave you to speculate. Meantime.

Yeah, you can see all the numbers refer to what with different districts of Berlin are names. So the dividing lines of the sectors weren't just drawn really nearly. They didn't make them up. They just based them on the existing administrative subdivisions of Berlin, which had been established in 1924, the most part.

So you can see against the French, we get a little bit, not quite as much as we have ones, but still a little bit. It's funny to give them vetting though, the like reddest part of Berlin historically. But I think some of it, in part, is due to existing infrastructure questions. There's always people, there's military occupation forces, they need garrisons, they need a place to stay, and there aren't that many garrison buildings in Berlin at the time. And the Americans down south, I think it's in number 13, what's called Templehof now is a place called Lichda Feldos where they got their garrison.

It was where garrison that we, uh, Leipstandart, Adolf Hitler, SS, so one of the worst SS divisions of all time. Like garrison, they have the Americans moving in there. It's moving straight in, like scooping all the stuff off the walls. We got a gattle, I think. Yeah, and you were also at Olympia Starrion, the so-be Olympic village, that was, I think, where the headquarters of the British were for a while. But then they were also in the entire garden, I think, closer to the center as well.

But basically, so you have the Americans get this bigger garrison in the south. And the French, in French in wedding get the Garrison that was a Luftwaffe. It was a Hermann Güring something something. Garrison, where so we got that and yeah, mentioned on when we did the like Berlin Airport episode with Ben, we talked about that. This is why Berlin had so many fucking airports.

Yeah, basically because we are put a table is in the French sector, basically, so they had to take care of it. And the Russians, of course, got their pick, they had a bit more space in the east. And they also got the center where the heaviest fighting had been. And also the interesting part, you can't see it in this map. Just, just west of the border between one and two, smack that had been the middle of the big part of the tear garden. There was a Soviet monument, which we built

just like as soon as we got there, we started on it. And it was in the western sector, it was in the British sector. And so the British always had to accommodate the Soviets coming in there to take care of their monument. But what was that? Is this Aliyoshya, the big like guy? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I always find that very sort of in your face, you know,

deal with it, we got that first. I think you've done the battle with Berlin, you're kind of entitled. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you have to let those guys in. You have to say, all right, yeah, come in, fix them out, yeah, whatever. It's all right. And basically, you guys are building to feature.

Fair enough. Fair enough. Right this way, sir. Yeah. And we use the Garrison Billings, And so basically, you guys are building different nominate. Fair nominate. Brightness wise, sir. Yeah. And we see the Garrison building. It's actually quite interesting. The American one is now a main state archive. So the Bundesachief in Berlin is down there.

And the French Garrison, which was previously the Luftwaffe Garrison, is still now a Garrison of a Bundeswehr. So there's a lot of tradition in Germany and not letting good buildings go to waste. They're still standing in use of them. You don't care what happened to them. Yeah, you know, the building still works. I mean, that's, you know, I look at, like Rome.

There's still a couple, there's actually a Roman era, like a Roman Empire era office building that's still in use as an office building to this day. And I can Berlin for the finance ministry is in the building of the air ministry that Güring built. I mean, if you didn't use a building that merely because it had been the size of like a historical atrocity in Berlin, there would be no buildings that you could use like Yeah, I mean you get to

Mercedes but in like the former East Berlin as well. Like I mean you do not have to hand it to in Nazis under any circumstances but the buildings they did build most of the time in Berlin were quite modern so like you know steel concrete construction. Yeah. So they withstood the wall better. And the older building fading in the sort of image of the bomber with the holes in it, sort of correlation thing. The ones that weren't bomb to destruction were like very survivable. Yeah. Yeah. Well, what's the average spear was always like obsessed with like ruined value of buildings.

Yeah. Like this building has to have a pretty ruined, which is stupid, but also, I'm not sure if it's lost in our rods. But it's also like, OK, well, building is still there. Yeah, we actually don't know the ruin value yet, because we're still using it. Yeah, we don't know, because we're still using it.

Yeah, we don't know because we're still using it. Anyway, Berlin at this point is sort of like a complicated flat chair. You know, with people you don't like. Then and now. But they're paying rent, you know, you need to hold it all together. Because Berlin is still at this point supposed to be the capital city of Germany. That's why everyone wants to have it. It's for larger city of Germany, that's why everyone wants to have it, it's for the largest city in Germany. So all the offices are with a few people left

to know to run a country out there. Yeah, I mean, if there's a whole... If there's a whole... Western allies, you know, whatever Germany they make, it's a real humiliation if they have to like decamp to some fucking middle of nowhere village like on a... Yeah. Yeah. I guess that's the other issue of Germany is, you know, you have a lot of cities that are about the same size.

I believe a esteemed podcasting colleague Matt Crispin called it a country of Milwaukee's. Yeah, it's a bit like Britain in that sense too. It's like Berlin and then distant equal second every other city. Yeah. That's what I feel I mean about Philly. Obviously every city is worse than we are. Yeah. New York can eat shit. Well, the cities do I hate. Bon is so funny to me though. They fully just decided to do a kind of like mock chewed a brazilia.

To be like, I hate that. Bon architecture is wild, because you have every possible style of the federal republic there. And it's all like, they still run a bunch of stuff out of it, even because again, you're never going to give up a good building. But it's just kind of this city that was built very artificially as a kind of like toy town federal government centre. I mean, it's well located. You know, it's close by colonial, you can get there quick.

Yeah, good transit links is the kind of thing that people who don't have anything else say about their city. The by way, as I know, the Berlin, it still hasn't recovered. It's population, the highest population Berlin ever had was before the war, like shortly before like 1940, something like that. And even now, we're still behind. This stuff has like huge long legacy. I think often about how Ireland still has not recovered its population since like before the famine. Like the Irish population like peaked before it. And you know, it's still like, you know, several million sure. Yeah, that's what we'll do to you. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, so you're a difficult flat chair.

And I think we can move on to the next line where we... That's what the flat chair reaches. It's very nice graphic. Thank you guys. I took several minutes to make this myself. I'm not entirely clear why I was sort of briefly possessed by the spirit of a former like SED, past the official to do this.

Yeah, so the problem with having a flat share is eventually, it reaches a sort of crisis point when nobody's doing the fucking chore wheel. And so one of the big levers that the Soviets always had in the Cold War was Seas West Berlin entirely. Just roll the tanks over the inner border. For the flag, right? Exactly.

Exactly. It was something that Kennedy was worried about as a sort of like for like thing about the Cuban missile crisis was, there was a lot of sort of like feeling in the Kennedy White House that if the US invaded Cuba, the USSR and East Germany would like invade and seize West Berlin as like a like for like trade. Sure.

It's also like what would they do about it? Yeah, that knocked out in the middle of Soviet zone. Maybe three, four divisions in there and that's it. And you're fucked. The Berlin Brigade and all of that stuff is like, I saw a bunch of that stuff at the National Army Museum in London as that's it. And you're fucked. The Berlin Brigade and all of that stuff is like, I saw a bunch of that stuff at the National Army Museum London, it's wild. It's fully just like, yeah, like, like, the guys who are actually

in the like army of the Rhine, their life expectancy in terms of, you know, if a war starts with the Soviet Union is like a day. And then in Berlin, it's like 10 minutes. So that again. Oh, so like genuinely, of the Soviet Union is like a day. And then in Berlin, it's like 10 minutes. Oh, so like genuinely, it was like a token force that existed to sort of like do like skirmishes leading up to war, like operations cover the war, like kind of like pointing tanks each other and had, you know, the Soviets ever decided to like move Westwood, it would have been not militarily significant. It's like, okay, we gotta give the appearance

of being mad at each other at least. Yeah, and the British contingent accidentally invented the world's best urban tank camouflage pattern in the course of doing that. Yeah, so part of the reason why it's impossible to reinforce West Berlin, military is because there's like one or two road corridors to it, which are like, you know, like walled in by the Soviets. And Stalin embodying the sort of spirit of this second image I put here

decided pretty much for shits and giggles to be like, yeah, I'm just gonna close that. We're just gonna starve everybody out and take it. But they had a sort of like agreement to have air corridors. And not for the first time, one of the United States enemies underestimated its air force. And you had a bunch of transport planes flying and very, very logistically, impressively

to feed West Berlin for a period of months until Stalin gave up. Because the main worry was the winter. Because the previous winter in 46, 47, it's been extremely hard. You had thousands of people dying, just freezing basically, because there was nothing to heat yourself with, there was no food, nothing. So the worry was, if it's going to be the same kind of winter again, it's gonna be tight, but they got lucky as the winter was quite mild And then we sort of like Everybody gets to create a Germany. So you get the The Bundesrepartist the server

The broad generator there we go your own personal Germany So you get the Bundesrepublikum Deutschland, which is like the FRG, if you want to put it in English, the Federal Republic of Germany, West Germany, which has freedom, democracy, often may not apply if you are being sort of like extrajudicial, murdered in prison for being in the barbed wire, mine half gang,

but like other than that. Wow. Look at Cola. Yeah, it's got Mercedes's and it's got a name. Yeah, all of this shit. And then you have the DDR or the GDR, the German Democratic Republic, the Don't You Don't You Don't You Don't You Don't You Don't You Don't You Don't You Don't You Don't You Don't You Don't You Don't You Don't You Don't You Don't You Don't You Don't You Don't You Don't You Don't You Don't You Don't You Don't You Don't You Don't You Don't You Don't You Don't You Don't You Don't You Don't You Don't You Don't You Don't You Don't You Don't You Don't You Don't You Don't You Don't You Don't You Don't You Don't You Don't You Don't You Don't You Don't You Don't You Don't You Don't You Don't You Don't You Don't You Don't You Don't You Don't You Don't You Don't You Don't You Don't no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, Sigmund Yane, it's got the FDOTs, it's got like all the fun stuff that we know and love about a communist regime, right? And yeah, they sent this guy to space.

Yeah, first German in space. I just noticed this kid here is doing a proto-John Fetterman because they hadn't invented hoodies yet. He's got the shorts with a heavy jacket. Yeah. Why did you find this photo of me? So the idea, we'll think about it in its totality later on, but we have to talk about the initial years of it, which, you know,

it's strange because a bunch of former, like a bunch of German companies came to the USSR having survived Stalin and like the whole lot of stuff Came back with the intention of like Communistifying and like denazifying. I mean in some cases you have to say Came to the USSR in quotes and then came back to Germany and even heavier quotes Like we're sent back where gently encouraged to come back and contribute. In order to restructure the country as a Soviet style regime, with some degree of optimism

sometimes. That was a point in which the party was going sort of a hidden hand in all of this and like there was going to be like more of a sort of a presence of a democracy and stuff. Um, and yeah, it didn't work really well. I mean, you're really hard. Generally it goes between periods of optimism and pessimism and definitely for a period like the very first years for like 49 to 53 is actually okay because you're rebuilding everyone's contributing, you know, you've got ruins to start with so it can only get better anyway.

And it's actually quite nice in some aspects. And then, you know, 53 unrest, the protest put down violently and then the wall 61 and then the 70s detent, you know, take West Germans give you money to be nicer and then in V80s again, everything's terrible, nothing's ever going to end. So it always kind of goes up and down. I think the 53 stuff is important too because it was like sort of a prefiguring a lot of stuff with like Czechoslovakia and Hungary, right? Where it's like, okay, well the Warsaw Pact, what does that mean? Does it mean everybody is going to be like a sort of like like a client state of the Soviet Union? Or is there some kind of like flexibility and how we're allowed to like implement communism?

And the answer is absolutely not. Oh, no, absolutely not. No, no, no, no, no. Thanks for going in. Yeah, Imre Nagy, fuck you. No. Yeah, and so once it was kind of established that those were the rules that like, you know, the group of Soviet forces in Germany was staying in Germany and sort of like revving their tank engines permanently.

And descent was not to be tolerated and, you know, there was going to be a secret police and all of this. Then it turns out all of those things are, and I say this in a sort of grieved way as a communist, quite bad for the economy. Sure. Oh no, the line. But the line really do matter though, when what's happening is, people are just going, yeah, fuck this shit, I'm going to the West. You know, like the sun in the joke from the lives of others, you know. You know, I mean, communism never really existed on its own terms. It always was in the context of global capitalist hegemony. Yeah.

This is the capitalist's worst trick is making you exist in a context. Yeah. He hates it. He wants to exist in a context. I hate fucking context. Yeah. If we just had global communism,

we could get rid of the woke bullshit. No. No. You wouldn I'm kidding. You wouldn't need that. You wouldn't need it anymore, yeah. It would wither away. Yeah, so people just leave. And not just Germans, not just these Germans too, like while the border is open in these

brief periods, you see people from what? You see checker slowbacks and stuff trying to like, out just trying to bounce through yeah yeah you just bounce you go you go drink your Coca-Cola and you buy your Mercedes I think when you will certainly be able to deal with your sort of like rewarding life in the West because at this point the ball was still relatively open I mean they're not wide open you can't just go but but you can still go if you make the effort. And so between 49 and 61, there's around 1.6 million people that live the GDR, and you have to remember that at this point, they only have 18 million total. So it's like 10% of the population just go the way, which is bad. And it's mostly young, educated people from the cities.

So it's even more of a problem. And so they really, I mean, you, you know, they had to do something about it. The question is just, what do you do? However, you change what you're doing, or you try to keep everyone from leaving forever. And you can't like try and make things a bit less repressive, because if you do Harper Stalin and then Chris Jopper, this one we'll be like very, very upset with you. That's sort of the argument that goes like, the wall sort of happens because of 53, to some extent, at least in the self-justification of Virginia,

because in 53, if he's unrest, the starting point is the working norm. So that the work you're expected to do in a day, in the factory is up for one day to the next by 10 percent. So you suddenly have to work 10 percent more. Let's just have a day. It's a good form of union. Yeah, sure. So people are unhappy about that. Go to the street where tanks come. It

comes down. But what the regime says about it is that this was all started by infiltrators from West Germany. So this is a bugled in Nazis and agitateers and everything. This is a perk of being forced to live in a context is you can kind of put anything on the context. Exactly. You can be like, listen, the reason why the line is bad, that's capitalism. And sometimes that's even true.

The reason why I just stubbed my toe, capitalism. And let me tell you what, it's fun, easy and rewarding. And in this case, it's even easier because you can say, well, West Germany, what sort of a, it's all Nazi, you know, they all went after, we're all still there, we're still doing Nazi shit. And we don't want that here,

so we gotta keep them outside. And it's not as if, I mean, the DDR wasn't of a rehabilitating Nazis quietly, but I mean, like it's where they got a, like a large portion of their first police from and stuff, but like, yeah, West Germany personally. Yeah, because it's like, where else are you going to find people, you know, in, in, in media, the beautiful Nazi Germany, the nice black leather uniform you just to be cops

and the cops are right exactly. Right. Exactly. Well, you know, your cops already exactly right exactly well. Now you're cops for communism, which is good. Yeah, that's right. We've changed, we've changed the hearts to reds. I don't know that I buy that. Strange. It's always as if people don't believe that a former nuts he could be a socialist revolution. So, you know, people people people change. You know, it's, especially when they're in their source of their income changes. I mean, this is, this is sort of like politically embarrassing for the GDO, which is why it never really like did formal, open denazification in the way that West Germany did. And West Germany's. They were all dead. West Germany's the last time I've

solved it about how good this is. What it says. That's why the East is increasingly fascist now is because we bravely reckon with the legacy of fascism. It's like, well, you bravely reckon with the legacy of it by declaring the world not sees anymore and then everyone feels good about it. And we don't ask why everybody has

this like blood group tattoo under their armpit or whatever. Yeah yeah but like yeah but I think in East Germany it was like to be at the top like you couldn't be an Nazi that would just look bad and you didn't want to make the fellows look bad but like middle management basically. But not just for middle management. Exactly. Yeah, I mean, if it's full of like bureaucrats who like went along and continue to do that. Thank you, tiny arguments. And I mean, in a sense, also, you know, what were you going to do? Because if you wanted to run the country, you need people to run the country. And they won't let many people left.

So from a very sort of pragmatic standpoint, in a sense of, okay, we don't know if it was going to start again in two years or not, you better get to it. You know, they just sort of decided, okay, it's worth, it's worth not looking to. I should also say that immediately following the wall of the Soviets, like aside from the fact that East Germany was in ruins, all of Germany is in ruins, the Soviets also took everything. So all of the heavy industry, all of the manufacturing capacity that went east and like their factories in Russia today that are still built out of like old Nazi shit that they've like repossessed as war reparations. It really was more stuff like I've seen some documents from Vettings in the French sector

where the mayor of the sector gets complained from a person running an auto repair shop. At one day, two Russians rolled up in a Jeep, took out a transmission from a car, left him a note in Russian, which he couldn't read, and then just left. So he complains to the mayor, and the mayor has to complain to the French in French,

naturally, of course, has to have a Russian note be translated into German, then in French. And it's just some Russian girl saying, yeah, we took the thing, sorry, deal with it. And it's just like, what are you going to do about it? It might have been like ultimately self-sabotaging to the project of building a sort of a communist state

and he's Germany, but it is very funny. And I don't feel bad about it. I think your graphic is actually quite accurate. Also during the air blockade, like the excuses for Russian over-Soviet's gave us to why you couldn't drive into Berlin, it was basically just, yeah, the road... We had the road for two minutes, we immediately made it Russian, sorry. Yeah, it was some partles, you know how it is. You know how it is, you immediately made it Russian. Sorry. Yeah, it was that it's a part of all, you know, it's not. You know how it is. Yeah. And they actually it almost came to war because when they were

yak fighters, like they flew close to the the American bombers was repurposed bombers to try to make them deviate from the landing approach. It's the fact that at one time like when the Americans got a fighter escort of the bombers, and they shot Soviet airplane down at some point. Lots of stuff in the cold where we have to pretend that that didn't just happen otherwise. Yeah.

So like an unthinkable escalation. Speaking of unthinkable escalations, go out to the next slide. That were on one hour in and we're on slide six of 34, yes. Yeah, baby. Okay, few attendants. Just go straight over me. We're one hour in and we're on slide six of 34, yes. Yeah, baby. Okay, few attendants. Just go straight over me. I was about to forcibly move this podcast.

Yes, for us. Thanks for nothing else. Let's see, in 61, these tensions come through ahead. When the East Germans together with Soviets, of course, we always have to approve everything. Prepare a nice little surprise. Everyone, but in the night, they have to approve everything. Prepare a nice little surprise for everyone, but in the night, they started like 1 a.m. by putting up barbed wire pretty much all along the border

and having these dudes in uniforms. Look at these dudes. What fine specimen of fighting manlies are? These are for the Betriebs Kampfgruppen, which is a beautiful word. And it's basically workers militia. I can't really turn into the like a camp gruff and an avai to class or whatever. Exactly. Oh, fucking what? Or the the the fighting groups of the working class basically like you're your office or your factory had a section that like in the event of ship popping off was meant to operate as an infantry platoon. It was fucking stupid. They formalized the idea of work with kind of like the idea for a little bit.

They formalized the idea of everything grows cups on it. These were troops not cops, although they there were a lot of volunteer cops and sort of like I bet there were. I mean, well, the Soviets really went heavily on this there was a thing called a like a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a You have the regular border forces, but it also helped by volunteers who wore no uniforms. Just had a green arm band and if you didn't notice that quickly enough, then you were probably fucked. If you want a license to beat people up, sure, come to the office and we'll give you one. Yeah, people like Britain did not invent everyone in the country becoming a cop. It's proudly German, much like the Royal Family. Yeah, well, I mean, listen, if you want an excuse

to wear a uniform to work, this is your country, you know, I mean, you know, copy, it's like the German model of official to mix with the Soviet model of official to them. It's perfect. And therefore, you know, the sewage inspector has to dress uniform and a saber. Nice. I've seen very uniform ones weren't quite so nice. It's all looking a bit

baggy, a bit unkempt, we have to say. So it was probably early in the day, and they're walking up at night, so we let them pass. But so basically it was these guys, and regular police, and the army, the N.F.O.R., the National Fox Army, was further in the back, like just in case, should got real, they were also on hand. But as you can see, these guys just form sort of a human wall just right at the border, whatever setting things up. And the West, in general, was taken by surprise. I mean, there's some speculation that they'd been warned before, and at least the US, like at the presidential level by the USSR, that's never been proven as far as I know. And since this all happens overnight, you know, people are being walkin up with vague messages of some things happening in Berlin. And most people just say, okay, and go back to sleep. So a guy from the Berlin section, I have the state department,

goes just that because we've gets a first message at midnight, goes, okay, well, whatever goes back to sleep, he's walkin up again four hours later by a CIA message through a code word and informing him that he must tell the president now. And then they frantically search for the folder with the plans for such an event. And they have a folder which is labeled border closure, but the folder is empty.

LAUGHTER What do we do? Wow, fuck, okay. The basic thing in Vienn is what they do. They do fuck off. We just wait it out. At first, you know, it looks like a big troupe spilled up all shit. Maybe something goes down, but they just go up to the border and no further. So it's all okay. And in the first few days, you just have barbed wire. But then in the next few days, you can see what's here on the right. He's more really shitty. Really. Breaks.

Yeah, that's the. There's some. Not very good center blacks here. He probably. Yeah, he probably take the sour, the good punch, you know, probably. But then you go to be to like punch through the Berlin wall. Yeah, you're one punch man. You go through the.

We'll come back to the concept of punching through the Berlin wall later And so and these these pictures here. We're fairly standardized I mean you can see it's the same type of center blocks and other places they use just like whatever was on hand Well a lot of just existing Masonry is just sort of mustard up to become suddenly the border and At this point the wall is still quite porous. They can still go through a lot of places. And a lot of people do escape during these first few days. Basically, you guys have it start with a really, really shitty war. And lots of dudes with

PPSH 41s. I enjoyed before they like, where the parts of the border were buildings, before they figured out that they needed to either demolish those or block up all of the windows and stuff, people just left by like climbing out of the building like assassins create just like descending down the side. Yeah. It's kind of like, yeah, you know, a place well enough, you know, you're kind of like, yeah, there's obvious security holes here, here, here, here. It reminds you, it's like Washington Union Station. You can bypass the Amtrak Q if you just go to the VRE platforms.

Oh, lifehack though. Yeah. But you have scenes of people lowering babies through windows on bed sheets and stuff like that. So it's a little bit hectic at that point. If we go to the next slide, we can see the two beautiful people who are really useful for the whole thing. To handsome, who the fuck are these twinks?

Oh man. I really love the 60s communist style of airbrushed portraits where you believe that Oraconica had no pause. Yeah, I don't maybe you just ate really well. He just looked at one. Yeah, he's on that retinal. He has some kind of an oxalope. Some kind of insane German diet. You want to talk about it at this day to day. And you have one like between your forehead and like the between your forehead and like the... Oh, listen, it's happening to me too. I'm allowed to laugh at it.

So anyway, the guy on the left is Walter Honeck, who is a big boss at the time, and interestingly enough, at the 15th of June, the same year, so like two months before, at a press conference, a journalist from West Berlin asked a question about, is there anything got a change from a border, whatever? And he said, the famous quote, Niemann hatte Absicht anemowat's verricht, which means nobody has the intention of building a wall.

That's like a sort of like, what a ridiculous hyperthesis. Yeah, I think who could think of that? Who's gonna fucking wall up? Like, come on. But at this point, the most certainly already knew it was gonna happen. So it was kind of a Freudian slip, you could say. And the guy on the right is Uldrich Hanukkah, which I always found. Morgan Liebzana. Somehow looks, I mean, from the two, I think Hanukkah is the one who looks nice.

So to some extent, he just can look like a small dude. You know, he was quite small as well. And it was his wife who was the real time. He was the grey middle manager of socialism. That's also a thing. We talked earlier about the Nazis that were taken over, but these people all coming in this fight as like, Hanukkah spent the whole war in Nazi prison, basically, and escaped and stuff and everything. And Hanukkah, I don't remember exactly what he did, but it's the same kind of story.

So he's people, you know, they were through communists, as true a communist as you could be, you might think. But then they went on to fuck it all up. So it's always really a bit puzzling. Yeah, we're having like a world historical opportunity. And you know what happened? The context got them. Oh, no, no, no, no, no and you know what happened the context got them. Oh no, not exactly.

It's the context, fuck, shit. So anyway, I was born on a guy, isn't the first secretary yet? He's going to become about in 71, but at this point, he's the secretary for security issues and for the central committee. So he's the one who has to come up with all the planning, the operational planning for building the wall. So he's the architect of it, if you will. And he's the one who's gave the order to build it. And he's also the one who gave the order

to shoot people trying to cross it. Which is gonna do the she's befeel. Not if you change the order of the letters, it becomes any word, but you shouldn't do that. He's the order to share, yeah. And she's befeel, which is considered one of the worst things to ever have happened in relation to all things, because obviously that's how most of the people who died

at the war were killed. And he was prosecuted for it after 1990, but they let it go because he was dying of cancer. Yeah, it's so strange how much the whole of the DDR has bound up in this one guy's lifetime Yeah, like yeah, it was his wall. He was he was general secretary for like damn near the whole thing Um, and then you know, he you know gets out countries reunified and he fucking dies like it really it's like a Greek tragedy It's a German tragedy any refused refuse to take responsibility for it?

Like, with an interview, when he's hiding out in Moscow shortly after the 1990, and you know, he generally asks him tough questions, but he just evades, evades, evades. Even though at this point, you think he wouldn't have much to lose anyway, but just refuse to take a position on the thing at all. Just says, you know, nation states have a right to decide what we do with a border.

Blah blah blah. It's a familiar line, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. So anyways, this guy sort of got to start in government being, you know, a big boy by building the wall. It's probably what got him in the end of the first Secretary post because he had shown that he was willing to do what it takes. So we can get him an excellent. And this is one of the most famous pictures.

It's a watchman aboard a guard jumping over the wire. Looking a little bit conty too. Yeah, he's serving. Yeah, he's serving. Yeah. I mean, it's basically a very much uniform, you know. Of course. Not so bad. Yeah. Yeah, they're not uniform, you know, of course.

Not so bad. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like this helmet, the M56, that was originally a Nazi design, but Hitler vetoed it because he thought it looked gay. And then yeah, so they just had like stocks of like millions of these fucking helmets. And so these Germans just used them until the 80s, like all the way through because they just had them on hand. Yeah. It does regard silly. Yeah. So much rumect. This guy is Conrad Schumann, and he was, why we have such good pictures of it is,

because on the other side, we're a few West Berlin journalists. And it's sort of so him working his nerve up to it, and so that's why we're also a van of the West Berlin police was waiting there with all open so he could just get in and he's like, oh, I'm gonna tell you, I'm gonna tell you, it's a little walking up, you know, it's filling with a wire with his boot, then walking back, walking back up, and then he just jumped and the front of him was waiting there for a moment and

just snap the shot. It's a fate and be there, you know, but it's it's so cool to like imagine the West Germans. They're like, I'm not gonna jump. He's gonna like watching this guy. Stronger man than I, I would not go anywhere near any concertino. Why are that stuff gives me the heebie, jabies? So like the really thick boots on, you know, yeah, mush, you know, is fine. I would still be like, nah, I'm not going near that shit.

So how confident are you in your sort of like high jump? A bit less. Not very. Very bad. I'm just sort of like rolling through that like forward rolling through the barbed wire, dying of blood loss on the way to the hospital, you know? Yeah. And interestingly, that man went on to live in a barrier till the end of his

days because he didn't feel even after reunification. He didn't want to go back to Saxony where he already came from. A fear of reprisals. People from Vostazia and actually committed suicide in the end, but Wikipedia doesn't say why. But anyway, as you can see from all the TV, you know, the stars we finally got them. You never know. But as you can see from the list on the right, like he isn't the only one who made it over in the first days as a guards person,

like we saw all guards, all the guards. And it's kind of interesting to see how they all did it. So like, We're very low ranking. You got a, like, all the back masks and then one left hand. did it. So like, you got a lot of back my shirt and then one left hand. Yeah, basically, I think it was mostly like the lower ranks, less likely to be ideologically committed and maybe had more to gain from just leaving.

Like the others crawled under the wire, which I think is worst when jumping over it. If you're afraid of it. Less Elan, less Panache, you know. Yeah. One of them, it says, he pretended to go get something to eat. He just said, I'll be right back. I promise.

I have to go get some chocolate away from here. It's fancy exotic. She goes to another school. You guys have never met her. Exactly. This guy's so good. I go go visit my girlfriend in Canada. How much push man? Push like whistle like a whiz. You just bought a What's the like, where is the use you jump the board? No, hey, Mood Oshman, which is number three in the list. He always found an excuse to be a hundred meters ahead of the others. Where he could then go over a notice. I mean, he was noticed, but we were being stopped. And we also note, like, did they have their weapon with them and how many rounds of ammunition

did we have with them? So apparently that was sort of a concern. But these are just a few of the people who made it over during the first construction phase. And obviously, as well, many civilians, like they said, because there was still a lot of, a lot of options if you wanted to go away. But next slide, please, the world quickly solidifies. As you can say, you can sort of see the second version, which starts to

railway ties. I was going to say the same thing they look like they're not they're not concrete railway ties, but they they certainly have the same proportions. Yeah, I think what we use most of the time was sort of like agricultural building materials because we likely to have a lot of these. And so this is sort of the second world version from 65 onwards. So it's a bit more solid, but it's still not quite what you associate when you think of Berlin rule. And what I find interesting as you can see this is taken from Western sign because there's this sign that says Straßensperum für Orsartus

di Schantmauer. Schantmauer is all of shame. So it's very much like this German population or East Berlin population rather didn't protest too much or a few protests, not that many probably because most of them still remembered 53 and didn't want to make too much a deal out of it. It's still easier to leave than processed, you have to imagine like at this point. Yeah. And also it's supposed that for a lot of people it was like, yeah, whatever we got other problems, like the economic crisis was quite real. Like in the wider GDR certainly they didn't especially care. I would think what happens in Berlin because Berlin was Berlin and you had your own problems.

But for the West Berliners, a dynamic you can still see replicated in every German I like for all that. Yeah, exactly. But like for the West Berliners it was very much a big deal, because certainly you were really in a height we want to say open air prison. But really on very tight space, and it was very hard for them to get out, because you were cut away from greater Western Germany, basically.

So very, very, very much not happy about it. And so that why you have these signs here that are just sort of gratuitous. I mean, you don't have to tell anyone that this is the wall and that the street is blocked because you can see that, but they made a sign for it anyway. And on the next slide, you can sort of see how that looks like on the left. Generally, for the street, you can see on the side these buildings with the white windows, it's because these are walled up. The buildings become more. And finally, a wise to people

like just climbing out of the window, Assassin's Great Style. Exactly. And in the back. Tumbling the freedom. Yeah, we put all these haystacks on the West Berlin side. And a little bit confused,

because it, okay, so is this building on the east, on the, on the, on the communist side? No, this is facing west. west is down in the west. So they had to have they had to have picked people who were Westerners to do this. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, I guess a victim, people as bad in general.

But you being a nimbee for the Berlin wall. Yeah, I'm a nimbee for the Berlin wall. I'm like, where do these people go? How do they, how do you justify evicting these people? I mean, very rarely. What's the legal process here? Get the fuck out.

Here's a gun. Yeah, it's real like, might make right now. Yeah. And anyway, in East Germany, you did not, like, there was no free housing market. You got a place allocated to you by the government. Anyway, so we just allocated to these people people a new kind of swings around about. So on the one hand, you get a place allocated to you by the government.

On the other, you get a place allocated to the government. Well, yeah. Yeah. But also in the back, like towards like up a middle of a picture, you can see these metal fence. That's the first stage in this case of what's called the hinterland, which is the hinterland, I mean that's the word in English as well. That's the wall on the east side and it's actually like for instance the east side gallery which we're

gonna see later on, one of the largest pieces of the wall that's left, that's not the western facing wall, that's the east facing wall and it's arguably to some extent also the more important part of the wall because the one that was the first really barrier to people getting out. Because on the west side you could get up close to the actual wall, but on the east side you could not. They've blocked off an underground station here. Exactly. We also get a bit later. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It was a little bit right there. Yeah. And on the right side you can see a bit more substantial state of affairs. You have sort of

an anti-tank ditch right in the middle of the street, which is a nice vibe. It's the thing is it's not a very good anti-tank ditch and there's a point to be made about this, which is that you don't really want that good of one because practically in Berlin the only direction the tanks are going to be moving as Westwood. Yeah, but I think the problem with a lot of these pictures is that they're in black and white, which makes Berlin seem even more miserable than it actually is. The best thing color it was just shot in December. But like all these pictures of a wall usually look really especially driving especially

miserable. That's just what Berlin looks like in black and white. So, I've got to deal with it. So, the next slide. And you can see another sort of further stadium of the wall. It's not quite the finished, the one we all know and love. It's an intermediate, very step. But you can sort of see the round part on top.

It came up without to keep people from climbing over it. So you can get a grip. And these walls, you see, they still stacked elements between sort of to go on the IBMs, probably something like that. And so it gets bigger and bigger. And in the photo on the right, you can also see in the background, in the middle ground, you can see the anti-tank, the check hedgehogs to keep the tanks from rolling through. I'm too distracted by the women in the dress there because once again, I'm hammering

the big button that says, every foe, so have an East German woman. It's distinct, yeah, unmistakable transgen divides. Actually, this isn't the West, too. This is looking used because that's the opposite to them. But yeah, I, it's still looking quite improvised at this stage, even with a custom anti-climax of circular bit. Yeah, this is 71. So this is 10 years post-construction. You got all these nice, what do they call, platinum bow back here, you got the big tower,

you got all this stuff right here. You know, bright lights, big city. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, it doesn't look too bad over there. But you can't see it because the wall. Yeah, it's a good point. You got a build of the, and this was its formal name, the anti-fascist protective measure. In order to prevent the fascists from looking in and seeing the fact that you have like cool platinum boy. And like, yeah, exactly.

This is the part of the process. Oh, at least. I don't know. Oh, fuck. Okay. Yeah, just cut all the bits where I fucked up German in this, which is every time I've tried to speak German. It's easy to control.

Still better than I do it. I can tell you that right now. I can't let the fascists look at your shining city on the hill. That's all I'm saying. That's right. I love how slow the pace of construction is in terms of like upgrades. So it's like very slowly building a wall around you sort of thing. Like, it is a lot of wall in the end.

And it's in a very dense urban environment. And like if you want to make it better, you have to take the time to tear down buildings, relocate people, etc. etc. So, you know, an euro country who has a very dysfunctional economy, you don't have any money all the time. And so yeah, took the time with it. Well, they had to be even like a bunch of teenagers, you just like stuck past the wall every night, don't ever notice them. I don't think so. Not even to like, not even to like escape to the West,

but just I don't know to go get cheaper beer or something. I mean, we'll see it in a further slide, but I think it's always a problem with these pictures. And again, most of these pictures are taken from Western side because they're my eastern side was forbidden to take pictures of the wall, obviously. And so you always see the West inside of it. In a way, it's at street level, you rarely get a good sense of the actual scale of the No Man's Land, which is the part where you get killed if you try to get over. So I don't think actually

many people manage to sneak across. Yeah, I almost find a slide about escape attempts. The most noticeable one is trying to tunnel under it, but that was something that... Yeah, it was up for you. Or just like... No, they had a few attempts, some of which were backed by British and American intelligence services. And yeah, they were sort of it sort of worked, but it was a real cat and mouse thing with the starsy and the grants for that science.

In my opinion, the most spectacular attempt is at Laipsey ashtrasse on the eastern side, we built quite high, like high-rise towers with like 80 meters tall, something like that. And two guys got frankly quite brilliant idea to paragliders in the west, because it's like 100 meters, it's very close. And so they built their own paragliders,

schlepped them up to the top of a tower. I don't know how nobody noticed, because it's a curious thing to do. I mean, I'll ask the IDF, you know, how do you miss a paraglider? How do you miss that? Well, you know, it turns out they should have restricted lawnmowers from entry into Gaza. I mean, in this case, the flight could be unpowered because again, it was a very short distance. And so they all set up to do it like at night, I think. And the first guy goes take a running start, you know, and almost makes it, but his foot

trips on sort of a corner of the tower with a small ledge there. So he doesn't die, he falls down, but he doesn't fly across. So he just lands into the courtyard of a nearby kindergarten. And his body's like fuck, and he doesn't want to leave his body behind nicely enough. So he goes down, gets him, and they leave, and they get arrested the next day at the border trick of Stavarka, because of course, Wastazi found them.

They both get thrown in prison for like five years. I think one of them is let out, and it's allowed to move to West Germany if you want his bought, West Germany, which is a thing that happened all the time. And I think that's a pretty cool story, and paragliding into the West. That's really interesting. As I understand it, this sort of this smarter option than trying to cross the wall for

like, if you're athletic enough, was to go north to the Baltic and try and out swim the coast guard, which there's a few stories and antifunders starzy land about. I'd like to also rather risky proposition, I think, because maybe watching the coast, like that was one of the most well, you just got like shot in the water, still all drowned, but I get eaten by a shark. Yeah. Die for you. Or you.

Hi,othermia. Hi,othermia, yes. It's a real sort of like, it's a summer activity and even then summer in the water, because it's still fucking cold. Yeah. You get eaten by a cold shark. What? Yeah.

So anyway, next slide. Here we have finally the final state of the wall, which is known in German as the grensmauer 75 because it's a model of 75. It's evil, but it's various that's exactly. And these well-known vertical elements, which you can see on the right with round top, they also have a beautiful name, they are called Stutzwand Element, who L12.14. Of course, it's just called it. It's like four C L, four C other restorations of them. Exactly. And it was made, of course,

in the FOEB Baustov-ominan, Nobranburg, which is the state owned company for construction materials in Nobranburg. I love FWB because they turn fucking everything into them. They went to Ruler, which had a watch industry, and was just like, yeah, everything is now on a VUV. You are now one big state enterprise that makes all of the watches for sale in East Germany. Congratulations. That's a thing. You had individual Faribis.

Faribis folks are gonna be trips. It's people's own company. And when you take many Faribis and make them into big Faribis, you call it a combina because they're all combined. I think it's always a cute word combina. But anyway, you can see here on the left, you have, that's, that's the four program. Basically, you have the lights, you have the anti tank, up the goals, you have a clear field of fire, all up to the wall,

towers as well as you see here, like, interspersed with very bored conscripts in them. Because you could get conscripted into the border guard. Yeah, I like the, um, the street lights just like, or look like ordinary street lights. They are. They are. There's the same lights you would have on the, like, highways and stuff. Because again, why would you make a separate kind of light for the warm when you've got a perfectly functioning street light? Yeah. That makes sense. And these wall elements were also used.

They could have used last some breeder. They just used. Finally, I used for it. They just used the normal thing. They told me this was stupid. It was like, hold 900 of these different ways. And the concrete wall elements were also used for agricultural purposes, like to build like what's it called, the house for the cows.

A barn. A barn. Yes. Hey, I don't know the German word for it either. So, Kuschdall. Kuschdall. Kuschdall.

And also, what's interesting is on the right picture, you can see this beautiful sign, which tells you that this is the end of the American sector and that the next part of Berlin is East Berlin and interestingly you also have it in Turkish which leads me to believe that this is in no colon which is a district of Berlin southeast which was on the west side, and which has a very large Turkish population starting in the 70s because there were guest workers. And so there was apparently a need to have the sign in Turkish as well. It's a cool graffiti. So next slide, please. Yeah, this is a problem with me putting in images that I find on Google Images, is that much like my abilities to speak German.

So those are good as I think of it. I was just looking for a quick diagram to show the general layout here. And this is, I'm informed, wrong. It's not entirely wrong, just some of the bits of it are wrong, some of the data for numbers, especially if a general sort of order of a wall is clear, but we're going to have a 3D visualization coming up on the next slide.

But here, there are some numbers, like for instance, 239 escape is killed. It's not correct. The actual current estimate from people who died at the wall is 140. And 101 of those were shot trying to escape, like had an accident while escaping or something like that. 30 of them. Yeah, the first sort of forward roll thing into the escape, like had an accident while escaping or something like that. 30 of them. 30 of them. The sort of forward roll thing into the belt, like me. Yeah, so it's suspect, but whatever.

30 people were killed at the wall, but actually did not want to leave. Like, apparently that happens. So, you just want to get out of the club. Yes, I know. You've been on the like a gold brand too much and like, you know, it's just wanders into the death strip. Oh, that guy who was a... He was passed at the 9-11 Memorial and just like fell on the pole or went on the pole.

What? I heard there was a nice Irish pub in West Berlin. I wanted to go there. And there was one Soviet soldier who was shot or died in an accident, apparently it's unclear. And then eight GDR bold regards were killed in the line of duty by either people escaping or other East German bold regards who fought or escaping or people from the Western sides such as police officers who sometimes shot back. These are like the official confirmed 140 victims of what it might be more because we don't really know is the thing because the GDR did make a point of not keeping very accurate records of this sort of thing.

We know the border guards accurately, I imagine, because the thin green line between communism and context. But yeah, we don't quite know. What I find interesting is that at least 250 people died while crossing the border legally from like heart attacks, like mostly old people who were perhaps given the chance to finally immigrate or something like that. And apparently it was such a stressful experience that at least 350 of them just couldn't make it. I do know it's impressive that the Soviets were able to, you know, enforce communist culture on East Berlin so thoroughly that they didn't keep accurate records.

Yeah, they really did, like, de-Germanify the mindset for a moment. Yeah. I do note here that the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the that the the the circle anti climby bit is made of asbestos, which means that the little fire. That's true. But on the other hand, it means that you escape to the west successfully and get me Sothelyoma once like hernica's revenge.

To the good for the bad, you know, it's fine. If you're not actively doing demolition with it. Okay. It's however like scrappling at it with my fingernails. Yeah, it's not probably fine. That's that's you're not inhaling it. Okay. It's have a like scrappling at it with my fingernails. Yeah, it's still probably fine. That's that's you're not inhaling it. No, she'd be inhaling it by guy. Yeah. Not that much. I'm like chew my way out over the top of the fence. It's like, I thought you get it. If you live to the age of 900, maybe you'd have a risk. I don't know. It's not it's not that much as best. You're not like dealing with it every day.

You're dealing with it once. What if I go back over? Yeah, if you try to escape every single day, then the asbestos is a proud. That's a question. This is a question because there's no, absolutely no reason for them to do this. And I don't know if we would even know, did anyone try and get over it west to east Just like you know to ladder up to it on the west and I'm talking tired of this There are too many cereals of the cereal aisle I think it might have happened like like into the criminal world

I'm sure there's some reasons new to have communication between eastern west bollini You know smuggling shit around and stuff like that. So it's quite possible that there was a little bit of traffic or attempted traffic from West to East. But it was definitely VV exception. In this case, I think VV has best of us. I think it's just kind of an attempt at making the walls sound even more sinister than it already is because I haven't read it anymore else, but it's made of his best of us.

But you know, I would imagine the asbestos is just for structural reinforcement because it has long fibers. That's not even like a fire proofing. That's not anything. It's just, problem with asbestos. They're not gonna make a circular thing. The problem with asbestos is that it's very good.

I'm like lead. Lead is fucking amazing, right? It's like very malleable. It's an anti-depressant. It makes you feel happy. It just also makes you very dumb. Also, the room of the butterflies is not your friend. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Another inaccuracy of his graphics that in a control strip, like on the right, it says, sometimes mind. This is true only for the greater energy I'm in Berlin. I have no minds and no automatic weapon systems. These were only used like in the border, like in the rural areas, stuff like that, but you couldn't have

people watching all the time. In East Berlin you would just get shot. You would not get exploded by mine. Oh, that's not bad then. Yeah, I think that's a lot nicer. If we go to the next slide, we can see a somewhat better diagram. This is in German sadly, but it's basically the same thing that you can sort of get a better idea of how it is. And the interesting point I think here is that you can see on the left, at the actual border, signifying that this dotted line, was actually like one or two meters ahead of the wall. So in West Berlin, you could actually go into a GDR anytime you wanted, just by standing really close to the wall.

So technically, every kid who ever did graffiti on this was like a fascist saboteur, exactly. Exactly. Exactly. But again, this is, it goes to show that the wall was directed mostly at the Eastern population because that's where most of the wall is in the end. And it's really trying to keep them from like the guards were also only on the Eastern half of this whole operation. So to as to be closest to whether people might be escaping and becoming from. So

like it's still like remembered from a Western viewpoint, which is still going to be like, like, like, Berlin, more people think of the west side of it looking east. Yeah, I was, I always thought that they had the big concrete wall on both sides, but apparently not. And if we go to the next slide again, we can talk a bit more about people's bicycle course, you know? Yeah. we can talk a bit more about people who spying on the classical course. Because this is probably the most famous of the wall victims. Also one of the early ones was killed on the 17th of August 1962. His name was Peter Feshdown.

He was, I think, a mason or something like that. And just a young man who a friend wanted to leave. Because he just didn't like it there. He wasn't an anti-communist, especially anything like that. He just thought he might have better life across. And so somewhere nearby, check point Charlie, they crossed Le Manslani, his friend made it over the wall. You can say, I don't know quite how they did it

because you can see there's a barbed wire on top. So not a thing for Ross to do, but it's friend-match. But just as Feshda was about to roll across, so all he was shot in the back by the East German border police, and was left there for an hour to start with when he was bleeding out and crying for help. And on the western side, just across, like you can't see it in the pictures, but basically like 100 meters away was the headquarters of the largest West German newspaper editor, Spring Affelag, which doesn't exist today and has most of the media in Germany, so this is why this is so well documented, like you had journalists

on the site instantly. But you have a left him out there just to bleed out until for an hour later, they carried him away, as you can see in the pictures. And on the west side, like a police game, they threw some bandages over the wall to him in the tent to help him, but that didn't help. And he died like, first person shoes are logic of like, we're going to throw that like healthcare over. Yeah, exactly. Right. And so he died then either on the way to the hospital or at the hospital, we don't know

exactly because each German he didn't tell, but it was like one of again the most publicized order killing basically. It was a huge, beyond disaster for this German because you could obviously see like there was really no hiding it that was just a murderous order regime. You can sort of see the left picture that they popped smoke, try to hide what's going on that didn't really work. And yeah, it's just, it's, it's, it's happened again and again like four over a hundred people. So, it's not very nice. Pretty, pretty ugly. That's, that's a pretty ugly thing to do. Oh, yeah. Yeah, we're still just living in there. I mean, you know, you don't clear why they did that. Like, there was no threat. Like, they weren't going to get shot at from West, but you can see, you know, he's still behind the wall.

Nothing's going to happen to you. You can just go there and get him. Yeah. But they didn't do it. Maybe it's just a question of like, you know, 19 year old conscripts needing to call up to like four layers of chain of command to even like go out of the guard post. I don't know. Hey, what do I do here? Right. Yeah, I don't know. But yeah, it's real bad. If we go to the next slide, I have some sort of, I guess, spin this off into the broader like economy and like transit between East and West Berlin and sort of like the PR repercussions of this for East Germany, which is like for a long time, like, so the politics developed of like managing East Germany, right? We talked about like buying people out, you know,

either out of prison or like buying them their exit papers, but also letting tourists in. And we see here on the right hand side an inter shop. Because the thing is, right, if you're building like a big like anti-fascist protective measure because everyone on the west and sides are fascists, why then do you want to let them into the beautiful sort of like hinterland or socialism?

Money. Yeah, you need the cash, you need cash, you need foreign cash. You need hard cash, yeah, cause what's it? The, all the east, all the sort of, what should we call it? The Soviet black currencies weren't really exchangeable for the Western currency. Good American money. What are you going to trade your shit for, rubles?

And there, conversely, there was some ways in which the East German economy was the most successful out of any of the comic on and then also packed. I think there are a few things. Of course, because it's camera lenses, optics, watches, even consumer goods, dishwashers and stuff like the highest check steampark devices. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like the highest aspiration of the like the sort of the the Russian the Soviet bourgeois at this point was to own like consumer goods made in East Germany because they were like a little bit nicer and some of them were like kind of almost world-class. But you can't like only sell that shit to the east. Some of it you want to sell to the west. Some of it you want to like, but you need dollars and you need like West German marks. And like also that's one of the reasons that people

on the VDR themselves were so poorly equipped is that because most of what they produced went out like for instance, Trabi, the Traband,, some of the nicer ones, they make a lot of them, but they all went out. And so that's why you had to wait 10 years in Germany to get one. Morning, Arievenin, because the plumbers come in the morning. Yeah, and so transit between goes through these military checkpoints and these are very strictly controlled. I am more strictly on the eastern side, right? Where you get your bags searched, you get your car searched, in case you're hiding

like decidants in the boot or whatever. You get sort of interrogated for a bit by a board of police officer. But ultimately, you still need that kind of commerce, so you facilitate certain amounts of this that you control, which may also seem familiar. When people went into East Berlin, they had to convert a set amount of Western money into Eastern money. You had to even go and buy anything. And you couldn't convert it back when you went back over. You just spend buy anything. Well, and you couldn't convert it back when you went back over. You have to put these away of getting,

you just spend the money. Obvious trap, but like we have this special, it's like dangling this in front of you. You like this, you like, you like a Marlborough, you like a copy of the collected works of Angle, Mark's Angles, like, and you know, I read some salt in it. I do.

I don't do that. Yeah. Yeah. But so, um, yeah, it's really weird to me that checkpoint Charlie is like a tourist attraction now, well, nominally, it's like very strange one, has a strange vibe to me. Because like Berlin has just progressed around it, so it's a guard shack in the middle of the street with a sign, and some guys like cosplaying.

And you know, tourists who don't have any best right is than to read like Google. We're gonna build a museum there, so it's gonna become more of a space, but it's still coming, especially if you, when you go to the next slide you can see all the board of crossings that they were and Checkpoint Charlie, which is number five was as it says there only for diplomats and non-German Foreigners so basically just for the Allies so no more people never went through checkpoint Charlie

Like you know you go there today, you imagine, oh, this is where the people cross the border. No, this is where the Americans cross the border. And it's basically the case with almost every of a checkpoint like Fritischstraße. Number one is the only one that East Berliners could use to cross over to West Berlin. All the other ones are not allowed for East Berlin.

It's only for either West Berlin people or West German people or the Allies basically. You had also a few spots for like number 14, number 13, 13 is for train traffic, 14 is for highway traffic, but basically, we've in the city as an East Berlin and you could only go for British traffic,

and that was it. And all the other spots were reserved for certain groups of people, so that's something I think that a lot of people don't really know if all the border crossings were open to whoever had business of them, but it's actually not the case. It was even more restricted than that. And on this map, you can also see on the western border,

on the left side, this area in Orange, Naval A and B, these are places where the original border was a bit wonky. Like, you know, it wasn't a straight line, it wasn't nice. So what we did at some point, we did a territory swaps. So like, this ape, it's originally, I think, was Western, but then it became Eastern, so that the border would be nicer. And it sort of exchanged it for some of his enclaves, but those sort of outside of West Berlin, we're still a West Berlin territory, technically. So it sort of, you know, shows the absurdity of trying to

was still a West Berlin territory, technically. So it shows the absurdity of trying to separate things neatly, where originally they are not neatly separated just by the nature of the urban area, basically. So you had to go back later and sort of work it out. So like, were you allowed to like casually cross the border at all, or was it like you had to have officials, super serious business to cross the border at all, or was it like you had to have officials, super serious business to cross the border? Well, if you were a member of the occupying forces, I think you always could go through because that was a big thing. It was very important for everyone, but everyone would be able to move around because Berlin is occupied by everyone together. You know, if that's sort of principle, you don't dictate who goes to the bathroom and who does not.

There's an interesting sort of wrinkle in this too, which is that that status of forces agreement does not recognize either Germany. I've seen a sort of like a training VHS tape from the early 80s of how to drive to West Berlin from West Germany, presented by the Royal Military Police for Allied military personnel. And it's like, do not answer questions from East German officials. Do not talk to them, wait for the Soviets to show up because they're the only ones we diplomatically have.

Right, I don't know. We're all here. Yeah, if your car breaks down and they offer you a tow, do not acknowledge them, wait for them to get the Russians. Yeah, because I think until like super late, like at least in the 80s and perhaps even up to reunification, West Berlin was legally not a part of West Germany. It was not under the jurisdiction, it was under the jurisdiction of the Yaku Prime power. Like, because West Berlin has even a vote in Germany. West Germany actually know. But I know, for instance, why a lot of people

wanted to move there is because if you moved in West Berlin, you were exempt from construction, conscription and military service, because you didn't want to West Berlin as you'd been via army for a few reasons apparently. So these people could move across the board quite freely, I think. But for normal people, like for East Germans, definitely not.

Like you needed to have a reason, you had to have an authorization, which you had to ask for in advance, and we could likely be denied unless you were a certain privileged kind of people. And for West Berliners, I think it was more relaxed, but like you maybe had a limit on the number of times, you could go over something like that. Like it was closely watched,

but it was easier for West Berliners for East Berliners for East Berliners, almost impossible. All right. Next slide. Yeah. Yeah, now we. East Berlin is almost impossible. Next slide. Yeah. Yeah. Now we can talk for a bit about the public transport. Because everyone likes trains.

Train trains. Train trains. Because that's one of the interesting knock-on effects. Like you draw a board of a city. Like the whole city infrastructure is obviously not been constructed around this board of which did nothing since before. So that was one of the first things,

like when the war was built, in 61, or was started. One of the first things that people noticed in Westburn, but suddenly the trains stopped coming. Like, because it was a night service, because it's a civilized country. And it stopped. And then there was very complex arrangements when they made like the S-Bahn, which is sort of a light rail for somewhat greater Berlin area at the time, was became divided in an East S-Bahn and the West S-Bahn, but up until like 1984, the West S-Bahn was still being operated by East Germany. Yes, it was in what he had.

You had East German transit cops because they had to develop a separate transit police for this. But my favorite part of this is that so as part of the whole successor state thing. So East Germany claimed to be like to have all of the privileges and like response billisies and rights that like Germany did diplomatically, which meant that it kept the continuity railway. So yeah, so in a communist state, you had an imperial railway, you had a Reichsbahn. Yeah, with a like a big DR logo on there, had surfs on the font and everything. And that's where for Deutsche Bahn is because West Germany had to come up with something that wasn't already

like trademarks, is it worth? I think I found my carp sonar. You were like an East German trans. East German transit cop in West Berlin, that sounds great. German Trans. I'm going to go East German transit cap in West Berlin. That sounds great. You're wearing a kind of like a communist-ified originally Vermarkt uniform that's been dyed blue in a hurry. Yeah, it's very swatchy. Yeah, besides that enough. Yeah, but with this West Berlin Espan being run by the East Germans was actually a financial loss for East Germany because the West Berlin's boycotted it The Honeck has been and you didn't want to take it. I've seen it as a slight

National armor. So they've lost a lot of money with it until 1984 where they sort of gave it to the West And that's when the pay for gave a Balina for case because they actually have Transit company for Berlin was founded so Which still runs everything in Berlin today. So it's also a product of the division of the city. And they lost that beautiful communist imperial liveries of paint, everything bright yellow. Because the functional way that these things ran

was like, you have one single line that goes to the city that happened across the border. So all of a sudden, outlying, in the outlying areas of the Espan, because the Espan goes out into the suburbs, you know, these were in, you know, they were in East Germany. So it's like, okay, this comes into the city. It comes into West Berlin. You're going to make a couple stops, you know, token stops, but I guess no one used them. You got to somehow kick all the Westboro liners off

before you hit the border. It's a very, very difficult thing to run. Yeah. You know, and it also wasn't very useful, if you were in Westboro lin, and you didn't want to go to Eastboro lin. I mean, you know, this whole, the way the Espan ran,

and it also contributed to like a lack of development of the Espan in West Berlin, which persists to this day. Definitely. Yeah. And sadly, Alice, you are wrong. The communist living room is not yellow. Like the one on the right here is the communist one. And it's actually white, sort of, X-shell and red sort of burgundy red. It on the left side you can see the Western one. It's a yellow and red. I did this backwards. But yeah, and here you can see the wall running smack down the middle of the tracks because of course you also got to keep that part of the border safe.

And in the next slide we can see the Uban situation, which is like, as you said, not quite like you said, but like what they did like the work, which is the blue line, you know, as you can see, is in the west, in the north, and it's in the west, in the south, but it's in the east, in the middle. So what do you do? Why do you drive here? Yeah, the tube does this with a zone two and three at Batsy power station. Yeah, they try and shoot if you get off there too. That's weird. If it just drove without a stop, just like the whole way, which was pretty weird and they did the same thing with the S-Bund, the North, South, S-Bund and the U-6 as well.

But what this meant for East Berlin was that they didn't have a U-8 and they didn't have a U-6. They only had the U-5 which runs West and it's not shown on this map. And the U2 which also runs East West and it's also shown on maps. So East Berlin sort of lost two underground lines because of war, you could say. And they still had to maintain the tracks like that was still East German business, but they did it for the West Germans basically. And what you get stuck with if you sort of like insist that you're still the

railway. Basically. And on the right, you can see a picture of parts of our plants for the underground station for the Espán, which was built by the Nazis interestingly in 1937. So you can sort of tell by the science, we still have a science, we haven't changed room. And so that's that's basically what it was like. Some of these stations we used, I think at least parts of them like a store room, you just put a few walls in there and you can just all stuff.

But to most of them, we're just empty up until reunification. Like in some cases, you had like guards there in case someone pulled the emergency break to try and escape. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, you had all kinds of these. The, you know, it was, you know, the filling conscription, take two years of your early life and like, guard the platform at like a closed train station. Easy job, easy job right there. No one said, no one ever said the Soviets didn't have easy jobs available if you really wanted. Now, now there's a 50-50 chance that you wind up, I don't know, going to Siberia and getting beaten to death as an asian restri-ridural. But, you know, maybe you get to be the guy who can just go sleep at class, dam or plots every day.

And it must have looked a bit, I mean, it does look a bit desolate. It must have been so weird just being these empty stations with lights on the one there. There's a train coming through every five minutes just rattling on and people looking at you through windows. You could do some pranks on those people. You do great pranks on those people. You could do great pranks. And in the low right, you can see the arrangements at British Trust, which was one of the cross of the points between East and West. And it's amazing.

I mean, it's still a complicated station even nowadays. But like, how much of tears? Yeah, that's what we call it. So when you wanted to go into West Berlin from East Germany, you would come from a little red arrow, which is on the right of the blue area. And this is the place where you would get searched and get interrogated and whatever.

Before you can go on to the white area in the main station, which was the western half of the station. And from this white western half of the station, where you wanted to go into a GDR, you would go to the red area where you get searched and Interrogated until you came out in the green area, which was the eastern side of the station which was connected to a regular Espán which went to the east. So it was like a convoluted, I don't know what happened if you took the wrong turn. But probably bad things.

Yeah, you're just going like some kind of research twice. Yeah. Like it's it's never an example of, you know, how do you deal with? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I'm just going round it for fun. Just going back and forth. Yeah, but how do you deal with a complex legacy infrastructure, but really

isn't made for what you're doing? Why you just kind of make do and you put up walls and stack cases What people aren't supposed to go and just kind of deal with it You know and built on top of itself another aspect which is interesting is that in East Berlin There's a much more developed tram network Yeah, because in in West Berlin they they decided these trams are bullshit. Let's replace them with bullshit buses I was about to say bullshit which is you know, please tell me those are the ones that are bright. Yeah, though otherwise, I can, oh, MCI has been lying to me. Yeah, they got a bunch of, uh, like, uh,

tattra trams, uh, in East Berlin, I want to say, I mean, the West Berlin buses. Oh, the West Berlin bus. I don't know anything about buses in West Berlin. They're probably all Mercedes. Oh, the West Berlin bus. I don't know anything about buses in West Berlin. They're probably all Mercedes. But in East Berlin, even to this day, there's a much more well-developed tram network because the Soviet's sort of value that thing a lot more than we did in the West, which is sort of...

Of course. Yeah, I mean, there's an extent to which public transportation was much more well-invested in in the Eastern block than, you know, Western Europe. And you can sort of see it and how this developed in Berlin more than a lot of other places. Because there's like, I don't know, two or three tram lines in West Berlin and then like 50 in East Berlin to this day. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's also in pop because like the bits of East Berlin, we have lots of

tram are generally built later and the parts of West Berlin, like West Berlin is a bit more constrained, like towards the West when you've got a big forest and green evildoering, let's be end of it. And it's all built like it's end of 19th century basically early 20th whereas East Berlin expanded a lot during the time of the division was in West Berlin you couldn't expand anyway so you didn't have much of a reason to build trams whereas in the East you know you had new new areas being developed so they did put a lot of it into it because it's cheaper than and we are no ground of course but now they're trying to bring back some, some trams to the west as well. Like there's a few projects going on

that we don't have to see. Everything takes forever and but in. So yeah, but basically that's the transport chaos. Like I think we've just really brushed on it here. I think it was even more complicated in some cases, but it's, yeah, but waiting the two out marks. Yeah, exactly, exactly. It's like, well, well you could do you could do two hours on Friedrich's dress on itself. Yeah. All right let's go. Yeah. I don't even care anymore. Let's do it.

Oh, it's a world very accepted adult, but I can pretend that I do. Yeah. Oh this next one's me. I just wanted to put something in just to emphasize that the wall was not only in Berlin like, this is a wild picture. Yeah, so it's just like bisect bits of farmland and stuff. And this is the bit that we talked about where you could get blown up by an ass mine or whatever if you wanted to. Had to go all the way around West Berlin, right? You know, you sort of think of it as something that bisexed the city in half. No, it went all the way around

the western half. That's right. Yeah. And also what you have to consider about these western parts of the world, like the people that live close to it, like there was a broader regime in the area close to the wall as well. So like this picture of his small hamlet, I guess you'd call it. These people, it's quite a good chance that get the loft of the underground seller search once a week just because, you know, like you had to have a special kind of pass

in order to go home every day because you were living close to the wall. Like the same sort of thing happened also within Berlin, like if symmetries were close to the wall, but if you have them, you had to have a special grave pass to show that you had to give a visit to grave of your mother, if it was in the cemetery, you had to get a realization to do that. So the whole thing just also a nightmare for people who just happened to be living there, even it was in the middle of, I'm fucked nowhere, Saxony, basically. All right, next slide.

Yep. So yeah, these are just like, free slides we can go through them in quite a quick sequence. I just wanted to show you something that I always found very interesting is that what I meant before people don't necessarily realize how big the Mao-Aish drive and the no man's land strip was. And when it's really, it's like a highway going through a city, basically. That's why I compare it. Like, if you want to try to imagine what it did to the city, a good example,

a good comparison is the highways from Robert Vose's in the US. We just level half the block to make way for something that nobody wanted to have. And it's quite the same thing, basically. You get even the next slide, you can see it a bit better. You have a city escape in the middle. From afar, it really does kind of look like a highway, but it's not. It's the wall. You have up to like 150, 200 meters of no man's land in between.

And that's really what was not visible to most people living back. Because when you're at ground level, you don't notice. But if you used to know the city and how it was before the walls built, I think you would notice that it was a big chunk of land missing. Yeah, I wonder how this would have fared into those sort of like time of drone photography and, you know, satellite imaging and stuff. Yeah, I mean, you can, you can see it also the next slide. It's an air. I'm just thinking that from the previous slide, I mean, you can, you can see also the next slide. It says an ad.

I'm just thinking from the previous slide, I'm the guy I own this apartment building here. How do I get this wall inspected? Sorry about it. Like I do, I have to call someone from the other side of the wall. Yeah, you gotta call like what? Call it street, street, apartment or, or LNI. What if I actually have a serious problem with the party wall there. You're you're gonna be you're fucked. You have to call 311 but for like a different

country. Yeah, in this case you're on the different economic system. Yeah. This building is on the eastern side so probably your war would be inspected for you by the brave boys of the Border Patrol. I would certainly notice if something was happening to it. But yeah, it's like it was... I don't want my wall inspected by a 19-year-old. I did it. You should have had a better thing. Yeah, I didn't know shit about anything when I used to do that.

Wait, when you're in the Gs. Yeah, except all those years ago, right, of course, many months ago, many moons ago, and I was a Drexel co-op. Oh, boy. Yeah, it was weird that Drexel had that sort of branch of the, the DDS board of God in it. He's German. East German. Yeah. Extra curricular activity. Somehow more depressing. You thought Drexel was depressing before.

Yeah, didn't visit any of that. You can really see it. I'm going to actually university. The scale of it. It's just it's pretty insane, I think. And this is like in the middle of a city. This is not only outskirts, it's just below the tree, which you can see the river at the top.

And so yeah, it just went ahead and did it. And the thing is like, like I said, it's a big scar across the city, but at least it was across, you know, along the original district borders, which was somewhat organic in themselves to the city, so it wasn't like arbitrary. But on the eastern side it became very arbitrary because again, obviously expands the land that's being opened is always on the eastern side, not on the western

side of the border. So East Berlin was half of a city that lost most due to the war, basically, they fucked themselves. Yeah, you can certainly like see a line of new buildings along the wall. You can sort of see where stuff got demolished. You can see where, you know, so on and so forth. I mean, this is, it is very reminiscent of like the American highway system. But, you know, this is not even allowing people to move anywhere. This is the opposite. Yeah. And the American highway system doesn even allowing people to move anywhere. This is the opposite that. Yeah. And the American highway system doesn't allow people to move anywhere a little

while. Okay. That's a difference. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. If you're redlining the GTI, which we endorse, thank you. Yeah. Yeah. But on 76, sure, good luck with that. Oh, redlining the GTI down the Berlin Wall. I don't redlight it on 76 because I like my life. It's a German, it's a West German car, it's what it was built for. I assume. Sure. No, you know, as I think assembled in Mexico.

But here, at least in the center of the picture, you can see a nice new housing complex, which was built in the late 60s, and which is now a lovely place to be, because you've got see a nice new housing complex which was built in the late 60s and which is now a lovely place to be because you go with nice new space-style buildings, monthly family housing, lots of green spaces, it's very quiet, big roads down the outside, with only small roads on the inside, it's lovely. But at the time your view from your balcony was the border strip, Not so nice. Is this the part in the sort of like the DDR Museum that always makes visitors fall about laughing? Or it's like under the sort of like it prevailed socialist tyranny, the government would provide you this horrible apartment and there was some apartment that's like way nicer than you were upon.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, this is the this the thing with the thing with the Soviet style micro districts is they're actually very nice. Yeah. And especially at the time, I mean nowadays they're okay. The night they can be nice if they kept up nicely bad with time. It was just it was amazing. Like you were coming from a 19th century building that had been bombed twice, burned out, fries. What's they deserve. Beaking everywhere. When you move into this new building, central heating, a bathroom and the same floor. Ah, the private, yes. Yes.

It makes men soft. Yeah, three whole rooms. Holy shit. Oh my God. Oh, times create strong men. Strong men create wool. Also flushing toilets? Who do? Strong men create flushing toilets times.

Flushing toilets times create weak man, weak man create no wall. It's one of the things for Vigidy Harle, so to speak, it's still very proud of today is all the housing they built. so to speak, it's still very proud of today is all the housing they built. And it was a massive achievement, like they built like a million housing units in like 20 years, which is quite amazing. And it's one of the most successful, sort of like Soviet block countries.

Yeah, but at the same time, if you were one of the many people who stayed, did not like, you were not getting a nice apartment You were getting a shitty apartment or you were getting no apartment at all because like especially like the young people who are single Good luck old people who are not working anymore good luck But if you're like a big family of two people who are working with free children when you're probably fine Unless you want unless you have family in the West, in which case, again, good luck. Like some people waited like eight years

to get the flat, which is pretty insane. Again, the meantime, you'd be living with eight of the people in one apartment that's leaking or something like that. Probably not even leaking, you know, the big issue in like the 50s, at least here in the United States, was a lot of these older buildings, we need to get indoor plumbing in here.

Do you have like, asbestos? Some of the Soviet stuff, I mean, like the Stalingkas didn't have individual kitchens because they figured everybody would eat. I don't want to do that discourse. I'm not doing that discourse. I'm not doing that discourse. I'm not doing that discourse.

Well, we have restaurants under communism? You can out of this or hit the next slide. Yeah. Yeah. So speaking of restaurants under communism and also speaking of weak men creating hard times. So yeah, you know how I said the thing about how eventually the chore wheel really gets out of hand. Well, eventually that there was a sort of a crisis point that brought down the entire Soviet system, seen here and body by Mikhail Gorbachev. Mikhail Gorbachev.

Galbachev. Yeah. Mikhail, that's his name. A little bit clumsy. We justified him. Mikhail Gorbachev. I am. I am. I am so angry at you for making me hear the sense we

yesified Mikhail Galbachev. I am so serious with you. My brain is soup. Mikhail Galbachev, doing a pizza hot commercial to pay the bills and a rabbit, which is illustrating the concept of financial crisis. So yeah, it turns out that this is actually not a very sustainable way in the long term to build an economy as relying on tricking Western tourists into buying a shit from you or your stores. Buying a card in a moral boroughs. I'm not going to try and sum up the reasons why this over the economy imploded in one slide

in a largely unrelated presentation. I'm only going to say that if you make the system based on reporting good numbers or else, people report good numbers or else and anything that doesn't conform to the good numbers immediately goes to the parallel shadow economy, which is not great. Like, it is an example. So, the GDR housing policy, you know, it's the thing that's always talented as the thing the GDR did well, you know, everyone everyone in the end at least had some sort of, you know, no homeless people on the GDR, it's that which is true. But what it meant was that the state paid two thirds of the effective rent, basically upkeep costs. Like the rent you would pay was only two thirds of what was needed to keep the building from

falling down, which is nice for you. And could be nice for everyone into the state at money, but if the state doesn't have money, then the buildings start falling down. So and it's also what started happening in the late 80s, basically, like the state was just broke and everything was subsidized by the state. So everything was broke. Yeah, just so and yeah, we that's the economic side. If we have the next slide, we have the political side, which is going to like actually force the issue. Yeah, people were not in 89. There's this big demonstration, which you can see the pictures of, at that example, it's in Berlin, it was the largest demonstration that ever happened in the GDI,

and it was also, I think, one of the first unofficial, also, not authorized demonstrations. Like more than 500,000 people took part, which is insane, a such a small country. And yeah, we were just pissed at this point. Like, everyone wanted change. I think there was a lot of different opinions on what that change should be Like a lot of people wanted to reform wanted to keep the socialism But there's one guy in the back who's like I would quite like some sort of like Neoliberalism, please

Weird Yeah, yeah, and thatcher and they thatcher, and they listen to that one guy, I'll press that. I'll press that. Of course. But yes, I mean, we talked about the spectra 53, and like ultimately what this came down to in East Germany as with a bunch of other places is a garbage

of not being willing to like repress stuff as Brutus. It's pretty disastrous, had a hard line, has tried it themselves in the Baltics, but then you had this coup and counter coup in Russia. In East Germany, it didn't come to that, which it, you know, this is always the threat, as we said, is that like, yeah, if you try and do any of this stuff, then, you know, either us or the Soviets is just going to kill all of you. And there was some like dicey moments, I remember reading about like, um, interest and the, uh, the like, um, the stars, they were like, arming themselves, waiting to hear, you know, do we shoot out of the windows at the crowd outside?

Yeah. Oh, wow. And yeah, eventually the answer is, no, I don't know what to do, just to fucking do whatever, which ultimately culminates in them storming. It's just a whole bunch of smoke. Yeah. It's just all the whole bunch of smoke. Yeah, people will still in the building

and then after they've managed to shred a shitload of files, which are still being painstakingly put back together and state archives. Yeah. If it's one of the paradoxes of a GDR like on the one hand it was an incredibly repressive state. Like Verstasi was a couple orders of magnitude more effective than the Gestapo in World War II, like it was the worst police and financier police really, both more effective and then better equip more people everything. And they did horrible stuff to people

they did not like all the time. At the same time, when it came to it, when push came to shove, they didn't shove and they didn't push, which is just really kind of strange, because you would have expected them to shoot at people in the end. But for some reason, just wasn't in the culture somehow. Like it was okay to punish people, it was okay to put people in prison, it was okay to

to exile them if they wanted to leave. But it was not okay to just kill them. I've heard the take. I'm not saying I agree with it. I genuinely don't. But our best foreign policy president was George H. W. Bush because when the Soviet Union was collapsed, he sat on his hands. I think there's a lot to be said for. Yeah, I mean, Reagan could have stalled World War Three one of many times. He could have done that. And we are not endorsing Reagan or Bush one. Leave us alone in the comments.

I think one thing that Bush and Hanukkah have in common, to be honest, is there is a value in being boring. Oh, yeah. I think it's the kind of like grandiosity that inspires you to like give those orders to shoot into the crowds. It's the kind of thing that like Trump did many times. We're a strong man. We're a strong man, shit.

Yeah, and was not listened to by people who were like professionally boring and so like much the same. You know, like even like Eric Mielker, who was, you know, head of the star scene, like, much weirder man personally, when he had his sort of like come up and it still didn't like, it was not that melodramatic. It led to him saying the bizarre thing, this guy who had been like, a tortured dissident for his entire career, saying, but I love everyone,

and getting booed and getting shit thrown at him. But yeah, no, just in the end, it sort of like, you know, kind of survived the test of whether or not this was going to be something that was was going to be repressed by force. And I mean, at this point, also the state was just generally kind of paralyzed. Like the leadership was also getting old, you know, just like in the Soviet Union. Imagine it just didn't do anything. I think we didn't know how to deal with it, so it just didn't.

It's okay to take like days for your mental health and like, just in a reflection and stuff. You know, they come into the office. It's okay to take like days for your mental health and like personal reflection and stuff. You know, they come into the office. It's okay to retire before you die in office. Yeah. Yeah. Another sort of like your look, like if you're out there. Another sort of context lesson here that it is important if you want to do a socialist movement to have like an interest in the next generation of it

Instead of torturing all of them. I don't know how relevant it is to this discussion, but there are a lot of off ramps where the Soviet Union could have created a more sustainable version of socialism and they just chose not to take those. It's legitimately like a human and a political tragedy. Like, when I say that the wrong side won the Cold War, I don't mean because the Soviet Union was like an unalloyed good, right? It's that it could have been. It was the only thing that could have been in that context.

And it's just that they fumbled the bag on a world historical level. And now we live in the terrible subsequent. This shit. Yeah. Well, I see it is that the Soviet Union was always sort of an event horizon for alternative. It was a shitty alternative. It wasn't an alternative. You had someone trying something else. Right. Maybe it wasn't working that they were trying something else. Whereas now everyone's just going to do the same thing. More of this, you know, more camera-wise. It's important though to remember too, that y'all are babies, the only solution,

is that I've just yagged off stage. Yeah. So, yeah, this is a place. We were just busy. So there's one guy in this demonstration who's like that, and then there's one guy on the other side. That's just me at the back, okay. Yeah, and then there's one other in this demonstration who's like that. And then there's one guy on the other side. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And then there's one other guy on the other side who's like, what I would like is a kind of soft annexation into neoliberalism where all of the most corrupt parts of the East German state administer the transition and enrich themselves. And then we fuck the economy and all vote for AFD. Yeah, one guy in the back.

Like, woo, Christian Democrats. You guys are a crockin' like getting shit thrown at me. I mean, I was at the U in the RGDR. Like, we had parties, they had a small... They had to control the parties. It didn't really allow them to do anything but they... Another thing they did have at this point was Nazis. And I want to... It's not to call these people Nazis because they're not. What I mean is that

like some of the early low-key of opposition to the socialist regime in East Germany were punks and football hooligans who both for shock value and out of genuine political conviction a lot of the time went Nazi. There's a quote that really, really struck me. I read a thing about FC Union Berlin fans and one of them said that it was a kick to do like a Nazi salute in front of the vox school, it's like, you know, you did this and for some of them, you could see their world just fell apart. And it's like, yeah, really fucking did, huh? And, you know, Pandora's Box having been opened, you know. Anyway, next slide. Remove anti-fascist protective wall fascism.

Yeah, exactly. The fall of the wall itself was again kind of a thing that just happened. And people weren't really ready for it. Like the Vigidiar was discussing internally changing the border rules and the travel rules. And they had sort of a new draft ready. And there was a conference about it, questions were asked, et cetera.

And then a jury is asked the relevant minister of member of a political bureau. So more precision on the question, and he quoted from the draft text of the legislation, which said that people would be able to travel freely between East and West Germany. And then another journalist asked, when does this come into effect? And this guy just said, like, as far as I know, this is effective now without delay. Oh, worst you've ever fucked up at work.

Because at this point, the Border Forces themselves had not yet been informed that this would be the new way going forward. That would be the worst six hours of this dude's life. Yeah. Do you want to get really yelled at? I mean, they all knew it was coming to it. Like, it was the agreed course. It just had happened a bit quicker than everyone expected. So, you know, many thousands of these

learners showed up at the ball of pool say, Hey, did you see the interview on TV? We're all getting out now. Let us out. And then again, amazingly enough, no one got shot or anything like that. One ball of crossing the first was people were being let out. They would stamp a passport as being invalid. So they were effectively being exiled from East Germany because when you couldn't come back without the valid passport, which was a really shitty thing to do, I think, at this point especially. But then later on, VVU officer in charge

at this board across the embankment of Hommage Traster made the decision individually without orders to just open the gates and form over passport checks. And that's sort of what really broke the dam eventually because once it was opened there, it may have to open everywhere. So it was in a way sort of this one dude who just decided upon his own conscience, okay,

I don't, there's 10,000 people here, I have to do something. And instead of just shooting them, I'm gonna open the gates and take the guns away from my man and just that's it Yeah, if you give someone like a middle or a junior manager a big enough bureaucratic headache You'll probably just be like yeah, okay, whatever I I really like this this post on the left because it always looks to me like the one big Dude has just shoved the wall over. Yeah, that's a pretty big dude. Yeah, there's a large man. Also, if you look on the right here, if the disassembly someone has grapheted Joker on the wall, which says a lot about the society,

we live in the society. We live in one of those. Back then already too amazing. live in a society. We live in one of those. Back then already too amazing. We live in two societies, two living in one society. But yeah, basically it's also a huge logistical endeavor to just demolish the thing, like it cost a lot of money and it took a long time because you know, we've seen the pictures, it was really a huge thing. But if we can go to the next slide, we can see that a lot of enterprising people took the matter in their own hands And these are called Mauer Späschter, which means world packers Sick link and I would start real Yeah, you just show up with a chisel, you know exactly all

Nair Hammer, you know They also did that and you can see on the picture on the right there's a sign that says it's stuck I'm DM so you could buy a piece of a wall for one don't you mark so I suppose the kids there were trying to make some money But so all the pieces of a wall that you can buy in souvenirs shops and everything right sort of the same backwards ass like on a lemonade And 118. And I like that a lot. Yeah, we tell.

The graphy Danko Gorby. Which is just a equivalent. It's what would German's called Gorbachev. They call it Gorby. I have a little like Maoistuk. Because I have a little piece of the wall allegedly. And the reason why is because, man, it got everywhere. It's because I bought as a child the like special edition of world in conflict.

And that was the like special edition thing when back when video game special editions came with like actual things was it comes in a fancy box and there's a little piece of the Berlin wall which thanks. So I still have that. So basically that's what happened to wall. It was struck the way or chipped away depending on which piece of it it was and there's a few original pieces now still remaining there's also like internationally they gifted them to whatever some of them were sold at auction I think I don't see them. So there was Stinion Flag in the top right hand picture. Well I mean VGDR and the PLO were big friends.

Yeah. Like whose the name of the leader of piano? I forget. Yes, sir. I forgot. Yeah, he paid like 400 medical bills in Chile when he was sick in the last years of his life. The best is. Exactly. So like, uh, there's sort of this weird capitalism thing where these pieces of the Berlin wall showed up, you know, when they were, when they were, when the wall was dismantled, I remember there, okay, so my dad used to work in Rosland and there was this park doing what, Ros, the CIA, American, American chemistry counts. Yeah, see, see, other one. So we've mentioned

that on the podcast before. So we have. And so there was this park they built in Roslyn, a privately owned park. It was built on an overpass. It was built on an overpass that had been improperly built so they couldn't actually run cars on it. And it was like, okay, here you are in Roslyn, which is where all the lobbyists go if they can't build a building tall enough in Washington DC just across the river. And it's like, yeah We have four sections of the Berlin wall here. And it's like this is the horrors of communism Now the other thing is they ran out of money to keep maintaining the park And they had to sell off the pieces of the Berlin wall to somewhere else So the horrors of capitalism couldn't maintain a memorial to the horrors of communism. No, that's really funny

The horrors of communism. No, that's really funny. The horrors of meaning again, the whole thing was built by the government just accidentally. I mean, okay. Yeah. Next slide, we can see further horrors of communism. Old Man Yowey, you knew it was time. If you persisted this far into the episode, this is your reward. God saved me from this deadly love. So this is the tradition that the USSR tried to make happen. It's a socialist fraternal kiss. If you're friends with Brezhnev, he'd like to plant one on you.

And so this is Brezhnev and Hanukkah having a little kiss. They're always supposed to go. Yeah. You also killed Goma. You also kissed Goma, chocolate. Big Brezhnev was a good kisser. You think he was like kind of sloppy. Oh, yeah, yeah. Incredibly good.

Like outrageous. Yeah. Do you think Brezhnev was better than Khrushchev though? Yeah, I think so. Very sensual eyebrows. Yeah. Yeah. So this is Ross's. Yeah.

This is like one of the most famous bits of like painting graffiti on the wall, right? And yeah, at some point, someone was like, we should probably look into preserving some of this instead of going to schedule. I'm not sure, but I think a lot of the paintings on the East Side Gallery, which is what this bit is called, were made after 1990. So I don't think this is, I mean, I would be surprised if this was pre-reunification. I think it's redone.

Yeah, they redo it anyway because now they have to because there's a lot of tourists. And I have to say, sorry to say, I mean, this piece is nice, but the rest of the so-called art on the East Side Gallery is dog shit. And that's the end by the state, the stand by the state, man. We're just going on like two Berlin attractions you can miss, the East Side Gallery and checkpoint Charlie. Yeah, because it's right by what is practically a highway, like there's six lanes of traffic

next to it, like it's not nice. Like, people fucking tourists stand on the sidewalk. I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I have to ring at them making go away. It's really annoying. The Arctic triumphant is like that where you're just like, oh, this is just a fucking traffic circle. And now I have to run like an asshole.

Oh, Arctic triumphant, I mean, that whole traffic circle is like a special, that's a special thing Special place in hell for a festival. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, it's because it's just anarchy. There's no rules It's not even a traffic circle to drive your car Just yelling at the plus to let's see you fucking synthesize some panacellan. Yeah Anyway next slide please here we can see somewhat more authentic rests of the wall like on the right side upper. It says that the memorial site at

Banomashstra, so we have a reconstructed or preserved. It's half half an actual bit of the actual wall, so you can see the scale of it, like it's the only place in Berlin, where you can still see what it was actually like and become a space it took up. And then the center in the middle, you can see that's about topography this terrace, which is actually more about the Nazi stuff, that's where the Gestapo and its headquarters also have a pretty long strip of it, which is still preserved more like in original shipped condition. And equivalent to be like, yeah, we have to co-locate this sort of state terror museum between the fascism and the comic. You don't have much of a choice. Yeah, lots of stuff happening, but if you climb

over this, do they kill you? Not anymore, no. No, you can give it a go, I guess. Do some like experimental archaeology. Not authentic. They should have like a guy with a paintball gun up here. We're coming back to you in the East German border guards. We'll get you a uniform off eBay. I don't know. I'm not sure. My size. People were smaller back then. This is not true, right? Germans, and particularly East Germans, are a gut-heavy people. And so, at the point, yeah.

At the East German official clothing sizes for a men's jacket. They're standard sizes, so like a 44-inch chest. You're like a 56 or 58, right? But there's a little dash after it. So that's the normal size. And then there's a little belly, which is a dash one, and then there's a big gut, which is dash two. And it's the thing is like cut wider

to allow for the girth. I feel like it was a paradise. It was a socialist paradise. Oh. They say it didn't do anything for its citizens. And yet, you know, yeah, I could drink a liter of beer and be an East German border cup in the West. The science.

Sounds like a dream job. Yeah. And on the upper left side, you can see this is the marketing, the center districts of Berlin, they've made this, they've enraged in the pavement, whatever, you know, where you're walking everywhere, you'll come across, you can see it with, oh, I'm crossing the wall right now. I'm crossing another one. Another one.

And three in the genre of memorials to historical tragedy that you trip over. Yeah. I think this one's actually quite nice because like if you pay attention a bit, you can notice that in the normal concert, if you dare, you'll be going like six or seven times over the border. And then you think about, huh, I couldn't have done that by grand and you realize how much the city has changed. It's like the yard of break at the end of the app was speedway.

Yeah, so it is like that. But generally speaking, otherwise, the wall has disappeared from Berlin. You can't really see any more. They've filled it all up. It's all been built up with new development. And if you want to see more of a scale of the border, the inner German border is preserved as a sort of park landscape, like overall the whole thing along the center of Germany. They're trying to keep it as a green border, I guess, is what you'd call it.

But in Bolivia, they didn't do that because a real estate is just too expensive and so you had to fill it all back up. It has to go and become we works. It's kind of weird. I'm just if you look at Berlin on Google Maps, I've never been to Berlin, but it's like you would expect this wall to have more of a scar on the city, but it's like, no, we built over it. It's over. Especially considering the scale of it. We had it just vanished. We've had it without trace. We've been like 10 years, it's just gone. It's gone. It's, you know, I mean, you hook this stuff up to the big engine of like 90s capitalism. And yeah, we go. And the next slide is still safe. Well, we can still see where the central artery in Boston was. Berlin wall gone.

The, here, this is the remembering the GD on slide, because what we have here is a picture of the foundations of the Palasté Republic, which was the main building of the GD right there. Yeah, that's the parliament, that's the whole restaurant, everything was a very nice building. Gorgeous building, gorgeous building, one of the one of the greatest buildings ever built I think. I agree. But one it was socialist and two it had asbestos in it which as we know it's bad.

On some cure of the show asbestos. Yeah. Exactly. We had maniacs. You blew it up like this is the thing not to would not catch fire. Because after after reunification, Berlin had two of everything. And then there's like abiding grievance of East Berlin as then to pretty much now is why does it get to be our thing that's demolished?

Yeah. Because like the International Conference Center, West Berlin, which is this huge sort of spaceship looking building, is also for West Besto, but it's still standing. Interestingly enough, curious. Whereas the parts of the republic was full of spray on Westbestos, they sprayed it onto the steel beams on the inside. And so what they did is first they removed all the Westbestos at bread expense, they basically emptied out the building and then they tore it down anyway And he as I said the executive foundation and someone who spent it on to it TDDD ArtNicky game, which means the VGDR never happened

Never existed which I find is a very fitting and poetic description Because that I think nowadays that's not true anymore, but in the early 2000s that was definitely the vibe like VGDR never heard of it. They replaced this with sort of a replica, at least as far as the facade of an older German building that had stood on the side. Yeah, which, you know, one of the things is, I'm not against like reconstructing historic buildings that probably shouldn't have been demolished. But the other thing is, this was not a reconstruction of historic building.

This was, they did not do any of the interiors. It is a shitty office building with a nice facade. I saw an office building in Red Defense, but it's made of concrete and steel and it's a bunker with a facade slept onto it. Basically, it's very controversial. Lots of people hate it. Now there's a big museum inside it,

but suppose to show Berlin, is this cosmopolitan, international city where tiptoeing around the colonial history of Germany, which is nothing happened there. Africa. I am a member in an association that wants to rebuild the Palace of Republic and demolish a reconstruction of the Schloss. Do you take foreign members?

I was about to say, hey, I would love to see that palace rebuild day. Not even, you know, maybe put it on a different site, but that's it. That was a good fucking building, isn't it? Yeah. You know, why is it always going to be, was it always going to be our context that we lose? You know, so I'm only the good day young. Yeah. But basically, ever GDR mean is associated very strongly with a wall.

And that's the right thing to do. It was a terrible thing to do to a city and to the country in general. And VGDR in general, you have to say, was not a very good thing. You do not have to hand it to them. But at the same time, again, it was an alternative. It was something different. It did some things right, but we're then very swiftly undone by reunification instead of trying to sort of keep them over, like, you, like gender equality, some aspects of work, some aspects of housing policy, et cetera. But no, it was just everything was bad. And how we slowly getting to a point

where we can start to differentiate between what was bad and what was maybe sort of, OK? But that took like 30 years. Yeah, absolutely. Like huge amounts of historical trauma from people that have victimized, but on the other hand, you know. It took until capitalism got worse than communism. Yeah, pretty much.

Yeah, and I think your sort of like your SED bureaucrat of the 80s view of now must be something like how badly did we fuck it up, that this is worse, you know. Yeah, I feel like I feel like, you know, if we went back in time and we went through Soviet border crossing, you're like, wow, this is this is a lot less invasive than the TSA, huh? I have some thoughts about this if we go to the next slide. And my question by way of wrapping up my sentiment here, I don't know if you'll agree with me or not, but I put these slides in, so I get to do it is

what kind of sick, depraved, totalitarian, communist fuck freaks build a razor wire topped wall over a state border to prevent migration with, that's the US-Mexico border next slide, please. Oh, thanks. Thanks, Joe Brandon. I mean, I mean really, but what kind of like evil, dictatorial, tyrannical, Stalinist, bastard builds a razor wire topped wall to keep people in a kind of open air prison, another, the, the Israeli border wall around Gaza. Thanks, Banny from Cheldenham High School. Yeah, but it was a foes of the Israeli wall around Gaza, which sort of leads me to my point, right, which is it comes into two flights. No borders, donations, I agree. Yes, now,

and the episode. It's more nuanced than that. So my sort of my depressing point is all of this is to say that something that in the 20th century was an unprecedented violation of human rights is now authorily normalized violation of human rights. And we're kind of we are living in the Berlin Walls world and that interim of happy liberal globalization reunification if that was ever a real thing is best understood as a temporary pause and a wider historical current of borders getting worse for everyone, which is great. On the other hand, and this is the optimistic thing so I like to end these things on an optimistic note. and these things on an optimistic note. Yeah, the Berlin Wall teaches us that like walls must fall, right? This stuff, like entropy being what it is, there is no state that can maintain a border indefinitely. And that isn't a time to sort of give up on the idea of making things better for people,

quite the opposite. I think that one of the lessons of the vellum was that once those systems of repression do disintegrate, you have to work very hard to provide something better. Otherwise, in 30 years later, everyone votes for the AFD. But yeah, that's the sort of like political challenge that awaits us, so get install forms of like oppression and authoritarianism. That's my point of view. Yeah. I just noticed that this is also using ordinary street lights. I mean, the real winner here at Big Street Light. I just want to say, bringing it back to the goddamn news.

What we have learned in this week is that at the very least, you individually can get over the wall. These security systems do not work. Yes. Generally, 10,000 people, you're going to have some lot. Yep. I just I You're going to have some of you may die. But you know, the thing is these things don't work as well as advertised. Folks, he's so right. Like, you know, is this East German transit cop is right.

Yeah, yeah. Be East German transit cop. I'm just saying, look, there's ways to get around this thing. Come on. Well, I mean, the best border wall is a joke. It's a joke that kills people for sure, but in general, use six miles inland so they can run out

through a butterfly reservation. Even the Berlin Wall, which was inside the city, it was 40 kilometers, which is not a lot in the end. And even that didn't work. It was a highly controllable environment. It couldn't get much better than that effectively. And even then, it failed in all walls, fail, always. Yeah.

Well, the walls don't work unless, you know, well, now the walls don't work. I was thinking about the Thierry and Walls. And then I was like, oh, wait, no, no, no, it's called the Istanbul now. Yes. Out the rings. Yeah. Which is also what Method said to his like a sea gen genitus about the concentricism. Also, I want to do it.

So last sidebar about the thing that in Germany, it's a very big thing that the whole GDR ended non-violently. It's very important to people. They really like to bring that up when you have other movements struggling for freedom across the world in sort of a sense. I don't think they meet it openly, but that's why they meet it internally. But if we manage to do it without violence, why don't you? And I think that's really a wrong way of approaching

like the situation. This Germany at the end was extremely anomalous. from the realm of probability it should have gone the way. The USSR should have stepped down with big boot and said nope and and killed a whole bunch of people. That didn't happen. That doesn't mean that that's the right way of doing it. It's the only way of doing it. Like it lucked out basically. It can't affect that pizza loving man. Exactly. But you can't expect that from other wall situations around the world. Like it's not the same thing. You can just say, if they just went out and protest in the big square and people would realize, oh, we got to do something about it. That's not quite

how it works. Yeah, I don't know. I think, you know, the less than we learned here, you see a wall. There that shit down. Yeah, just punch it.. I think, you know, the less than we learned here, you see a wall tear that shit down. Yeah, just punch it. Yeah, punch it. Punch it. Punch it. Punch it. Hold on the drywall. I think we're like all anarchists on this one. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You got a wall in your house. Fuck it. You make it only landed at it. Yeah, you want every single one of us like rejects a state sort of like the idea of a state's moral right to impose a wall on this borders

So yeah, no walls no masters, right? That's right. That's right. I have I have stuff for you to read. That's right What are you handing me this vegan tray bacon? No, I'm not doing that No, it gets fed. No, wait, we got the nine vegan brownies. They're made of meat. These are my meat brownies. This is your tendency. It's called it not bombs.

Yeah, I'm going to make a medicine. I love medicine. I don't very get it the whole idea of liberation. I'm punching the wall next to me right now. I love that I said I Very good at the whole I don't liberation again I'm I'm punching the wall next to me right now Yeah, I'm just going on it like a old boy, you know, no, it's made a brick. It's it's gonna be difficult Yeah, like I'll also it supports the apartment above So I don't want to tear that one down. Yeah, this would not be for some yeah, yeah exactly so

tear down every single wall. We have a podcast. We have a podcast on the segment called, called safety third. Almost. All right. Hello, Roz, Alice, Ye Liam, and hello, possible guest. Yeah, you did it this time, Moron. Yeah, now know. My story comes from my time aboard the mobile Chernobyl. A-K-A, the USS Enterprise. Oh, yeah, fairly. Yeah. I've been waiting for military safety, though.

An aircraft carrier, which should have never been built, and whose designers alleged attempts itself sabotaged, produced the ship, so dysfunctional that they never made another one. Instead, they built two more oil fired carriers while trying to unfuck the design. Now, this incident was afterwards known to the crew as Muddy Sunday.

Oh, geez, that's a good one. We'd been more in the repair yards at the Northrop Grumman, Newport, New Shipyards for almost two years, trying to complete a regularly scheduled overhaul. Oh, God. However, what the fuck? There was not another ship scheduled to come into the yards anytime soon. And shipyard bobbas only get paid if a ship is present for them to work on. So the odds of our repairs getting done in a timely fashion were lower than the chances of a paper dog successfully chasing and as best as cat through hell on a particularly hot day. This is a late Soviet Union story. So with repairs only partially complete, the Pentagon in its indefinite wish wisdom actually got tired of hemorrhaging taxpayer treasure and decided to have us pull out early, go on sea trials, and then finish repairs pierced side at Norfolk naval base.

Now, sea trials are when you try and break things on purpose in order to see if they were properly repaired. No, it's over, but for aircraft carriers. Yeah. Note that I said the repairs were not complete. Oh, so you just break things to see if they haven't been repaired? Oh! Another problem that

propped up was at the river between the shipyard and the ocean hadn't been dredged in almost two years. Oh, boy, it was due for its regularly scheduled dredging next month. So the chief engineer or shang. Oh, perhaps Chang actually went up to the flight deck, pull out his cell phone, called the appropriate staff of the Pentagon to inform them that he was staring at sand bars that were blocking the ship and that please either delay the pull out or move up the dredging. Eighteenth century ass, like seamanship problem, like cooling up the Pentagon, be like, unbecombed. Hey, yeah, can

you guys. Hey, what's the Army Corps of Engineers when I need them? Yeah, reminds me the last episode. So the Pentagon said to just pull out anyway. So we did. We didn't even make it out to the ocean before the tugboats had to come rescue us. Ships, especially steam power ships like nuclear aircraft carriers have to suck up cooling water to cool the condensers that draw steam through the turbines. Essentially, nuclear power is hot rock makes water boil oil boiling water makes steam. Steam makes the turbine go around the around the around the shaft spins the propellers and the generators. I see why Navy Newg School has the highest nutrition rate beside seals. That's very complex. Yeah, I made me, you know,

only without a cold condenser to suck the steam through the turbine. The turbine doesn't go around. E roundy. Oh, no. I was a new guy just coming off a night ship so my first said something was wrong was three announcements in a row over the ship's PA system announcing various condenser failures. Then the words, Scram, all eight reactors muster all nuclear-trained personnel in the aft-bomb transfer area. Okay. I had no clue where that area was. So I just rolled out of my rack and followed the mad rush out of birthing.

A scram is an emergency shutdown of a nuclear reactor. No one's actually clear on where scram comes from. It's an accident. Of course, you control Rod Axe, man. Sometimes, sometimes, yeah, a guy with an axe had to cut a rope in the like original firmly reactive but yeah yeah but the yeah exactly but but when you do an emergency shutdown that's essentially what happens so now what happened exactly what happened was exactly what the chief engineer thought what happened and as the ship passed over the sand bar,

the cooling water pumps sucked up a mass of James River mud, trash debris, and sea life, which proceeded to block the narrow condenser channels through which cooling water is supposed to flow. We then immediately lost all electrical power for a pollution and the ability to dry in more cooling water is supposed to flow, we then immediately lost all electrical power, propulsion, and the ability to dry in more cooling water for our nuclear reactors, while a drift in an inland waterway of the continental United States. Jesus fuck outstanding.

Fortunately, the ship had four emergency diesel generators which start automatically if the power is lost, and one of them did. They managed to start another one three hours later. The other two never started. I was standing. Meanwhile, with no ventilation, temperatures and humidity in the steam plants stored, reaching 160 degrees Fahrenheit with 100% humidity in some areas. A literal sauna. Oh, cool. Having you like wet bulb moment in the engineering compartments of an aircraft carrier,

which sounds terrible at the best time. That's safe. We're about to sweat, Jordy LaForge, the death. These spaces held critical equipment that had to be manned at all times. Watch standard cycles through as fast as possible. One one one especially dedicated senior chief refused to leave. Eventually his men realized he was talking nonsense. He was beat red and he had stopped sweating.

So again, the rest of them up, the two flights of 70 degree angle stairs, it's probably a ship ladder. I don't know if anyone knows what a ship ladder is, but yeah, yeah, it's kind of a Google ship ladder. Go to the USS New Jersey. It'd be very uncomfortable at it. Yeah, or the what's the summary visit it? Yeah, not a list that we went on. Not a list. Yeah, wrestling up two flights of 70 degree angle stairs that were too hot to touch. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, temperature, rectally, as they worked successfully to keep the heat stroke from killing them. Outstanding. The muddy part of muddy Sunday comes from what happened next when the mechanics had to open up all the condensers and clean out thousands of individual condenser tips with pressure

washers. Oh, of course. You have to rinse out the big spaghetti. Oh, yes. Yes. Yes. It got everywhere. Imagine walking up to a manure pile, spraying it with a pressure washer at point blank range and getting hit with the back blast. And you have to have an accurate picture, except it was the

putrid bottom silt of a polluted river mixed with sea life paste. I kind of think the Pentagon should have maybe listened to the chief engineer instead of the the ask guessing CEO who ignored his own chief engineer and told the Pentagon what they wanted to hear. Thanks for the great podcast. Keep up the good work and NAVY never again voluntary yourself. How are you? Flying A.V. Amazing.

Safety third. Our next episode is, I forgot I put the Chernobyl slide. Yeah, the next episode is this bud. Yeah, this bird. I will say. Is that a road runner. What? I think that might be a road runner.

Well, thanks so much for coming. Yeah. Like if you have listened to two hours and a half of this without subscribing to the YouTube channel, what the fuck is wrong with you? Please do that. Very close to 100,000 followers in which case we get the plaque and then I can, I can, I can, I can, I can, I can be at least equivalent to Alan Fisher. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. All right. Edward, does it, like, are we promoting anything? Do we want like, no, as a museum worker, go to your local museums, they like you, they love you, they need you, you know, to appreciate museums. Yeah. concept of museum. Accept the fear of local museums on strike.

And don't, yeah, don't scout with your museum, but otherwise, yeah, check out. Never was come to Berlin. It's a nice broken city, which is what makes it nice. And don't be an ass and don't stand on the street when I'm trying to ride my bike. Thank you for having me. Yeah. Thanks for coming on. Thanks so much. Our next episode is on this road runner.

Yeah, I guess that's the end of the podcast. That's podcast folks. We did a podcast. Bye. Bye. Bye.