The German Democratic Republic came into being on October 7, 1949, when the constitution written in the Soviet occupation zone took effect and a government was sworn in at the state opera house in the eastern part of Berlin. Wilhelm Pieck became president and Otto Grotewohl prime minister. It was the second German state founded that year: the Federal Republic, in the three western zones, had adopted its Basic Law in May. Both were reactions to the other. Neither was meant to last.
The division came out of the breakdown of Allied cooperation. The four powers had joint administration machinery that stopped working by 1948, when the Soviet Union walked out of the Allied Control Council and then blocked road and rail traffic into West Berlin for eleven months, until an airlift supplied the city. Currency reform in the western zones in June 1948 was answered with a separate currency in the Soviet zone. The Socialist Unity Party, formed in 1946 from a merger of communists and social democrats that had been pushed hard by the occupation authorities, took the leading role in the new state, and its general secretary Walter Ulbricht held the power.
The government took over an economy already running on Soviet lines, with land reform behind it and nationalised industry ahead of it. The Ministry for State Security was set up in February 1950. By the time the state ended it had about 91,000 full-time officers and a far larger network of part-time informers, whose files filled more than 100 kilometres of shelving and became the archive the country had to face afterwards.
It lasted 41 years. Mass emigration through Berlin, which drained the country of young skilled workers, brought the government to build the Wall in August 1961. It stood for 28 years. The economy was kept going partly on credit from West Germany in the 1970s and 1980s. In the autumn of 1989 protests and departures through Hungary and Czechoslovakia forced the leadership out. On October 3, 1990 the German Democratic Republic ceased to exist, when its five states joined the Federal Republic.