The Wall was put up 45 years ago today, an event that seemed to define the Cold War. I lived in Berlin for a few years, starting in 1988; to me the concept of a city belonging to West Germany being in the middle of East Germany surrounded by a system of walls purposefully designed to make it easy to shoot people trying to cross was profoundly unnatural. For those Germans who’d been born (as I had) since the building of the Wall, it was natural, it was what they’d always known. I remember long discussions with friends early in 1989, as the Communist systems started to wobble and crumble, whether and when East and West Germany could become one again. As late as June 1989 it wasn’t at all something that people allowed themselves to believe in. Most people I talked to seemed to think the Allies (the US, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and France, the four “winning powers”) wouldn’t allow Germany to ever again be a large, powerful country. And indeed it took a lot of discussion before the four powers would allow the reunification of Germany, under the Two plus Four Contract.
The Wall evokes mixed emotions. In the West it was, of course, seen as unambiguously bad, stopping people leaving East Germany and separating families. When I talked to some people from East Germany around the time it fell (November 9, 1989) they said at the time it was built the Wall was a necessity to give their fledging state a chance of survival. Too many hard-working people with skills and ambition had left the country and they needed to keep those who were left. Their view was that eventually East Germany would be a socially fair, prosperous country, if only it could have a fair chance. And, from what I’ve heard, in the decade after the Wall was built, life did get better. Walter Ulbricht, the leader of the country at the time, was said to remain in touch with the people, to go to the pub with his mates, and to genuinely want what was best for his country under the circumstances. Later on the political leaders were more adept at living the good lives themselves than they were at procuring them for the rest of the population, with their villas and parties with food and drink unobtainable by normal people. I’m not going to go into the economic problems of East Germany here, there were lots, but suffice to say that by the end of the 1980s East Germany was not prosperous. West Germans and foreigners could visit East Berlin on exchange of 25 Deutschmark for 25 East German Marks; this was deemed to be an entrance fee by many Westerners and there was quite a debate about whether people should visit or whether that money was just propping up the East German regime. But I digress.
Many people ask why the West Germans didn’t just tear down the Wall? One reason was that the Wall was built completely on East German territory, sufficiently back from the legal border that nobody could claim it encroached on any part of West Germany or West Berlin (which legally had a different status to the rest of West Germany). Another was that even at the time I was in Berlin, there was a definite feeling of being occupied. I worked at the Hahn-Meitner Institut in Wannsee, near the south-west border of West Berlin, in the American zone. It was not uncommon to see American soldiers in full battle gear with machine guns running around the streets on some exercise; they seldom bothered to learn any German and I remember being at a kebab stand watching the American soldiers bark orders at the Turkish server/cook in American English in such thick accents and so fast that I had difficulty understanding them. Then there was the less definable feeling of guilt, the feeling that this separation was some part of the punishment that Germans had to suffer in order to atone (if only in part) for what had happened during the second World War.
Most people in West Berlin learned to live in the presence of the Wall, although many couldn’t and fled to West Germany. Many people died (Peter Fechter was the most famous), many families were ripped apart, for a Wall that was gone, along with the system that created it, 30 years later.
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I don’t know how I missed your blog before, but wonderful. There’s a piece of the wall in Microsoft’s main conference center. It always seemed a bit too in place there for me.
I remember in high school that I never thought I’d see a world without the wall, though.
I could have got lots of pieces of the Wall while living in Berlin of course; there were literally tons of it lying around near where I lived in Spandau. They remind me too much of the many people who died trying to get across that Wall, so that’s one souvenir I did without.
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