World: Learning to Live with the Wall

AFTER years of living with the Wall, West Berliners last week accepted the eighth anniversary of its construction almost with a shrug. Local politicians and union leaders laid wreaths near places where refugees had been killed trying to escape from the East. A new political splinter group called for a night-time march to the Wall, to the point where in 1962 East German guards shot 18-year-old Peter Fechter and then left him on the ground to bleed to death. There were few marchers.

Before the Wall was built in 1961, more than 3,600,000 East Germans crossed into the West over a period of 16 years. Since then, only 128,000 have escaped illegally, and at least 100,000 of them managed it by using false identity papers. It is now estimated that scarcely 20 people a month cross the Wall into West Berlin.