Berlin Wall built
A city is cut in two overnight — the Cold War made concrete
On the night of 13 August 1961 East Germany sealed the border with West Berlin with barbed wire, later a concrete wall. It stopped the exodus of its citizens to the West and stood until 1989.
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Did you know
Gagarin flew into space in April 1961; that August, the Berlin Wall went up.
Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Whole world
- 1939–1945 World War II — 22 years earlier
- 1947–1991 Cold War — 14 years earlier
- 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights — 13 years earlier
- 1949 Founding of NATO — 12 years earlier
- 1980 Smallpox declared eradicated — 19 years later
Eastern Europe & Russia
- 1941–1944 Siege of Leningrad — 20 years earlier
- 1942–1943 Battle of Stalingrad — 19 years earlier
- 1945 German surrender and Victory Day — 16 years earlier
- 1957 Sputnik 1, the first satellite — 4 years earlier
- 1961 Gagarin's flight — same year
Middle East
- 1948 Founding of the State of Israel — 13 years earlier
- 1979 Iranian Revolution — 18 years later
- 1980–1988 Iran–Iraq War — 19 years later
Africa
- 1956 The Suez Crisis — 5 years earlier
- 1958 Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart — 3 years earlier
- 1960 Year of Africa — 1 year earlier
- 1963 The Organisation of African Unity is founded — 2 years later
- 1967 First human heart transplant — 6 years later
Asia
- 1945 Atomic bombing of Hiroshima — 16 years earlier
- 1953 First ascent of Everest — 8 years earlier
- 1958–1962 Great Leap Forward — 3 years earlier
- 1964 First Shinkansen high-speed railway — 3 years later
- 1975–1979 The Khmer Rouge and the Cambodian genocide — 14 years later
Americas
- 1960 Great Chilean earthquake — 1 year earlier
- 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis — 1 year later
- 1969 Moon landing — 8 years later
- c. 1970 Mass deforestation of the Amazon begins — 9 years later
- 1983 Birth of the Internet: ARPANET adopts TCP/IP — 22 years later
Oceania
- 1936 Death of the last thylacine — 25 years earlier
- 1941 Attack on Pearl Harbor — 20 years earlier
- 1942 The Battle of Midway — 19 years earlier
- 1954 The Castle Bravo test at Bikini — 7 years earlier
- 1959 The Antarctic Treaty — 2 years earlier
Alive at the time
- Winston Churchill (aged 87)
- Pablo Picasso (aged 80)
- Charlie Chaplin (aged 72)
- Mao Zedong (aged 68)
- Nelson Mandela (aged 43)
- Martin Luther King Jr. (aged 32)
- Neil Armstrong (aged 31)
- Yuri Gagarin (aged 27)
- Harry S. Truman (aged 77)
- Anna Akhmatova (aged 72)