A World Divided

From 1961 to 1989, the Berlin Wall was the literal manifestation

of a world divided by the Cold War—a concrete barrier, eventually

12-feet high at points, demarcating East and West Berlin, and by

extension, the Soviet and Western worlds. Patrolled by armed

guards, eerily clean and white on its Eastern side, covered with

graffiti on its Western face, the Wall turned West Berlin into a

veritable island of democracy in the middle of a Soviet client state,

and served as a mute, and seemingly immutable, reminder of how

tenuous peace between East and West really was. (Life - Your World
in Pictures)