The Wall

The People's Story

Christopher Hilton

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780752458335
• eBook ISBN: 9780752466989
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: German History
• Index: History

For almost three decades, the Cold War was focused on Berlin, where the two (nuclear-armed) sides were kept apart by a twelve-foot wall, which had appeared almost overnight in August 1961. For a generation, until its fall in November 1989, it not only divided the city of Berlin, but also symbolised the confrontation between capitalist West and socialist East.

In this astonishing book, journalist Christopher Hilton has collected together the individual stories of those whose lives it affected, including international politicians, American and British soldiers, East German border guards and, most importantly, the citizens of Berlin itself, West and East. Weaving their memories together into a remarkable narrative, this is the extraordinarily vivid, occasionally harrowing and often touching story of a city divided, and of how it affected the lives of real people.

FOUR

First Week of the Rest of Your Life

When will they ever learn,

When will they ever learn?

Pete Seeger,
Where have all the flowers gone?^*

That Sunday afternoon, a small boy in a cardigan, arms upraised, beseeched that he be allowed to cross, and a policeman adjusted the top of the wire so that he could. The policeman’s head twisted away to see if anyone was watching him – someone was, and he was arrested immediately.

Another fixed image, taken quite passively, was of two soldiers positioned at a broad crossroads beside a lamppost and a litter bin, with a rambling web of the wire in front of them. Behind, a crowd lingered on the pavement not daring to go near. They formed the eternal backdrop of history, curious and uncomprehending.

At another place, where the wire hadn’t yet reached, a Western motorist emerged from his car, advanced and an Eastern policeman pushed him in the chest. A soldier, bayonet fixed to the barrel of his rifle, prodded it towards the motorist. The portals of a tall, broad church loomed behind all this, eternal against the foibles of men. Was the motorist going there to worship, as he always had, and now found his church in another, forbidden, country?

Two soldiers faced a crowd at a crossroads while a third had gone among the people to silence or intimidate them. Beyond the crowd, two elderly women in summer frocks chatted, arms folded. The other part of their own street was less than 40 metres away and now it, too, was in another, forbidden, country.

Two Factory Fighters in shirt sleeves walked with a coil of the wire wrapped in a ball round a stout stick, a Fighter holding each end of the stick. As they walked, the wire automatically uncoiled and another Fighter, kneeling, lifted a strand of it and hammered it into a concrete post using cleats, gathered another strand and hammered that in, then another – row upon row, neatly spaced – until the wire was head high.

An elderly couple were escorted from the wire by a policeman, the sadness and the powerlessness expressed by the stoop of their shoulders.

A family of four smiled and smiled and explained how they’d managed to scramble over because some incident diverted the police.

An Eastern policeman said to a photographer: ‘This is Free Berlin, taking photographs is not allowed here.’

On a street bisected by knee-high wire, people milled on both sides. In the East, a young man had his hands in his pockets; nearby, a plump woman held a baby and two women stood next to her. A policeman strode by, automatic rifle on his back. On the Western side, a very young girl wearing a frock trampled the wire down with her foot, presumably to step over it. Her mother, one of the two women standing together, scolded her for risking tearing the frock. A man in shirt sleeves went by on the Western side and made a joke so that suddenly everyone was laughing. Did the child step over? Did the mother step over? Did the policeman stride back and hold them apart? The moving camera had stopped filming by then, and what it had taken would be developed, carefully printed, fixed into the montage but giving only the present, not past, not future.

‘Toasts of good luck were drunk by some of the East Germans who arrived in West Berlin but some women in Marienfelde wept quietly’, Kellett-Long filed to Reuters. ‘They said they waited in vain for husbands or children who had arranged to cross by another route for safety.’

At 5.52 p.m., a report to Police Headquarters noted ‘several young people rampaging near the National Council building but armoured cars dispersing them’. At 6.00, a police radio car announced, ‘About 300 people are at the Unter den Linden– Friedrichstrasse intersection but do not show any negative attitude. Eighty per cent of them dispersed by the Factory Fighting Groups at 6.05 and the dispersing is being continued.’ The Brandenburg Gate remained a place of potential insurrection, and that gave the Unter den Linden a particular importance.

Several reporters saw the dispersal at the intersection, Kellett-Long among them. ‘A line of ten steel-helmeted black-booted policemen with rifles slightly down but at the ready faced the silent crowd. The atmosphere was tense in the centre of the crowd for a moment, but people gradually began to drift away while others took their place, and the moment was gone. The police, who also carried their usual pistols, were especially armed with automatic rifles.’

A New York Times reporter sensed ‘a note of fury building up. Hundreds of young men moved down Unter den Linden. Two troop carriers drew up to reinforce the police. A line of rifles was raised slightly towards the crowd who made a slow backward movement.’

A report to Police Headquarters said ‘security forces and water cannon deployed in the passage under the Brandenburg Gate by 6.20. The water cannons are not in action.’

Armoured cars, which had arrived earlier, moved fractionally through the Gate. A long cordon of men from six different services – the six to demonstrate solidarity – arranged themselves shoulder to shoulder in front of the armoured cars because the sector line bulged there. One of these men, a Factory Fighter, wore his uniform but white socks and sandals, betraying the haste in which he had come.

The sector boundary was a white line painted across the roadway but none of the uniformed men in the cordon put a boot – or a sandal – on it; they stayed fractionally behind. Above them, by the old stone charioteer on top of the Gate, a soldier with field glasses scanned a British Military Police jeep parked 100 metres away. The officer behind the jeep’s steering wheel spoke into a walkie-talkie. A helicopter from the West skimmed by far overhead and banked, monitoring.

The GDR did not pass up a chance to fix images. From their side a photographer moved behind the cordon and took a picture through it so that the cordon appeared as a protective bastion against the threatening mob of Westerners in the distance who bayed abuse, shook their fists and chanted. A middle-aged man, seeing this Eastern camera recording him, cupped his face in a hand to mask it. Did he have relatives over there, did he fear retribution being visited upon them if he was recognised? Was he from over there and he’d made it? The images posed questions as well as answered them.

Kellett-Long saw ‘a working party of police erecting six-foot high concrete posts for a wire fence across open ground in Potsdamer Platz and then the Brandenburg Gate’. The noose was still tightening. A crane with a grab would clear this obstruction away in a straight-forward demolition job – but this would be on Sunday 12 November 1989.

At 6.10 p.m., a report to Police Headquarters said a West Berlin senator would make a speech at the Potsdamer Platz at 7.00 – a possible incitement to insurrection. A reserve Factory Fighting Group of 162, stationed just off the Unter den Linden, was dispatched to cover that and, at the same time, an order went out to deploy water cannons in Potsdamer Platz. At 6.20, the Factory Fighters cleared the road between the Brandenburg Gate and Potsdamer Platz – ‘No people gathered on the western side at the moment but several little groups in West Berlin.’

At 6.30, a report from Treptow said young Westerners had trampled the barbed wire. Another from nearby announced that ‘Citizens can still go to West Berlin unhindered. The situation cannot be changed with our own forces. Measures will be taken.’ The noose had not tightened there yet.

At 6.40: ‘The situation at Potsdamer Platz is unchanged as a whole although West Berlin television has put up a second camera.’

Two minutes later, a report noted ‘about 500 persons gathered at Wollankstrasse, mostly young and undisciplined. Two platoons of Factory Fighters and one platoon of police brought into action.’ Five minutes later, the number on the Western side grew towards 800. They shouted across, ‘Have you a ticket for the Walter Ulbricht Stadium [a few streets away]? They’re showing the last piece of butter there.’

At 6.50, a report from Treptow said a crowd of 150 in the West and 100 in the East ‘whistled from both sides’ and a battalion of Factory Fighters ‘normalised the situation’.

Peter Johnson of Reuters spent ‘much of the evening on different sides of the Brandenburg Gate. On the Western side a crowd of several thousand collected and for a time got partially out of hand because the West Berlin police precautions had not been strong enough. Some groups made dashes onto the road in front of the Gate – the road itself was East German territory – and were driven back by water cannons mounted on armoured cars. [These were the ones deployed at 6.20.] Later, the police confined these people behind ropes. A section of the crowd, perhaps two or three hundred strong and composed mainly of teddy-boy-type youths, shouted rhythmically such slogans as “Berlin stays free” and “Away with the Goatee Beard”— Herr Walter Ulbricht, the East German leader, sported one.

‘A British Army Corporal keeping watch in a radio jeep was critical of the West Berliners who, he said, were causing the tense situation at this spot. The left-wing Social Democratic Mayor of the [Western] district of Kreuzberg asked a police officer to move back the crowd to reduce the danger of a clash. One police officer, I was told, said that a member of the West Berlin Senate had been on the spot and said, “Let the people stay, it’s good like that.” While I fully understand genuine feelings of anger at the East German action, I think it is wrong to let it be manifested in this dangerous way and mainly by a lot of louts who have little political sense anyway.’¹

Mary Kellett-Long noted in her diary that ‘later in the evening big crowds gathered at the Brandenburg Gate at both sides and reinforcements were called in and water cannons used and someone threw a Molotov cocktail. Eventually everything quietened down without any serious incidents.’ She added: ‘I’ve been worrying about the Berlin crisis ever since we came here but, funnily enough, apart from about five minutes I’ve been quite calm and relaxed. What is the point of worrying really? If there is a war we shall be as safe here as anywhere because both the Allies and the Russians have great numbers of troops. My own feeling is that there will be no war.’

The water cannon were framed into the images: a youth rushed forward to throw the Molotov cocktail and long jets of spray from the nozzle of the cannon engulfed him; someone else rushed forward and turned at the furthest limit of the spray then scampered back with his arm raised in the most temporal triumph.

Westerners called out, ‘Why don’t you go and dig your own graves?’

Round the House of Ministries, six tanks, three armoured cars and six trucks filled with troops stood guard. ‘The helmeted tank drivers were perched in open turrets ready for action.’²

At Hyannis Port, Kennedy cruised gently on the Marlin. It’s worth restating at least one of the reasons why he did not return to the White House. As Frank Cash says:

Berlin was a very special place, the only cosmopolitan city in West Germany. Munich might be big, Stuttgart might be big, Hamburg and Frankfurt might be big but none of them were the cosmopolitan centre which Berlin remained even though cut off from the West. I think Kennedy thought those who worked in the Mission and those of us in the State Department working on Berlin over-emphasised its importance, but to us it was the crucial point of confrontation between East and West. Perhaps we were gung-ho about it although, incidentally, nobody in the Department recommended knocking the wall down.

Kennedy never really committed himself to the whole of Berlin and you’ll notice that all of his statements emphasise West Berlin. He constantly said, ‘We will maintain our rights in West Berlin and our access to West Berlin.’ Prior to that we, the Department, used the term Berlin because we felt that as an administrative area our rights were in the whole city. I think Kennedy felt if West Berlin was secure that was the main objective.³

The possibility that access might be cut in a second phase of the wall operation concerned Kennedy a great deal, but what could th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Contents
• Quote
• List of Maps
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue
• One: Fault Line
• Two: Saturday Night
• Three: And Sunday Morning
• Four: First Week of the Rest of Your Life
• Five: Cold as Ice
• Six: The Strangeness
• Seven: The Bullet Run
• Eight: Thaw
• Nine: A Quiet Night Like This
• Ten: Dawn
• Eleven: Pieces
• Epilogue: Corridor of Emptiness
• Notes
• Bibliography
• The Death Strip: The Toll
• Copyright