Berlin Wall in Second Life

November 9, 4:40 PMSecond Life ExaminerApollo Manga

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For nearly a half century after World War II, East Germany was a brutal, totalitarian state after Germany was partitioned into East and West Germany in the war's wake. The oppression only grew worse in 1961 when the country's Communist rulers built a wall separating Communist and non-Communist Berlin. The wall divided neighborhoods and families with a no-man's land of barbed wire and armed guards ready to shoot to kill any East German who tried to leave.

The Berlin Wall is commemorated in Second Life in the Ciel sim, where Christo Larsen has built a replica of the notorious Checkpoint Charlie crossing through the Wall, shown in this picture. There are more pictures in the slide show below.

It's difficult for people today to imagine what life was like for East Germans before the Wall came down in 1991. North Korea is the best parallel today. To appreciate what it was like, imagine that your country has been divided and a wall built through your national capital. Armed guards along the entire length of the wall shoot anyone from your side of the wall who tries to leave. When people visit from the other side, you see that they live well and in fact are all wealthy far beyond what anyone on your side of the wall can imagine. They also live in freedom. They don't have to live with the knowledge that even their family and closest friends are probably spying on them and reporting their every action to secret police.

You know people who have been jailed and you may know someone who could no longer stand it and one day just disappeared. Everyone knows the person tried breaking through to the other side of the wall. Did they succeed? Or are they dead or imprisoned in a dark cell somewhere. No one knows.

Today Germany is united and free, and today they celebrate the day that those living in the eastern partition were liberated to join the modern world.

Second Life members can visit the Second Life Berlin wall by clicking slurl.com/secondlife/Ciel/82/124/24, where the east side of the Wall contains a series of informational signs giving the history of post World War II partition of Germany. You can see more pictures in the slide show below.

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All photographs in this report are by Erik Gordon Bainbridge.