The commander of the Stasi headquarters in Leipzig knows he has to make a decision. Fast. He has Mielke’s backing to start shooting, but with so many protesters, he knows a single shot could start civil war, and as he looks at his soldiers, standing at the doors and windows of the Stasi headquarters, loaded pistols and machine-guns in their hands, finally, he decides what to do.
He locks the door.
That night there is no shooting. No tanks. No dead bodies. And the next day, everything is different. People who understood what the rules were, understood the limits of their power, know things have changed. It is a new time, one for taking risks, testing boundaries, seeing how far you can push things. New parties and trade unions are created, demonstrations spread through East Germany, to Potsdam, Dresden, Rostock, Halle, Magdeburg, and in each city, the protesters target the same place: the local Stasi headquarters. As the protesters chant, sing and shout, inside, Stasi officers do what they do best: they write detailed reports about everything they can see and hear.
Meanwhile, the party panics. They sack their leader, Erich Honecker, hoping that will be enough.
It isn’t.
Still the protests grow.
The party announce a new leader, a man with an equine face and long teeth – Egon Krenz – who promises reform.
Three hundred thousand people gather in Leipzig with posters mocking Krenz and his ‘horse-face’, calling for him to go too.
Then, on 4 November, there’s a protest that’s different to all the others. So far, it’s only in cities outside East Berlin that people have had the courage to march on the streets. In East Berlin, where people feel the eyes of Mielke from the House of One Hundred Eyes, few have been brave enough. But that night, and over the following week, tens of thousands gather outside the Stasi headquarters, the place where so many have been interrogated and imprisoned. Inside, Erich Mielke sits at his desk, typing the chants he hears through the windows: ‘Burn the buildings down, out with the Stasi swine, Kill them!’
On 9 November, the Politburo meet. They need to do something big to save the country, and eventually they come up with a plan, a gesture that they hope will extinguish the protests. They will relax travel restrictions, allowing anyone to leave the country if they apply for a permit, only refusing people in special circumstances. After they make their decision, they tell Günter Schabowski, one of their members, to speak to the press. Schabowski is nervous. He wasn’t in the meeting, doesn’t really know the details, but he prepares to wing it.
Just before six in the evening, Günter walks into the International Press Centre in Mohrenstrasse and sits at a long table in front of TV and print journalists from all over the world. There are other items on the agenda; his announcement comes an hour later, right at the end of the press conference when half the journalists in the room are asleep. Literally. Looking exhausted, Günter Schabowski reads out the note he was given, telling the journalists about the new regulations.
There are confused faces. Murmuring. One journalist asks if this is a mistake. Schabowski confirms that it isn’t. Then another question: ‘When will this new provision come into force?’
In a flush of embarrassment, Schabowski realises he doesn’t know. He looks down, turns his piece of paper over, looking for an answer, but finds none. He looks at the journalists. ‘It will come into force… uh… to my knowledge… immediately.’
The journalists leave, still confused, begin filing reports. Then at five past seven, Associated Press condense Schabowski’s lengthy statement into one powerful sentence: ‘According to information supplied by SED Politburo member Günter Schabowski, the GDR is opening its borders.’
The TV networks pick it up and, within an hour, around a hundred people have arrived at various checkpoints, asking to go to West Berlin.
Border guards tell them to return tomorrow.
Then more people arrive – two hundred, four hundred, until there are thousands standing at checkpoints demanding to leave, pushing against the screens at the checkpoint. It is the beginning of a stampede.
Schabowski had messed up. The new provisions were only meant to take effect the next day, and even then, people were meant to apply to leave, not just turn up, but now there are tens of thousands of people swarming the checkpoints.
Erich Mielke calls Krenz, the new horse-faced leader of East Germany; tells him what’s going on. The two men talk, briefly discuss shutting the border completely, enforcing it with tanks, but they know it’s too late. And so, finally, Erich Mielke gives up his fight and can only watch as the country that he spent his life building and defending rapidly falls apart.
At the checkpoints, commanders realise things are becoming dangerous – soon hundreds could be killed in a stampede – and eventually, one commander makes a decision.
He opens the border and lets people through.
And so they stream in: mothers who haven’t seen their children in years, teenagers in pyjamas who race through holding hands, old men in warm coats who stumble across with walking sticks, hands shaking with excitement, crumpling into the arms of West Berliners there to greet them, everyone laughing, weeping, whooping as they watch people clamber to the top of the wall, and dance and scream and sing in the glare of searchlights, looking down at the city that was divided in a single night, had remained so for half-a-lifetime and is now, finally, reunited.
When Joachim Rudolph and his family walked to Berlin in 1945, they joined one of the largest forced migrations in human history. © Arthur Grimm/ullstein bild via Getty Images
After a barbaric fight for the city, the Soviets fly their flag over the Reichstag in Berlin. May 1945. © Picture Alliance / Bridgeman Images
Joachim Rudolph in his early twenties. © Joachim Rudolph
At the end of the Second World War, huge swathes of Berlin were destroyed. Yet, for the city’s children, the rubble and tanks turned Berlin into an adventure playground. © Fred Ramage/Getty Images
The uprising of June 17, 1953. The moment East Germans learned the limits of what they could do. © mccool / Alamy Stock Photo
Before the Wall, it was easy to cross the border from the world of queues and empty shelves in East Berlin to the glitzy lights of the Ku’damm in West Berlin. © Müller-Preisser/ullsteinbild via Getty Images (above); © akg-images (below)
Erich Mielke, head of the Stasi and the longest-serving secret police chief in Eastern Europe. © ullstein bild via Getty Images
Walter Ulbricht, the carpenter-turned-leader of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). © ullstein bild via Getty Images
The orderly enthusiasm of the Junge Pioniere (Young Pioneers)—the communist youth organisation. © Siegfried Pilz/United Archives via Getty Images
Though the barbed wire went up in one night, the Wall itself took longer to build. In the early days, many took their chances and escaped through gaps in the barrier, including construction workers. © Keystone Press / Alamy Stock Photo
Divided families hold up newborn babies at the Wall for relatives on the other side. © Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
After the Wall was built, VoPos were instructed not to lose a single escapee. They fought for each one, including 77-year-old Frieda Schulze, who leapt out of her window on September 24, 1961. © TopFoto
Conrad Schumann couldn’t bear seeing children separated from their parents. On August 15, 1961, he leaps into West Berlin. © ullsteinbild / TopFoto
The Wall changed the geography of East Berlin, creating dead-ends where children gathered with balls and bicycles. © Thomas Hoepker/Magnum Photos
The Berlin Wall was 96 miles long: 27 miles separating East and West Berlin; 69 miles separating West Berlin from the East German countryside. © Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
Evi Schmidt © Eveline Rudolph
Evi Schmidt with her daughter, Annet. © Eveline Rudolph
Wolfhardt (Wolf) Schroedter © Wolfhardt Schroedter
Siegfried Uhse was just 21 years old when he was recruited by the Stasi. © BStU St
asi Mediathek
The Stasi’s report about Siegfried Uhse following his recruitment. The report notes his ash-blond hair, “pointed nose,” and “inflamed eyes.” © BStU Stasi Mediathek
Siegfried Uhse’s letter of commitment. Every new recruit wrote one. © BStU Stasi Mediathek
Reuven Frank, later referred to as one of the founding fathers of broadcast journalism. NBC Newswire © 26/08/1968 NBCUniversal / Getty Images
NBC News correspondent Piers Anderton (far left) talking to NBC News cameraman Peter Dehmel and Domenico (Mimmo) Sesta. © Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
The tunnel, with its stove pipes, electric lights, and the diggers’ beloved border sign, replicating the one above ground: “You are now leaving the American sector of Berlin!” © ullstein bild via Getty Images
When the leak begins, the diggers pump 8,000 gallons of water out in one week, but still the water comes. © ullstein bild via Getty Images
Renate Reichelt © Renate Sternheimer
Wolfdieter Sternheimer speaks for a few moments during his show-trial. ©Wolfdieter Sternheimer
Hohenschönhausen Prison, one of the Stasi’s largest remand prisons, where guards perfected the art of “zersetzung”—decomposition. Many inmates spent years there. By the time they were released, they were but a shadow of their former selves. © ullstein bild / TopFoto
Dotted along the Wall between East and West Berlin were border crossings, like the famous Checkpoint Charlie. © Erwin Reichert/AP/Shutterstock
Though Walter Ulbricht described the Berlin Wall as an “anti-fascist protection barrier,” designed to protect East Germans from spies and saboteurs in the West, the binoculars of the VoPos were always turned not to West Germany, but toward their own people in the East. © J Wilds/Getty Images
The lifeless body of Peter Fechter. ©Wolfgang Bera/ullstein bild via Getty Images
VoPos searching an escape tunnel near the border. © ullstein bild / TopFoto
In 1963, President Kennedy feared he might be heckled in West Berlin for his inaction over the building of the Wall, but he was welcomed as a hero. © Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
During the summer of 1989, protests grew each week until tens of thousands took to the streets in Leipzig in November. It was the beginning of the end of East Germany. © Eric BOUVET/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Image
And so the Wall came down. November 1989. © Régis BOSSU/Corbis via Getty Images
Afterword
IN JOACHIM’S FLAT, he asks if we can pause the interview for some water.
Evi brings some, a plate of biscuits too, then she sits down to show me photographs from their life together. There’s a photo from their wedding day, Joachim in a dark suit and red tie, Evi with her hair in a bob, wearing a short white dress and heels. Joachim stands just behind, her back-stop; Evi looks so happy she could float. They married in 1971, six years after Evi and Peter divorced.
Along with the photos, Evi shows me her Stasi file. She only found out a few years ago, in 2017, that she had one. She’d been wandering around a museum a few years earlier, reading about all the files that were uncovered and she’d submitted a request, not expecting to hear anything. Then one day a letter arrived, inviting her to the Stasi Archives at Alexanderplatz, where Evi discovered her own file, seventy pages long, and realised that two of her neighbours – ‘Walter’ and ‘Wilhelm’ – had been spying on her and her family for years.
Those files – along with millions of others – were found in Stasi offices after they were stormed by protesters who smashed their way through steel doors with bricks and discovered secret cellars stuffed with champagne, pineapple and peaches, along with tens of thousands of sacks of paper. Some of the files were intact, hundreds of thousands shredded.
And so began the process of Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit – ‘working through the past’. As the files were puzzled back together, the extent to which the Stasi had manipulated and controlled the lives of people in the East was revealed, to the shock of those who’d lived through it: the microphones, the cameras, the nepotism, the mistreatment; then the more gruesome and bizarre discoveries like the radioactive tags the Stasi inserted into people’s clothes to keep track of them, no consideration for their long-term health.
In 1991, the German parliament passed a law allowing the files to be searched to uncover Stasi perpetrators and informants. Within a few years, over three million had asked to see their files, discovering what had really happened to friends or family who’d gone missing or were killed at the Wall. Like Evi, many only found out then that friends, brothers, sisters, even parents and children, had betrayed them, and relationships all over the country were destroyed. There was shock in West Germany too, about the thousands of spies the Stasi ran there, infiltrating its intelligence services, newspapers, businesses, police force, politics.
The irony was that since the Stasi had been so meticulous in recording details about life in the East, these files were used to help build cases against those responsible for the worst violence. While the number of people killed at the Wall was relatively low (around 140), the number of people who died at the hands of the state since its earliest days is estimated by some to be as high as 100,000.
The most high-profile trial was that involving Erich Mielke, the head of the Stasi, the longest-serving secret police chief in the Eastern bloc. It began when he was called to the new parliament a few days after the Wall fell. Like the Wizard of Oz in denial about the collapse of his kingdom, Mielke puffed up his chest and made a speech saying everything was under control; that the Stasi were the best guardians of East Germany. As the new parliamentarians booed and hissed, Erich Mielke recoiled, stammering and stuttering, unused to this feeling of rejection, eventually raising his arms and shouting, on the verge of tears, ‘But I love you all! I love all human beings!’ The most feared man in all of East Germany, a man who’d lived in a palatial home with an indoor pool, was arrested, placed in solitary confinement and, in 1993, sentenced to six years in prison for the murders of two police officers in 1931, the only charges they had enough evidence for. Mielke was released early on health grounds in 1995 and died five years later. Before he died, he made a final request, requesting access to his own Stasi file, correctly guessing that there would be one on him.
There was a smattering of other well-publicised trials involving border guards who’d killed escapees at the Wall, but the few found guilty were given short or suspended sentences. And then there were the Stasi employees who tried to atone; around a hundred who spoke publicly about their work, expressed regrets. But most slid into the background and hoped no one would ever find out what they’d done.
Meanwhile, their victims often remained stuck in the past, obsessed with trying to find those who betrayed them. At one point, two of Siegfried Uhse’s victims who spent years in prison tracked him down, asking the authorities to bring him to trial, but they said it was too late, his crimes were too long ago. When I interviewed Wolfdieter, the only time he became emotional was when he talked about Siegfried Uhse: he told me he’d spent years looking for him, showed me a folder full of photos, convinced he was alive somewhere, yet he wasn’t sure what he would do if he ever found him.
When you talk to people who lived behind the Wall, it’s these personal betrayals that seem to have caused the deepest hurt: children betrayed by parents, parents betrayed by children, friend betrayed by friend. They want to know why, how someone could do it, yet I wonder what Siegfried would say; whether there is any answer he could give that would explain the decision he made in that interrogation room aged twenty-two: a decision that would shape and define the rest of his life.
At Joachim’s flat, it is now dusk and night has fallen around us. We stand up and stretch our legs, wander to the windows, where the lights of Berlin twinkle below us, a city that still owes much of its identity to the Wall, though there’s not much of it left. Joachim tells me how he used to go to the Wall in the days after the border was opened. Standing under an umbrella
in the November rain, he watched the Wall come down, piece by piece. Sections of it would soon be sold to museums and private buyers all over the world, to the relief of many who lived near it who wanted to forget it ever existed. Now, apart from a few sections here and there, there’s almost no sign of it; just a strip of granite, dark grey, running along the ground, and the words ‘Berliner Mauer 1961–1989’.
Joachim and I talk about what happened in the years after the Wall came down, after die Wende – ‘the turning point’: the techno activists who streamed over the border into East Berlin, creating a raver’s paradise in abandoned power plants and bunkers, dancing in places where only a few years ago they would have been shot. The hundreds of thousands of East German workers who went the other way, desperate for a taste of life in West Germany, buying shiny Toyotas for their shiny new lives, flying off on package holidays to Majorca before finding that they missed their old life in the East – the free healthcare and education and sense of solidarity – and a wave of Ostalgie, a nostalgia for life in the East swept in. For by 1989, many of those in East Germany had only known life behind the Wall, and that life, to them, was normal. Now, suddenly, they were exotic oddities; the world they’d known, they were told, belonged to the past.
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