Fifty years ago today the DDR built Die Mauer - the Berlin Wall. As an ethnic German that comes from a family that was ethnically cleansed by the Soviets in 1939, the wall has been a big part of my life growing up.
I only saw the wall in person in 1979 when I travelled to Poland with my parents and aunt Sabine. On our return to the west we stopped for a couple of days in Berlin. I was only 13, but the wall was already present in my mind because of my family. The reality of what the city was like with the wall was quite bizarre. A city with no hinterland, with no place to easily travel to. Navigating around the city meant we ran into the wall from time to time.
The wall was there through my youth as this reminder that east and west were split. There was an iron curtain and it split Europe in two leaving my families homeland under military occupation. For us the division of the cold war was a constant in our house.
As late as the spring of 1989 I honestly thought this wall would never come down. As someone born four years after the wall was built, by the late 1980s it seemed as if it was always there and would always be there. The wall was symbol of all of the communist oppression in eastern Europe. The distance between east and west, communist and democratic, was short enough that you could look over the wall and see the other side.
People in the east could listen to rock concerts in the west. I can not imagine what it must have been like to have been sealed into East Germany knowing a world where you had choice, you could speak your mind, you had basic human rights, was just a short distance away.
As a youth I could not see it, but now as a middle aged man I can see that the very existence of the wall meant that the communist regimes of the east could not survive. The wall has an act of desperation that could not endure for generations. Fifty years ago the SED in the DDR made the biggest admission that there regime was unsustainable and non functional through the building of that wall. The only way to keep people in the country was to make the DDR a prison. For 28 years everyone in East Germany was a prisoner,this is longer than the longest sentence without parole in Canada.
That day when the wall opened was a moment in my life I will always remember where I was. I was in our living room listening to a report on CBC radio. It was one more "We interrupt this program to bring you this report". This happened so many times in 1989. The report of the wall opening came during Morningside. My first desire was to catch a plane to Berlin. I would have to wait another year before I could get to Berlin and see the liberated city.
As wonderful as it was to truly see the end of communism in Europe, the end of the wall also meant the end of West Berlin. West Berlin was this crazy anarchist city full of artists. It was an utterly unique place on earth. That city disappeared just as completely as the former DDR.
3 comments:
I was one of the last people to be REFUSED entry into East Berlin.
It was October 7, 1989, not quite a month before the Wall actually came down. October 7 is East Germany’s “Foundation Day”, the commemoration of the date of the founding of the country in 1949. National holiday, with big parades and so forth in Berlin.
My friends and I took the elevated train from West Berlin - you get on in the West and travel non-stop to Friedrichstrasse, a station about half a mile inside East Berlin, and go through the border there. We got out and the station platform was full of border guards, many more than the time I had gone over the year before - there were even police dogs. A big beefy guard and two others came up to us - he shoved out his hand and demanded:
“Passport!”
We handed them over. He looked at them.
“Amerikaner?”
“Ja, sie sind Amerikaner, ich bin Kanadisch.” (I, the Canadian, was the only one who spoke German.)
He snapped them shut and poked them back at me.
“Keine Einreise!” (No entry!)
No point in arguing, so we stuck around for 15 minutes until the train went back to the West.
We found out later that no one was being allowed in from the West on that day, because Gorbachev (who was then the poster child for freedom and reform throughout the Warsaw Pact) was in town for the holiday, and big anti-government demonstrations were expected. This was reinforced by what had happened (but we didn't know about it in the West) a few days before in Leipzig: the city police had refused to put down anti-government demonstrations, so factory militia had to be trucked in from outside the city to break them up. This was the first visible breakdown in the authority of the East German government.
As it turned out, the East Berliners had a nice holiday with no riots, I’m sure Gorbachev enjoyed himself, and we went to the open-air flea market.
A few days later, I left Berlin. And not long after that, people began to travel through the Wall without hindrance. I had missed the Freight Train of History by a couple of weeks.
The End.
(also the end, as you said, of West Berlin, which was one crazy city back then)
Thanks for the story, the whole era of the wall was crazy.
In 1979 I had an interesting experience at the Polish East German border. I will write about that soon
I was 18 when a buddy and I went through Checkpoint Charlie in 1985 at the height of the Regan/Chernenko era. I dutifully exchanged my 25 Deutschmarks for 25 Ostmarks (when the “real” exchange rate was closer to 1:30). The challenge was finding enough things to buy given that we were not allowed to return to the west with Osmarks.
I ended up spending it on “coke” and beer I couldn’t drink, chocolate I couldn’t eat, and a really cool cassette of Bob Dylan’s greatest hits, complete fine print claiming it was recorded in the DDR (go figure!).
It was still early but times were changing. I recall visiting the TV tower in Potsdam and speaking to a tour guide who was anxious to learn as many western idioms as she could, while furtively glancing around to see if she was being watched. I also remember the bravado of the US forces who first warned us not to take pictures of anything on the east side that one might bomb in a war, and then who pointed to the East German tower guards and exhorted us to “flip them the bird in stereo dude!” upon our return.
A trip through the subway would take you through bustling stations full of young people dodging compulsory military service, and then the tube would duck under the wall and pass through “dead” stations with a single light and a guard with a Kalashnikov.
Young men with guns, sitting on a border.
Crazy
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