Question

For the Communist regime, the Wall was an existential necessity. GDR was not only a dictatorship with no freedoms of elections, press or speech; it had a Marxist, centrally-controlled “command” economy that kept the country hopelessly backward.

Even worse, the GDR’s system was failing, and keeping the country’s standard of living abysmally low, in plain sight of the thriving West Germany, which was fast becoming one of the most prosperous countries in Europe.

And what topped the Communist boondoggle, the 1951 division into two states left a big part of Berlin under the control of the Western Allies. Within five years, this blunder became so obvious that Mikhail Pervukhin, the Soviet ambassador to East Germany alarmingly reported to the Kremlin:

“[T]he presence in Berlin of an open and essentially uncontrolled border between the socialist and capitalist worlds unwittingly prompts the population to make a comparison between both parts of the city, which unfortunately, does not always turn out in favor of [what he called] the Democratic Berlin.”


Which of the following was NOT a problem that East Berlin faced?

The economy was held back by the government.

Citizens had few rights.

Industry was stronger in West Berlin than in East Berlin.

People wanted to move to East Berlin

Answer 1

"People wanted to move to East Berlin."

This is NOT a problem East Berlin faced — in fact the opposite was true: people wanted to leave East Berlin for the more prosperous West (the passage describes comparisons favoring West Berlin/West Germany).