Authors: Frederick Taylor
Breakfast time found Till’s Communist uncle more subdued than usual. ‘Is there going to be a war?’ Till asked. The older man had no clear answer. Both of them were wondering how young Till was going to get back to his mother.
The uncle switched frantically between RIAS and East German radio, trying to make sense of what had happened at the sector border during the night. The Politburo and its servants rarely, in their public pronouncements, referred to a ‘wall’ or anything similar. The preferred euphemism was the bland phrase ‘Measures for carrying out the decision of the council of ministers of 12.8.1961’. It made interpreting what was actually going on a little hard.
‘Yes, it’s certainly a serious situation,’ he announced, finally hitting on an appropriately grave tone. ‘Obviously, our state is no longer prepared to allow the West to keep plundering the GDR.’
He had now figured our the political aspect to his own satisfaction. But what to do? He told his nephew to pack his things. In the meantime, he would call his party friends in Berlin to see how things really stood.
To ring Berlin entailed an hour’s trek to the nearest phone and back. While his uncle was away, Till packed his red-checked duffle bag, then sat down and listened to the radio. There were crowds assembling on the Potsdamer Platz and in front of the Brandenburg Gate, tanks in the back streets, and barriers being erected on the rail tracks in the north of Berlin. Waiting anxiously for his uncle’s return, Till stepped outside into the lakeside greenery, but heard only the distant quack of ducks, the wind in the trees, the twitter of the birds. The dramatic scenario outlined on the radio seemed to belong in another world.
Around one that afternoon his uncle reappeared, looking far from happy. He had no idea, he said, what was going to happen next. The best thing would be if Till got going as soon as possible and just went back home as he had come—by a combination of ferry, bus and S-Bahn. And no dilly-dallying.
So the teenager began his journey back (he hoped) to the West. The route was quite lengthy. Over on the ferry to the far shore, then a fifteen-minute walk, carrying his stuff, to the bus station in Ransdorf; followed by twenty minutes on a bus to the S-Bahn station. Already, on the platform of this usually quiet suburban stop, Till noticed a lot of people waiting apprehensively for the westbound train. Many, like him, were Westerners, caught here while on weekend visits to families or friends.
Once the train arrived, it was eighteen stops on the east-west line to the Ostkreuz junction. Here Till changed on to a line that usually took him straight over the border into West Berlin. There were many worried, bad-tempered people on this train; a grumpy old man, a blonde woman with children who kept bursting into tears and wondering if the kids would ever see their grandparents again.
At Treptower Park, last stop before West Berlin, instead of a loudspeaker warning the passengers: ‘Achtung! You are now leaving the Democratic Sector of Berlin!’, the train stopped with a peculiarly final clunk. Then came an announcement that no one had heard before: ‘End of the Line! End of the Line! The train ends here!’
The passengers emerged warily on to the platform. Black-uniformed
Trapos
bawled at the Easterners to go about their business, the Westerners to proceed to the crossing point at Harzer Strasse, where if their papers were in order they would be permitted to enter West Berlin.
Everyone stumbled in that direction with their luggage, as instructed. The old man from the train, obviously a Westerner, was among those who made their way, sweating in the August heat, several blocks to the designated crossing point. As they came within sight of the new barbedwire barrier, the old man extracted from his bag a couple of East German sausages, which he tossed furtively into the front garden of a nearby apartment block.
‘Don’t want to give them an excuse to arrest me for smuggling,’ he muttered.
Crowds of East Berliners milled at a safe distance from the armed border guards and the barbed wire, discussing the situation. The Westerners kept their heads down. They could see people leaning out of the windows of apartment blocks in the East, some out on their balconies, many calling over to the Western side—just a couple of hundred yards away—or waving handkerchiefs.
Approaching the crossing point, Till spotted tanks of the East German People’s Army parked discreetly to the left and right of the border approaches, their turret guns pointed westwards. In the actual area of the border stood heavily armed men in steel helmets, who looked as if they meant business. Construction workers were already busy at the sector border, drilling holes for concrete posts to be inserted into the cobbled street.
On arrival at the barbed wire, the Westerners showed their identity cards to the armed border police. It was a tense moment. The young guards were just as nervous as they were. However, once their ID was accepted the crude barrier was eased apart and they were let through into West Berlin.
It still felt somewhat primitive, the whole new control arrangement. A clumsy, uncertain beginning to something that would one day be far more malevolently sophisticated and permanent. What they were creating here would become a symbol for the world of division and cruelty, but not yet.
On the Western side, in the Harzer Strasse, groups of youths had gathered. They worked off their frustration by bawling insults at the Eastern guards, and chanting slogans: ‘Down with the pointy beard! Ulbricht, Murderer! Budapest! Budapest! Budapest!’
Eastern guards and Western demonstrators were roughly the same age.
Till did not turn around. He kept walking until he got to the next S-Bahn station in the West Berlin borough of Kreuzberg. From there he took a train to Friedenau, where his mother was waiting anxiously for him.
Also on the green edge of East Berlin, a young man a couple of years Till’s senior was likewise holed up in a country cottage. Unlike Till, he was an East Berliner, though one of a rather complicated sort. And also unlike Till, he was in the full glorious flower of his first grown-up love affair.
Klaus Schulz-Ladegast was nineteen years old and thinking about his future: that is, his planned studies, which he hoped to commence this coming winter, and besides that the life he had in mind with his new girlfriend, with whom he was spending the weekend
À deux
. They too had listened to the radio and realised something big was happening. But, being in love and feeling that nothing could hurt them, they joked about it. Oh no, he said. I won’t be able to get the Roth-Händle (strong West German cigarettes) that I like to smoke. Even worse, she countered, this is the end of my supply of decent stockings from West Berlin.
Klaus’s background was unusual. His father, a former army officer, was also a leading lay official in the Lutheran Church in East Germany—just about to take up an important post as vice-chair of the Church Community in Brandenburg. Klaus himself, though brought up in East Berlin, had attended high school in West Berlin until he passed his leaving examination a few months previously. Then he had come back. It had been tempting to stay in the West, but at this point he didn’t want to. West Berlin to him was bourgeois. The East was the old heart of Berlin. The best theatres and pubs were there. Klaus liked the Bohemian life, and East Berlin at the turn of the 1960s seemed much more interesting, full of rebels and writers, actors and artists, exotic foreign students from the Third World studying in the city with the help of generous scholarships provided by the Communist authorities. Many of his East German friends were privileged children of the GDR’s élite, including, for instance, Brigitte, the writer daughter of Interior Minister Karl Maron.
And after all, the way to the West was just a matter of crossing the
street! One could live in the East and enjoy the best of both worlds. This young man was looking forward to studying and living a full, exciting metropolitan life.
Klaus didn’t know three things. First, that from now on, in the new closed-off East Germany, anyone who had chosen to study in the West would be suspect and thereby severely disadvantaged. Second, that the
Stasi
was already fully aware of the man whom Klaus had introduced to his father a few months before; the man from West German intelligence who was interested in having occasional talks with Herr Schulz-Ladegast senior about relations between the Lutheran Church and the Communist state.
Within a few days, Klaus Schulz-Ladegast would realise both these things.
The third realisation would take much, much longer to sink in: it was that thirty long years would pass before he set eyes again on the woman with whom he had spent that last, idyllic August weekend before the Wall went up.
14
THERE WERE TWO STRIKING
sets of images that the world found itself focusing on, in print or in flickering black and white, during the days that followed the building of the barrier that would become the Berlin Wall.
The first set showed ordered ranks of armed East German soldiers, police and paramilitaries, and barbed wire being rolled out to sever the nerve networks of a great modern city, posts being driven like nails into Berlin’s prostrate body: Erich Honecker’s ‘Operation Rose’ in all its totalitarian, machine-like efficiency. The second set was the terrible, messy human side. People fleeing, or trying to flee, as the barrier closed; making dashes towards the Western side, encouraged by watching crowds. Human beings waving, calling, holding up children and pets, making final, vain attempts to get close to people they were beginning to realise they might not see again for years, perhaps for ever. Worst of all, most heart-rending, were the scenes in and around the Bernauer Strasse.
The Bernauer Strasse was in the borough of Wedding, in the French sector. Just. This soon-to-be notorious street began at the Nordbahnhof S-Bahn station and ran north-east from there for about a kilometre and a half until it hit the corner of Eberswalder and Schwedler Strasse, where the Wall turned north along the eastern edge of what for many years had been a busy marshalling yard and was now essentially no man’s land between East and West. It formed the near-straight advanced edge of a three or four city-block square area that jutted into the East.
Those who lived in that the area were surrounded on three sides by Communist territory. By a quirk of the settlement that established the district boundaries of Greater Berlin in 1920, the Bernauer Strasse itself was divided between the districts of Wedding and Mitte (Berlin Centre).
Wedding lay in the West, in the French sector, while Mitte was in the East.
For the first three or four hundred metres of the street, coming up from the Nordbahnhof, the border ran along the edge of the cemetery belonging to the Sophienkirche congregation. This was followed by another cemetery, belonging to the Elisabeth-Himmelfahrt (Ascension of Elisabeth) congregation. These two sets of permanent inhabitants might reasonably be expected to have gone beyond caring whether they were Communist or capitalist. But when blocks of nineteenth-century apartments began to line the street on both sides, filled with live human beings, the situation changed. Many, understandably, cared a great deal. The border ran along the southern (in the strictly geographical context, but in the political context ‘Eastern’) side of the Bernauer Strasse, leaving the buildings on the northern side and the entire roadway as part of West Berlin, but, starting from the thresholds of the buildings on the south side, placing the actual apartment blocks in East Berlin.
Those who lived in West Berlin, directly on the sector border, found their daily routine suddenly devastated. They were used to shopping in the East, the children to going roller-skating after school at the rink in the Gartenstrasse or on Sundays picnicking at the Märchenbrunnen (Fairytale Fountain) in the nearby Friedrichshain Public Park. Even their church, the nineteenth-century Church of the Reconciliation (Versöhnungskirche), was situated in the East, though its front porch opened out on to the West. Until its demolition, the church was doomed to a pathetic non-existence in no man’s land.
1
Elke Kielberg, then thirteen, lived on the corner of Hussiten Strasse and Bernauer Strasse (and still does). Her closest playmate—since Elke remained an only child, almost a sister to her—was her cousin, who lived across the street. The closely related families were, of course, constantly in and out of each other’s flats.
2
The first inkling of catastrophe came at eight o’clock on the morning of Sunday 13 August, when Elke’s mother went out to buy a newspaper. She returned to their apartment distraught and outraged: the streets that ran at right-angles to the Bernauer Strasse in the direction of Berlin-Mitte—Ackerstrasse, Gartenstrasse and Strelitzer Strasse—had all been closed off with barbed wire. There were Eastern police with guns blocking
access. Already paramilitary workers seemed busy constructing a more permanent barrier.
The Kielbergs had been planning to drop over to their relatives for coffee later that day, but now those on the southern side of the street, including Elke’s cousin and her family, were immured in East Berlin. ‘Barbed-Wire Sunday’, as Berliners called it, would mark the greatest change in most of these people’s lives. Ordinary streets became traps, sometimes death-traps.
This was why, within hours of waking to the new reality of a divided Berlin, many of those trapped in the East made frantic last-minute attempts to make the journey that just hours before would have involved a simple crossing of the street.
The Bernauer Strasse was the scene of people jumping from the windows of apartment blocks, which were part of the East, down into the street, all of which belonged to the West. The
Vopos
and
Grepos
, realising the potential for escapes, had begun entering these buildings. Their ultimate aim was to clear the immediate sector-border area of ‘unreliable’ elements, but this would take time.