The Berlin Wall

August 13, 1961 - November 9, 1989

Frederick Taylor

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780062985873
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia alemana

"This vivid account of the Wall and all that it meant reminds us that symbolism can be double-edged, as a potent emblem of isolation and repression became, in its destruction, an even more powerful totem of freedom."— The Atlantic Monthly

NOW WITH AN UPDATED EPILOGUE 30 YEARS AFTER THE FALL OF THE WALL

On the morning of August 13, 1961, the residents of East Berlin found themselves cut off from family, friends, and jobs in the West by a tangle of barbed wire that ruthlessly split a city of four million in two. Within days the barbed-wire entanglement would undergo an extraordinary metamorphosis: it became an imposing 103-mile-long wall guarded by three hundred watchtowers. A physical manifestation of the struggle between Soviet Communism and American capitalism that stood for nearly thirty years, the Berlin Wall was the high-risk fault line between East and West on which rested the fate of all humanity.

In the definitive history on the subject, Frederick Taylor weaves together official history, archival materials, and personal accounts to tell the complete story of the Wall's rise and fall.

Cement

12

Wall Games

TWO DAYS AFTER THE closure of the border, a young man reported for duty on the Eastern side of the divide. Just twenty-one, Private Hagen Koch was a fresh-faced, newly married soldier in the East German army, the NVA.

Koch, born in the historic Thuringian town of Zerbst, was at that time a true believer. He had joined the SED at the age of nineteen. After completing an apprenticeship in technical drawing, he succumbed to strong peer and employer pressure and volunteered for the East German military. Due to his perceived political reliability, he was selected for the élite so-called ‘Felix Dzerzhyski Guard Regiment’ in Berlin – the military arm of the Stasi. Because of his skills in draughtsmanship, he was assigned to its mapping department.¹

Koch’s service in Berlin brought him a wife, and increased his attachment to the Communist system. Even more, it increased his resentment against young people of his own age who lived in East Berlin but worked in West Berlin – sometimes part time and at weekends. They could earn 5 marks an hour in the West, which because of the unofficial 5:1 exchange rate, gave them 25 East German marks. So, for an afternoon’s work, such a ‘border-crosser’ could earn 100 East marks, which happened to equal an army private’s entire weekly salary. The ‘border-crossers’ flashed their money around, wore the latest Western fashions, and mocked those like young Koch, who existed on meagre Communist pittances.

So, when the border was closed on 13 August, Private Koch supported it with enthusiasm. ‘The measures’ would finally settle the hash of those kids who made, to his mind, a despicable profit out of living in a heavily subsidised socialist state while working in a dog-eat-dog capitalist one. Call it fair-mindedness or call it envy.

On 12/13 August 1961, Koch had been granted a rare weekend leave. He and his bride realised something was going on during Sunday morning, when they observed the first disturbances on the border. Koch was recalled to his unit, but it was not until 15 August that he was given a job. That job would make him rather famous. Or notorious. Again, depending on your point of view.

Around dawn on Tuesday, the young private was summoned to his commander and told to report to the East-West border. The staff responsible for the border closure was carrying out an initial inspection. Koch’s task would be to accompany them and ‘document the state of the extension of the border fortification works on topographical maps’. ²

Koch got a new pair of boots, for this was going to be a long walk – most of the fifty or so kilometres from Pankow-Schönholz in the north to Alt-Glienicke in the far south-east. The hardest parts were places like the Bernauer Strasse, where only the buildings sat on GDR territory, while the pavements were already in the West. But Koch persevered, painstakingly drawing his maps on a folding portable table. The survey team made good progress, sometimes ferried short distances by jeep. They had covered twenty kilometres by early afternoon. Koch’s senior companions changed from section to section; but the conscientious young private with his instruments, his drawing materials and his folding table remained a constant factor.

At around three p.m., the mapping party arrived in the old centre of Berlin.

There was now barbed wire all along the Zimmerstrasse leading to the crossing point known as ‘Checkpoint Charlie’, which since Sunday was reserved only for foreigners. Coming from the Potsdamer Platz, the party cut down the Mauerstrasse (literally ‘Wall Street’, named after the eighteenth-century customs wall) and arrived at the checkpoint in time to witness a large and noisy demonstration on the West Berlin side. Koch’s superiors, superior Stasi men as they were, took offence at the Western ‘provocation’. Something had to be done.

Soon Koch found himself with new orders. The ‘aggressive forces of imperialism’, he was told by an officer, had to be shown the limits of their malign power. The 21-year-old picked up a can of white paint and a brush and found the exact line of the border, which followed that between the boroughs of Mitte in the East and Kreuzberg in the West.

Starting at the pharmacy on the corner of Zimmerstrasse and Friedrichstrasse, and ignoring yells and catcalls from the Western side, Koch straddled the border. Bending to his work, he painted a precise white line to show the ‘imperialists’ where East Berlin began. Then he marched smartly back to join the mapping party.

By the end of that long summer’s day, Private Hagen Koch’s task would be complete, his feet thoroughly sore, and the ‘white line’ he had painted at Checkpoint Charlie on 15 August 1961 would be world-famous.

Just minutes later, a couple of kilometres to the north, another guardian of the GDR’s borders was carrying out his duties. Corporal Conrad Schumann stood just inside East Berlin, on the corner of Bernauer Strasse and Ruppiner Strasse, facing a jeering group of West Berliners. In parts of Bernauer Strasse, concrete slabs had been positioned to block escape routes, but at this time nothing more formidable than a three-feet-high roll of barbed wire stood between this inexperienced, unhappy young child of the SED state and the Western ‘enemy’.

Schumann, a nineteen-year-old Saxon fresh from NCO training school, had been drafted into the élite ‘Readiness Police’ and was one of 4,000 provincials who had volunteered for transfer to Berlin. When his unit first arrived just a few days earlier, he had been shocked to find that they were regarded with suspicion by East Berliners. Schumann remained in a confused and uneasy state, unsettled by the border closure and the ensuing events.

‘The people were swearing at us,’ Schumann explained later.

We felt we were simply doing our duty but were getting scolded from all sides. The West Berliners yelled at us and the Eastern demonstrators yelled at us. We stood in the middle . . . For a young person, it was terrible.³

Schumann’s discomfort was all too apparent. The young East German NCO was standing against a house wall, his machine-pistol slung over his shoulder. He chain-smoked, glancing occasionally in the direction of the Western protesters, mostly young men of his own age. They could read the doubt and indecision written on his face. Some stopped abusing him and started encouraging him to desert. ‘Come over!’ they called out. ‘Come over!’

A rookie photojournalist from Hamburg, Peter Leibing – a year older than Schumann and in Berlin for less than twenty-four hours – was also watching.

‘I had him in my sights for more than hour,’ Leibing recalled. ‘I had a feeling he was going to jump. It was kind of an instinct.’⁴

The urging from the Western side grew louder. A West Berlin police car drove up and stood with its rear door open and its engine racing. ‘Come over! Come over!’

Schumann suddenly tossed away his cigarette and ran for the wire, casting aside his heavy weapon as he reached the barrier and jumped for the Western side.

Leibing’s famous photograph – taken, ironically, with an East German Exacta camera – immortalises that extraordinary moment. The helmeted and jackbooted Schumann is captured in mid-leap atop the barbed wire, his young face immobile with concentration, symbolically overcoming this artificial and inhumane division and yet, for those of us who still look at the picture, frozen for ever between East and West.

‘I had learned how to do it at the Jump Derby in Hamburg,’ Leibing explained. ‘You have to photograph the horse when it leaves the ground and catch it as it clears the barrier. And then he came. I pressed the shutter and it was all over.’

It is the picture of a lifetime, taken right at the beginning of a young photographer’s career. All the more remarkable because his camera had no motor-drive. It was the only image Leibing had time to shoot.

Within hours the photograph appeared on the front of page of Bild. It found its way into scores of newspapers throughout the world and remains an iconic image.

Less famous – though in its way more revealing – is the photograph Leibing took of young Schumann once he got out of the police car in West Berlin. Bare-headed and with his collar loosened, Schumann looks suddenly like a bewildered small-town teenager, a little frightened and shocked at his own temerity and the attention it has suddenly brought him in a world he doesn’t yet understand.

The two images gave the world two views of the GDR’s youthful servants. One, the obedient Private Koch, ‘drawing the line’ of history; the other of the reluctant dissident, Corporal Schumann, who crossed it in one great, eternally remembered ‘leap to freedom’.

All Schumann ever said, then or later, was that he hadn’t wanted to shoot anyone. Going West was a way of avoiding a moral dilemma. Western interrogators were astonished at how poorly prepared the East German Vopos were from a psychological point of view. Schumann was the first ‘deserter’ but by no means the last. During these first thirty-six hours, nine more border guards would flee to the West, jumping the wire, crawling under it, or in one case scaling a factory wall.

Koch, by contrast, never had to worry about the kind of stuff that disturbed soldiers on the ‘sharp end’. He was a privileged ‘back-room’ type, who spent the rest of that afternoon – while the bewildered Schumann was adjusting to a double-edged fame in the West – travelling onward, by boat and foot and jeep to the southernmost limit of the sector border. His main concern was resting his blistered feet, the result of taking that long, long hike in his smart (but tight) new boots.

The result of the inspection tour in which Koch took part was to define the border, and the result of that definition was the building of a more permanent structure, the so-called ‘extension of the military engineering measures’.

At 1.30 a.m. in the morning of Friday 18 August, six crane trucks arrived on Potsdamer Platz, Berlin’s Piccadilly Circus or Columbus Circle, south of the Brandenburg Gate. They unloaded dozens of concrete slabs of the kind hitherto used at checkpoints to control traffic. Some forty minutes later, a column of fire engines, concrete mixers, and a ‘work brigade’ of bricklayers arrived. Guarded by Vopos, they began to build a barrier across the entire square. Shortly after five, as dawn broke, they withdrew, leaving a concrete wall topped by two rows of cavity blocks, altogether just over five feet high, topped by metal staples suitable for the threading of barbed wire. At one point, this Wall (it feels legitimate to capitalise it from now on) ran inches from an entrance to the Potsdamer Platz subway station, one of the few on the Western side. West Berlin police and early commuters watched in astonishment.

Of course, the big station below the Potsdamer Platz was closed, though subway trains still passed through without stopping on a line that emerged from West Berlin, going north through East Berlin, and then went back into the West again. Passengers noticed armed and uniformed Trapos on the underground platforms. No civilians were to be seen. The other former trans-sector subway line through Potsdamer Platz, running West to East, was now truncated in the East and started at Otto-Grotewohl-Strasse.⁵ It ended on the Western side at Gleisdreieck, a few hundred metres short of where it would once have crossed the sector boundary or – before 1945 – crossed no meaningful boundary at all.

So the lifelines of old Berlin were cut. Hagen Koch’s white line, a piece of local defiance by a keen Communist officer, was like the indicator mark for a surgical operation. It told the world that the nerve network of a great city, which carried buses and trains, sewers and telephone lines, was to be sliced, snipped and capped.

Berlin was a city of steel, stone, brick and wood. It was not alive in the literal sense, so it could not bleed or feel pain. But its people lived, and they felt intensely.

The day after a Wall first appeared across Potsdamer Platz, President Kennedy’s high-level representatives arrived in West Berlin.

Forty-eight hours before, Vice-President Johnson had been sitting in a restaurant in Washington, bitterly bemoaning attempts to wrench him from his familiar political habitat. Now the tough Texan was landing at Tempelhof Airport in an airforce Lockheed Constellation on the afternoon of Saturday 19 August 1961, bracing himself to play a game in which an extraordinary variety of roles was demanded of him: protector and admonisher, idealist and realist, cheerleader and diplomat.

The Vice-President and General Clay had first flown across the Atlantic in a Boeing 707. They were accompanied by a high-powered State Department party that included Charles Bohlen and various highups from the German Department (including Frank Cash and Karl Mautner) plus Johnson’s press assistant, George Reedy, and Jay Gildner of the US Information Agency. There were also some young women, inducted at Johnson’s insistence for stenographic purposes, and a press party that included Marguerite Higgins. The ‘Berlin Mafia’ was strongly represented.⁶

The story went that the normally quite reticent Clay spent the trip telling stories about his experiences in ‘beating’ Stalin during the blockade and emphasising how tough they had to be with Russians now, just as they had been then. If Truman had allowed him to send an armoured column down the autobahn in ‘48, then the whole airlift wouldn’t have been necessary. In fact, they could probably have avoided the Korean War into the bargain. If, Clay maintained, he were president, he would tear the Wall down right away. And, just as in 1948 ‘Chip’ Bohlen had opposed fighting for Berlin, so now, in the cabin of the 707, he interjected that this sounded to him like a pretty good way to start World War Three. Plus ça change . . .

Unusually for Johnson, he did a lot of listening during that journey.⁷

They didn’t fly directly to Berlin. Protocol considerations and 1960s technical limitations demanded a stopover at the Bonn/Cologne Airport. Here they were received by the American ambassador, Mr Dowling, and the West German Foreign Minister, Dr Heinrich von Brentano. This group accompanied them into Bonn, the modest university town where the West German government had been housed since 1949. There would be discussions and lunch with Chancellor Adenauer.⁸

The time since 13 August had not been Adenauer’s finest hour. Far from leaping on a plane to Berlin, the Chancellor had merely carried on with his duties and his election speeches. Some of the public had started to ask why he hadn’t visited Berlin in its hour of need. By way of contrast, since 13 August Brandt had achieved an uncomfortable amount of television and press exposure. Almost a week after the border was closed, Adenauer was finally persuaded by his aides that he had been a little ...