The American Spectator : Twenty Years Ago, America Stood for Freedom

The American Spectator : Twenty Years Ago, America Stood for Freedom: "Among the many thousands who attempted to escape the prison known as East Berlin was a man named Wolfgang Engels, who in 1963 stole a tank and drove it into the wall. Engels' assault on the imposing barrier splitting his city came just two years after the Soviets and their East German allies built it. Among the soldiers who erected the barbed wire fencing was Wolfgang Engels.

It didn't take long for East Germans to become disillusioned with the Communist utopia imposed upon them. The Soviets knew that would happen, thus the wall.

The wall was intended to imprison minds as well as bodies, and it achieved both purposes. The shadow of ignorance the wall cast eastward lingers two decades after its fall. Last week, an opinion poll found that 58 percent of Russians said they didn't know who built the wall. Some thought the people of Berlin built it themselves.

Catherine Hickley, a writer for Bloomberg News, was an English teacher in East Germany in 1989. The English textbook she taught from depicted Britain as a 19th century coal-mining backwater and referenced the United States only in relation to the slave trade, she wrote last week."