Sixty years ago, on August 13, 1961, the GDR leadership closed the sector border.

It is Sunday night, the Berliners are, one hopes, busy with the weekend.

More than 10,000 people's and border police officers tear up pavement and asphalt, erect barricades and pull barbed wire through the city.

The sector crossings will be cordoned off, and numerous S-Bahn and U-Bahn stations will be closed.

7,000 soldiers are supposed to prevent a breakthrough into the West, and the Soviet troops are also on standby.

Markus Wehner

Political correspondent in Berlin.

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The horrified residents of East Berlin are prevented from any active protest or resistance by people's police with machine guns.

The citizens in the western part are also upset, the police there prevent them from getting too close to the border installations.

Nevertheless, many East Berliners flee over the barbed wire in the days that followed.

On August 14th, the Brandenburg Gate is closed as a sector crossing, three days later construction crews begin to replace the barbed wire with a wall made of hollow blocks.

This is how the SED leadership reacted to the mass exodus of citizens from the workers 'and peasants' state in autumn 1949. By August 1961, 2.8 million people had left the GDR. The SED leadership under Walter Ulbricht had been harboring plans for a wall since 1958. But the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev was against it until the summer of 1961 - until he changed his mind. The wall, 155 kilometers long, divides the city of Berlin, separates people from one another.

The border fortifications are constantly being expanded, a border strip created, houses and churches torn down and blown up. In the mid-1970s, a new wall made of concrete retaining wall elements was erected; it was more than three meters high and 1.20 meters wide. A hinterland wall is erected, mines and self-firing systems make it almost impossible to cross the border. Many who try to escape pay with their lives for it.

The wall has stood for 28 years - but now it's been four years that it no longer exists. Today there is little to remind us of this cruel division and the terrifying symbol of the Cold War. How about if the wall suddenly came back? What would it look like if it were to cut Berlin's death strip again with its border fortifications, its 302 watchtowers, and its death strip? What would it mean if barbed wire, concrete and death strips suddenly shaped life in the pulsating capital?

The Berlin photographer and designer Alexander Kupsch opened the exhibition “The Wall. It stands again! ”, In which he merged historical recordings of the Berlin Wall into current photos. Now he has made new assemblies. Photos of border installations that the GDR leadership had taken were superimposed and collaged with current drone images from Berlin. The result was pictures that inspire the viewer to deal with the division of the city and the country, which lasted almost three decades: because the wall appears to exist again.