To Lester Kirkendall:
Die Mauer ist lächerlich und absurd, aber auch zum Weinen wegen der Tragik.
TRAVELOG
Berliners tell their tales of life against the wall
Hagen Koch, who painted the white line that demarcated the Berlin Wall, visits the former site of Checkpoint Charlie recently. The system he served later abused him.
By Ray Moseley
BERLIN -- Hagen Koch was a proud, 21-year-old member of the Stasi, the East German secret police, when he knelt before a group of smiling East German leaders on Aug. 15, 1961, and painted a white line across a Berlin street.
The line marked the boundary between East and West Berlin at what became known as Checkpoint Charlie, the U.S.-manned crossing point in the Berlin Wall that was about to rise when Koch took his place as a footnote in history.
"I was totally convinced that what we were doing was the right thing," said Koch, 59, who like millions of others eventually became a victim of the state he had been taught slavishly to admire.
For 28 years the wall--a jagged, 93-mile-long, 13-foot-high barrier of reinforced gray concrete--stood as the supreme symbol of the Cold War confrontation between communism and democracy.
Ten years ago Tuesday, it was breached and a communist system stretching from the heart of Western Europe to the Bering Sea facing Alaska toppled in its wake.
The anniversary will be marked with a blaze of publicity and a Bundestag ceremony at which former President George Bush and former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev will join German leaders in making speeches. Daniel Barenboim also will conduct the Staatskappelle in a performance of Beethoven's 9th Symphony at the State Opera House in east Berlin to commemorate the fall of the wall.
From man's earliest history through the Middle Ages, people built walls to keep other people out. The Berlin Wall was a rare, if not unique, example of one built to keep people in and to cut a city apart.
Thus it stood as an advertisement of an embarrassing fact: A system that could not trust its own people bore within it a fatal weakness.
With freedom's triumph, the Soviet empire collapsed, the U.S. emerged as the world's only remaining superpower, Germany was reunited after 45 years, the world's abiding fear of nuclear holocaust abated as the vast Soviet and American nuclear arsenals began to be dismantled--and a host of new problems bubbled to the surface. Notably, the aftershocks took the form of wars in the Balkans and on the Russian periphery.
Just why Berlin, the old imperial capital and then the capital of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich, became the center of Cold War tensions and repeatedly brought East and West close to war was no mystery.
After World War II, the Russians were given occupation rights over eastern Germany, stretching almost as far west as Frankfurt and Hanover, while the Americans, British and French occupied the west. Berlin, within the communist zone, was divided between eastern and western sectors, with access through East Germany by highway, rail and air corridors guaranteed to the Western powers. Soviet dictator Josef Stalin reneged on the agreement and imposed a land blockade on West Berlin on June 23, 1948, in an attempt to force its collapse. The Western powers responded with an airlift to supply the city that lasted until May 12, 1949, when Stalin conceded defeat.
But the presence of a Western showcase within the heart of a communist zone and its capital remained an irritant to the Russians and a threat to the stability and survival of East Germany. Thousands of East Germans took advantage of this tiny Western island in a Red sea to flee from a hated system. The hemorrhage of people reached a peak in 1960, when 360,000 crossed into the West.
At midnight on Aug. 13, 1961, Walter Ulbricht's East German regime, with the blessing of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, suddenly moved troops into position along the East-West Berlin border. Berliners awoke that morning to find barbed-wire barriers across their city. Within days, the wall began to go up.
In the U.S., President John F. Kennedy was widely criticized for not having sent in tanks to knock down the wall as it was rising.
But the administration privately acquiesced in Ulbricht's action, even as it protested publicly because Kennedy believed the stability of the East German regime was key to the wider East-West equilibrium established by the 1945 peace settlement. With East Germans locked inside their country, Soviet-American tensions might subside.
Drawing the line
Hagen Koch was a cartographer with the Stasi when he was called upon to paint the white line at Checkpoint Charlie.
"I had to walk 50 kilometers (30 miles) that day, marking where the wall should be," he recalled. "I wore new boots, and at the end of the day I had so many blisters I couldn't walk anymore."
He had been singled out as a rising Stasi star because, in a speech he made when he joined the secret police in 1960, he denounced American "imperialism" and spoke of his pride in defending peace.
Erich Mielke, head of the Stasi, commented, "He's the man of our future."
Nothing illustrates the cruelty of the system Koch served better than what happened to him subsequently.
Koch's grandfather was Dutch and came to East Germany in 1966 to be reunited with his son and grandson for the first time. Hagen Koch was then involved in drawing plans for nuclear defense shelters and enjoyed the highest security clearance in the regime. Fearful that secrets he carried might spill out, the authorities expelled his Dutch grandfather. When Koch's father protested, he lost his job as a teacher and was declared mentally unstable.
Thoroughly disillusioned, Koch asked to leave the Stasi. He was arrested, and he and his young wife, Elke, were falsely accused of writing pornographic material. While he was in prison, the authorities forced her to divorce him. He was then released and, at his request, was assigned to the Stasi culture department.
A year later, he and his wife remarried against the will of the Stasi. The pressure on them resumed in 1980 when their son Frank, 19, was arrested and accused of leading an immoral life and of lacking a commitment to socialism.
In April 1985, Koch's father died, and he was barred from attending the funeral. "That was the last straw," he said.
He was finally allowed to leave the Stasi, having served the 25-year minimum, and was forced to take a job cleaning windows and floors at an exhibition hall; anyone without a job was subject to arrest as a social parasite.
Two years later he was arrested again because he had made contact with a West German journalist. After his release, he found work with the Institute for the Protection of the Cultural Patrimony of East Germany, and when the wall came down a new, reformed East German government commissioned him to safeguard documents about the wall and help dispose of the wall itself.
"I shipped a guard tower and sections of the wall to various places in the U.S., and gave souvenir pieces of the wall to all of the American presidents then living," he said.
"Since then I've devoted my life to documenting the history of the wall so people will not forget, and giving lectures to tell young people about what happened under communism." In July he and a West Berlin journalist published an illustrated history entitled "The Berlin Wall."
Construction begins
The first sections of the wall went up in August 1961 along Bernauer Street in Berlin. As it happened, some East Berlin apartment houses stood on the border with West Berlin, so the escapes began there almost immediately.
People began climbing out of windows and leaping to freedom or rappelling down the wall. Over the next 28 years, more than 5,000 people made their escape, and more than 3,200 were arrested in the attempt.
Some who tried to escape were drunk and didn't fully realize the danger they faced, according to a Berlin prosecutor. Others carefully planned their escapes, and outside Berlin some even walked through marked minefields to freedom--or were blown up trying.
On Aug. 19, Rudolf Urban fell from the window of his apartment on Bernauer Street while trying to get down and was killed. He was the first of more than 260 people who died while attempting to escape.
Five days later, the first of hundreds shot and wounded by East German police fell.
One 77-year-old woman on Bernauer Street stood for a quarter of an hour on a window ledge, afraid to jump into a firemen's net below. Police entered her apartment and grabbed her. They tried to pull her up but, intimidated by threats from a crowd below, they let her go.
Four other people missed the nets and were fatally injured.
For a time, East German police stood guard in people's kitchens and living rooms on Bernauer Street to prevent escapes. Then they bricked over the windows. In 1962, the remaining residents of the apartment complex were moved out, and it was destroyed.
Many early escapees were soldiers or border guards. One who didn't make it was shot dead by his comrades under a bridge that bore the slogan "GDR--Bastion of Peace in Germany." GDR stood for German Democratic Republic.
Behind the wall, the East Germans leveled a "death strip" up to 550 yards wide, even dynamiting the imposing Church of the Reconciliation, back of Bernauer Street, to clear the way. Anyone found within the strip would be shot, and along it were tank barriers and ditches up to 15 feet deep. Alsatian dogs on chains that stretched to 50 yards or so patrolled the area. There were 302 sentry towers along the wall, arc lights every few yards and a fence with electronic sensors behind the death strip that stretched for 76 miles. The wall became all but impregnable.
Enemy of the people
Hartmut Richter, 51, lives on Bernauer Street, where the city of Berlin and the federal government have rebuilt a number of sections of the wall that had been chipped away after its fall and have erected a memorial in the form of two large steel walls that extend into the former death strip.
Richter didn't always live there. He grew up in Potsdam, just outside East Berlin.
"I was a fanatical member of the (communist) Young Pioneers," he said. "I wanted to become like Lenin. We were taught that people in the West were the class enemy, but I had relatives there, and I couldn't really classify them as enemies. As I got older, I started having doubts."
As a teenager, Richter refused to join the Communist Free German Youth, and let his hair grow long--a political provocation as far as the regime was concerned. He was sometimes arrested on the street and given a forced haircut.
When he was 18, he decided to escape by taking a train to Czechoslovakia and making his way across the border into Austria. He was arrested before he reached Czechoslovakia. From prison, he wrote to his parents, saying how much he admired the "heroes of socialism."
The ploy worked. A prosecutor decided he could still be "saved," and he was released in May 1966.
On a dark, rainy, moonless night in August, he made his way to Berlin's Teltow Canal, stripped down to his bathing trunks and slipped into the water. Swimming underwater most of the way, he took four hours to cover just over a half-mile.
A fence ran down the middle of the canal, and East German guards patrolled it on both sides. "I was determined they would only get me as a corpse," he said.
Richter eventually came to a 10-foot-high steel mesh fence, topped by barbed wire, that crossed the canal. He climbed over it and looked back to read a sign that said "You are leaving the American sector of Berlin." He had made his escape.
In 1971, the two Germanies entered a period of detente, and the West Germans paid a great deal of money to get political prisoners released. East Germany granted an amnesty so that people who had escaped could visit their homes.
Richter drove back to East Germany on several occasions and managed to smuggle 33 people out in the trunk of his car. Then in March 1975 the Stasi tightened up and started checking cars using a transit highway between East and West.
They checked Richter's car at an unfortunate moment. His sister, Elke, then 21, was in the trunk. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison, and served 5 years and 7 months before the federal government bought his freedom. His sister was jailed for 2 years and 2 months.
"I wasn't tortured physically in prison," he said. "In effect, they wrapped their clubs in cotton wool and tried to break my personality. You don't recognize an injured soul as quickly as an injured body."
Richter moved to Bernauer Street "where I could see the wall all the time." He started working with human-rights organizations, advising people on how they could help East Germans escape.
Stasi files are now available to all German citizens who request to see them, and from his own, Richter has learned that the Stasi kept him in their sights through agents in West Berlin. They planted hidden microphones in his apartment, tried to infiltrate his circle of friends and spread rumors he was a dangerous subversive, so that he was repeatedly called in for questioning by West Berlin political police.
On the 20th anniversary of the wall in 1981, he and friends hastily put up a wall around the West Berlin offices of Aeroflot, the Soviet airline.
Later, he put a ladder against the Berlin Wall, climbed up it and used a rope to lasso a mat embedded with nails that the East Germans had put in the death strip to stop any car that might somehow get through.
"The guards pointed their guns at me, but I was pretty certain they wouldn't shoot," he said. "I knew they had to get permission to shoot." He hauled up the mat, and donated it to the Checkpoint Charlie Museum in West Berlin.
After that, he has learned from his Stasi file, the East Germans decided to kill him. A man he knew, who was in the pay of the Stasi, tried to persuade him to steal another nail mat; the guards would be waiting to shoot him. But Richter declined.
Last year Richter lost his job as a caterer for the electrical company Siemens and since then has devoted himself to conducting guided tours in East Berlin and doing research on communist internment camps, sharing his findings with history teachers.
He will soon start work at a church-sponsored documentation center about the wall that is preparing to open on Bernauer Street.
Peter Fechter's story
For West Berliners, one of the most heart-rending casualties of the wall was 18-year-old Peter Fechter. On Aug. 17, 1962, he made a dash for the wall, climbed to the top and was trying to negotiate the barbed wire when a guard shot him. For 50 minutes he lay there, bleeding to death and occasionally crying, "Help me."
West German policemen tried to throw first-aid packets to him. East German guards just stood and watched him. Finally they lifted him down, but it was too late to save him. There is now a memorial to Fechter on Zimmer Street in East Berlin.
Scores of East Germans escaped by tunneling under the wall. The longest of these, nearly 500 feet long and 40 feet below ground, started in an outdoor toilet in an East German back yard and came out in the cellar of a former bakery in Bernauer Street.
Siegfried Noffke, who was in West Berlin when the wall went up, dug a tunnel into the East to rescue his wife and child. But guards shot him dead as he emerged from the tunnel, and two people who helped him were arrested and sentenced to life in prison.
Most tunnels were dug by young people, but in 1962 nine people aged between 55 and 81 succeeded in escaping through a tunnel they built.
Other escapes were more inventive. Two families of eight people built a hot-air balloon 92 feet high, then the largest ever built in Europe. On a night in September 1979 they took off near the border with West Germany. Guards spotted them and turned a searchlight on them, but they climbed quickly to more than 8,500 feet to get out of the range of gunfire. They landed 25 miles away, relieved to find they had come down in the West.
One Austrian man, determined to rescue his fiance and her mother, bought a car in West Berlin that was so low-slung he was able to speed under a border crossing barrier. After an Argentine then followed his example to rescue his own fiance, the East Germans installed vertical bars at the barrier to prevent further such escapes.
Improvisation, then expulsion
In 1984 Inge Albrecht, then 21, was told she would not be allowed to study to become a doctor in East Germany. She suspected it may have been because her father, who had a high position in a state-owned company, had declined to join the Communist Party.
She applied to leave the country, but like most others she was turned down. The authorities were happy to let retired and seriously ill people go, putting the burden of their care on the West German government, but not young, healthy people like Albrecht. The excuse for the refusal was that she was "a carrier of secrets" as an employee of East German Television.
Together with two women friends, aged 21 and 36, Albrecht devised a scheme to get out, along with two children of the older woman. They took tranquilizers to keep themselves calm, then approached the West German diplomatic mission in East Berlin with the intention of getting past East German police and taking refuge inside. When they arrived, two uniformed policemen guarded the entrance, and several plainclothes Stasi officers were circulating in the area. They almost decided to abandon their plan.
But then hundreds of members of the Free Democratic Youth in their blue uniforms walked past on their way to a rally. The women joined the youth, conspicuous by not being in uniform, but Albrecht said the police were too busy ogling the young girls in the march to notice them. Suddenly, as they walked past the door, Albrecht grabbed the hand of her friend's 16-year-old son and ran in with the others running behind her. The boy hesitated at the door and a policeman grabbed him. His mother shouted "Leave my boy alone!" The startled policeman let go of him and he hurried inside.
West German officials tried in vain to persuade the women to leave the mission. The women then discovered that 12 other people had taken refuge earlier and were still there. Later the numbers grew to more than 50--many if not all of the newcomers apparently Stasi members masquerading as people who wanted to leave.
Finally, East German lawyer Wolfgang Vogel, famous for having negotiated several U.S.-Soviet spy exchanges through Berlin, came to the mission. He guaranteed the people inside they would not be arrested if they left and said their applications to leave probably would be approved. A few took up his offer, then phoned from West Berlin to say they had been allowed to leave. After that, everyone departed.
Albrecht went to a friend's house, and almost immediately Stasi officers arrived, informing her she had to leave East Berlin within three hours. They allowed her father to drive her to the Friedrichstrasse station, where those with permits could take a subway to West Berlin.
"That was the first time I saw my father cry," Albrecht said. Aboard the subway train, she too burst into tears. She now works as a producer for Austrian television in West Berlin, and has made a documentary film about her escape.
`Ich bin ein Berliner'
Despite the Kennedy administration's initial acquiescence to the building of the wall, no American politician could publicly appear to condone its existence. Six days after it went up, Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson came to West Berlin and affirmed the determination of the U.S. to defend the freedom of that half of the city.
In June 1963, Kennedy followed, and from the Schoeneberg Town Hall in West Berlin delivered the most famous, if grammatically incorrect, sound bite of the Cold War: "Ich bin ein Berliner" (I am a Berliner).
On June 12, 1987, President Ronald Reagan stood on the same spot and delivered a now-famous challenge to Gorbachev: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall."
In effect, Mr. Gorbachev did.
The death knell for the Berlin Wall was sounded on July 17, 1989, when Hungary lifted its border controls with Austria. A flood of East Germans started crossing into Austria through Hungary.
In the same month, dissident East Germans in Leipzig began gathering nightly at the Nikolai Church to pray for peace, then staging candlelight demonstrations through the streets despite police attempts to break them up.
By September, East Germans were taking refuge in West German embassies in Czechoslovakia and Poland, and gradually were allowed to leave for the West.
Gorbachev came to East Berlin on Oct. 7, 1989, to mark the 40th anniversary of the East German state. East German leader Erich Honecker hoped Gorbachev would use the 325,000 Soviet troops in East Germany to help put down the unrest.
Instead, Gorbachev pulled the rug from under him. "He who acts too late will be punished by history," Gorbachev said in a speech, an unmistakable warning to the regime to change or die. Eleven days later, after a huge demonstration in Leipzig demanding democracy and free elections, Honecker resigned all party and state posts; Egon Krenz was named as his successor.
The pressures on the regime mounted, with more than 500,000 demonstrating in East Berlin on Nov. 4.
The entire government resigned on Nov. 7, and a day later the Communist Party Politburo stepped down en masse. Hans Modrow of Dresden became the new president.
On the afternoon of Nov. 9, Politburo member Guenther Schabowski announced at a news conference that applications for private travel abroad would be accepted and permits would be granted on short notice. The full implication of his announcement was unclear, but soon several hundred persons had flocked to border crossings demanding the right to go across. By late evening, the crowd had grown to scores of thousands.
At that point, authorities bowed to the inevitable. All border crossing points were thrown open, and delirious East and West Berliners joined in a nightlong celebration of freedom that, 11 months later, begat German reunification.
The reverberations of the collapse of the wall reached quickly into all of Eastern Europe. The Czechoslovak communist regime fell within two weeks. Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu was overthrown, and he and his wife executed little more than a month later.
Twenty months later, the Soviet regime that had lasted for 74 years was buried, and the Soviet empire broke apart.
Border guards' fate
Christoph Schaefgen has had to deal with the terrible legacy of the wall. A Berlin prosecutor, he heads a team that investigated 22,854 people in East Germany who were involved in the building of the wall and the crimes that resulted from it. So far 335 have been convicted, most of them placed on probation, and 135 cases are still open. Only 15 people have gone to prison, and the longest sentence, 7 1/2 years, was given to former Defense Minister Heinz Kessler.
Not one of the border guards who shot fleeing people has gone to prison. Under German law, Schaefgen said, guards who carry out orders cannot be held to account unless it can be proved they were aware their orders were illegal.
"Because they didn't realize they were violating international law, they got milder sentences," he said. "I think it is good we have acted according to existing law. If we had created a new law, the reproach that we were carrying out victor's justice would have been stronger, and it might even have been true."
The border guard who shot Peter Fechter and watched him die on the wall, escaped prison on these grounds: He couldn't influence the time it took for an ambulance to arrive. Fechter would have died even if he had been given prompt treatment. Border guards were afraid they would be shot by angry people on the West Berlin side of the wall if they had gone to Fechter.
Erich Honecker escaped justice because he was suffering from liver cancer and was allowed to go to Chile, where he died. "It would have been better if we could have convicted him," Schaefgen said. "But it was impossible under German law, so I can live with it."
Erich Mielke, head of the Stasi, was spared a trial on grounds he was too ill. He is still alive, and Schaefgen commented with some asperity: "If the former Communists keep gaining ground, as they have been doing in the east, he will be given a state funeral."
A house still divided
The wall may be gone, but not the psychological walls that grew up between east and west Germans. The two halves of the reunited Germany of 82 million people have little time for each other.
Many "Wessies"--westerners-- tend to look upon the easterners--"Ossies"--as backward, lazy and poorly educated. The Ossies see the Wessies as arrogant, grasping and unwilling to admit any of the East's achievements.
Underlying these mutual resentments are the fact that, despite more than $55 billion of government money poured into eastern recovery, Germans in the east are twice as likely to be jobless as their western brethren, and the pay levels of those who work remain far behind those in the west.
The former Communist Party, now called the Party of Democratic Socialism, has pushed the governing Social Democrats into third place in some states and recently took 41 percent of the vote in East Berlin.
In a recent poll, 40 percent of west Germans said they had not set foot in eastern Germany since the collapse of communism.
In another, 20 percent of east Germans said they wished the wall were still standing.
Von Prof. L. Kirkendall am Dienstag, den 26. Juni, 2001 - 14:01:
Prof. L. Kirkendall, 2001
Von Lester Kirkendall am Dienstag, den 26. Juni, 2001 - 13:59:
Veröffentlicht im Herbst 1961 in einer amerikanischen Lokalzeitung des Staates Oregon (USA).
The Wall I have been to Berlin; I have seen the Wall. It looks exactly as pictures had led me to expect it would. It is a barrier of concrete blocks or bricks, of varying height and of rough workman-ship, separating East Berlin from West Berlin; that is all it is. Yet standing at the food of the infamous thing it suddenly becomes much more than any pictures could ever make it seem.
It is a symbol of the division into two parts of a world which as far as transportation, communication, and the movement of people is concerned is really one world. It typifies the conflict in two approaches to life, and also the disaster which can come when governments cannot reconcile their differences.
The thing that was most vivid for me was the conflict in emotions and feeling that engulfs one as one is at the Wall. As you stand back and try to look at it objectively the impulse is to laugh at the ridiculousness and absurdity of what you see. It is plain farce.
But as one tries to comprehend what one is really seeing – what the reality of the thing is, one wants to cry. It is sheer tragedy.
For example, at points the Wall of an apartment house has become the Wall itself. At these places the windows of these houses, even when they are six or seven stories high have been tightly bricked, so that no one can pass through them and leap to the street and freedom. I saw one tree with high limbs over- reaching the Wall. The trunk of this tree had been surrounded with poles which were ten feet high and looped with barbed wire. Thus no one could climb the tree and get over the Wall.
…
At Potsdamer Plaza the East-German government has erected a battery of loud speakers which can be used to blare its messages across the Wall. Just across from this battery and on its side the West Berlin government has erected a large electric light sign (similar to the one on the New York Times building in Times Square) across which lighted letters move. This is the West Berlin way of countering the loud speakers. When I was at the Plaza the speakers were silent, but the electric sign was conveying to the East Berliners the news of Russia’s latest series of nuclear tests in the atmosphere. Again the comic tragedy !
The Wall is still being built. It is being lengthened, and today one of the Berlin papers carried a photograph showing a second Wall being built some yards behind a certain section of the original Wall.
There is more to be said, but I will leave this for another time
Lester Kirkendall