BARRIERS TO BETTER LIVES

The Berlin Wall began as a white line on the ground. Sixty years ago this month, 21-year-old technical draughtsman Hagen Koch plotted and then painted, on cobblestones and asphalt – and, in some places, across green lawn, along park edges and hard up against (and sometimes, ludicrously, through) buildings – the line that would come to define, like no other, the border between East and West.

Through the early hours of August 13, 1961, a date that would become known to Berliners as (Barbed Wire Sunday), East German soldiers began unloading coils of barbed wire and patrolling the abruptly closed border between the Soviet sector of the city and the Western