I remember it all so clearly. Twenty-four years ago, I wrote a PhD exam that asked me to assume “a finality” about the Berlin Wall and the division of Europe.

I accepted that premise, because no one familiar with Europe after l945 foresaw any change there.

Just four years later, I watched, slack jawed and speechless, as Champagne-spraying Berliners stormed the Wall checkpoints and threw a reunion party for the ages. Some finality! I was chagrined at having missed so badly on the longevity issue, so I launched a personal research project after the fall in order to get the Wall right. In the spirit of the 20th anniversary of its destruction, here are three of my more intriguing findings.

The Wall indisputably added a new dimension to the mathematics of modern conflict. Addition and subtraction have driven most recent wars; in the 1870 Franco-Prussian war, a fast-unifying Germany took Alsace and Lorraine from France, launching a cycle of vengeance that helped precipitate World War I. World War II began with Adolf Hitler’s conquest of Poland, while Saddam Hussein brought on the Gulf War with his invasion of Kuwait.

By contrast, the Cold War’s defining principle was division. The United States and the Soviet Union divided Europe between them in l944-45, each side taking control of countries it had liberated from the Nazis. As it was the center of Europe and the birthplace of Nazism, Germany was similarly divided between the two superpowers. Then the allies split Berlin, the German capital, even though it lay deep in the Soviet part of Germany. For years, Berliners passed freely between east and west, but on August l3, l961, they woke to find themselves separated by a growing brick and barbed wire wall. This development spawned another round of division: family from family, neighbor from neighbor, living from dead after guards shot people attempting to scale the wall. It is hard to imagine a crueler calculus.

The backstory of the Wall lays bare the fundamental mendacity and pettiness of the Communist leaders. By l961, East Berlin’s standard of living had flatlined, owing to rigid central planning and East Germany’s con role in the Soviet Union’s economic empire. Meanwhile West Berlin was fast becoming a showcase European metropolis, prosperous people living in attractive apartments and shopping in swank boutiques.

Thus East Berliners increasingly gravitated there, since salaries and conditions were far better. This greatly upset East German leader Walter Ulbricht, who faced a growing labor shortage in his part of Berlin and a loss of face with his counterpart in West Germany. Ulbricht went to his boss, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, for help in stopping the exodus. When Khrushchev appeared unsympathetic to his plight, Ulbricht suggested sending Soviet workers to East Berlin as replacements.

Khrushchev was outraged, as he later recounted in his memoirs. “Imagine how a Soviet worker would feel,” he told Ulbricht. “He won the war and now he has to clean your toilets. It will not only be humiliating, it will produce an explosive reaction in our people.” So the two leaders decided on what they called “border control.” When that “control” – the Wall – began rising that August, Ulbricht added insult to injury by introducing it as the “anti-fascist protective rampart.” This barrier, East Berliners were assured, would protect them against sudden attack from the neo-fascist/imperialist West Germans and their sponsors, the United States.

The East German and Soviet Communists had failed to deliver on a quality of life comparable with the west, yet they took no responsibility and declined to rethink their policies. They blocked access to the nice neighborhood rather than improve their own, then cynically misrepresented the Wall as a defense of their citizenry. If the 1962 Nobel committee had awarded a prize for dishonesty and dissembling, Khrushchev and Ulbricht would have been runaway winners.

The Wall seems destined to go down as the biggest public relations blunder in history. Khrushchev and his Communist allies constantly trumpeted their conviction that they had created the most egalitarian, humane and progressive system ever known – a workers’ paradise. They proved equally vociferous in enumerating the sins of capitalist nations like the United States: poverty, inequality, racism and homelessness.

At times, the Communist world did appear more dynamic, especially in the surprise launch of Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin’s historic flight. But the image of the Wall soon eclipsed all the positive publicity, begging the question: what kind of a workers’ paradise requires a wall to retain those workers? Visiting Berlin in June l963, President John F. Kennedy offered a dramatic response. “There are many people in the world,” Kennedy declared, “who really don’t understand, or say they don’t, what is the great issue between the free world and the Communist world.” He paused to cast a pointed glance at the Wall. “Let them come to Berlin!” “Freedom has many difficulties,” the President continued, “and democracy is not perfect. But we have never had to build a wall to keep our people in, to prevent them from leaving us.” Khrushchev and Ulbricht never publicly second-guessed their decision, but no one outside the Communist world could look at the Wall and see anything but a glaring admission of failure, that Communism was in fact all about coercion, not competition.

The 20 years since Nov. 9, l989 have schooled me well on the nature of Communism, on the life and death of the “anti-fascist protective rampart,” on the 20th century broadly defined. But they have also brought me back to basics, to a simple truth that Robert Frost enunciated long ago, namely: “Something there is that doesn’t like a wall.”

Brigit Farley is associate professor of history at Washington State University Tri-Cities. The author spoke to the Columbia Forum in April.