Response from the youth

I have always been interested in how people think for some reason. I find it so fascinating how different people respond to different situations. When people respond in particular way about something, like how they handle a break up with a boyfriend/girlfriend or how some people cannot stand it when you sit on their bed, I always wonder what has happened in their life to make them think or feel that way. Those are obviously small examples, but I also ponder the minds of addicts, hot heads, perfectionists, etc.

I can’t help but believe people react to things the way they do not solely on their personality traits, but also by events that occurred as children. Children have minds like sponges and just absorb the environment around them. This can effect them in a positive or negative way. It is simple yet so complicated to understand the child who was abused to grow up with anger management issues, but what are the effects on youth who grow up in a world with a happy, for the most part normal family to all of a sudden be confronted with a wall that wasn’t there a few days ago? What would it be like to be missing classmates because they were on the other side of the wall? It is one thing to be raised in the East Berlin community, just knowing not to approach the wall, but what would it be like as young person who was just old enough to understand what the rise of the wall meant, or lack of understanding what the wall meant?

I would be interested in talking with the people who were the youth of the era during the time the wall was created in 1961. I can only imagine the confusion this created on both the East and West sides of Berlin. I would also be very interested in how this occurrence might have effected them later in the lives.