How long was the Berlin Wall?

155 kilometers around an island

The Berlin Wall did not simply cut a city in half. West Berlin, made of the American, British and French sectors, was an island inside East Germany, so the barrier had to run all the way around it: about 155 km (96 miles) by 1989. Only about 43 km of that divided West Berlin from East Berlin, through the middle of the city. The other 112 km or so ran between West Berlin and the East German towns, fields and forests around it.

That made it longer than Hadrian’s Wall, at 117 km, but far shorter than the border between the two German states, which ran about 1,393 km from the Baltic to Czechoslovakia and had been fenced since 1952. The two are often mixed up. The Berlin Wall was only the ring around West Berlin. By the end, 302 watchtowers stood along it.

How tall was it?

It depends on the year. On the first night, August 13, 1961, there was no wall at all, only barbed wire and roadblocks; the roll that Conrad Schumann jumped two days later was about 80 cm high. Within days, workers laid concrete blocks, and through the 1960s the blocks gave way to walls of concrete slabs.

The wall most people picture arrived in the mid-1970s: the Grenzmauer 75, prefabricated L-shaped segments of reinforced concrete about 3.6 meters (12 feet) high and 1.2 meters wide, set side by side and capped with a smooth concrete pipe that left nothing to grip.

A strip, not a wall

Seen from West Berlin, it looked like a single wall. Behind it lay a strip several layers deep. Going from east to west, there was a rear wall facing East Berlin, a signal fence wired to raise the alarm, a band of raked sand to betray footprints, floodlights, dog runs, a patrol road and the towers, and finally the front wall facing the West. East German border troops spoke of a control strip; in the West it was the death strip.

The front wall stood a few meters inside East German territory, which is why West Berliners could walk right up to it and cover its western face with graffiti. On Bernauer Straße, where the border ran along the house fronts, the buildings themselves, their doors and windows bricked up, served as the barrier until they were torn down.

Twenty-eight years

The Wall stood from August 13, 1961, to November 9, 1989: 28 years, 2 months and 27 days. On February 5, 2018, Berlin marked the day it had been gone as long as it had stood. Most of it was demolished in 1990 and the years just after, once the night of November 9 had made it useless.

What remains is small. A stretch at the Berlin Wall Memorial on Bernauer Straße keeps its border strip and a watchtower. The East Side Gallery, about 1.3 km of wall along the Spree covered in murals, is the longest surviving section. Across the city center, a double row of cobblestones marks where the Wall ran.