by Peter Millar
On June 15th, 1961 Walter Ulbricht, the general secretary of the East German Communist Party (officially the Socialist Unity Party since a forced merger with the Social Democrats in 1946) gave a speech in which he famously said: ‘Niemand hat die Absicht, eine Mauer zu errichten. (Nobody has any intention of building a wall.)’ He obviously woke up next morning and said to himself, ‘Now there’s a thought!’
At midnight on August 12th, armed guards began to roll out barbed wire along the border between the sectors that ran through the middle of Berlin. And not just along the forty-three kilometres that actually lay within the city limits but out in the country too, all along the 156 kilometres that formed the rest of the border between the Western half of Berlin and the landscape around it. Within hours, especially in the middle of the city itself, they were digging up the road alongside the barbed wire and cementing concrete blocks into a wall that would be the first of several incarnations, each one more intimidating and permanent than the last, over the next two and a half decades. All the work was done, standing firmly on ground that was in the Eastern sector, by labourers watched over by armed guards. One guard, a young soldier of nineteen called Conrad Schuman, made himself famous just two days later by jumping over the barbed wire within range of a Western photographer’s lens.
Because the sectors had been drawn up along old postcode lines, in some places the boundary itself ran along the line of the buildings. This meant that in Bernauer Strasse to the north of the city centre, the houses were in the East, but the pavement they opened onto was in the West. The closing of the border meant that armed guards marched into people’s apartments and began bricking up their windows. Western photographers captured images of people dropping from upper windows as the troops bricked up the lower ones. Within months the houses were evacuated and in 1963 the last of them was demolished.
On the Western side, the Wall changed over the years from a basic, breeze-block structure topped with barbed wire to a uniform curtain of concrete slabs three metres high topped with a cylindrical concrete drum with a circumference designed to make it impossible to get a grip on, though it was only ever envisaged that anyone trying to climb it would be coming from the other side.
In the East, paradoxically, the Wall was less intimidating, as if the authorities wanted to achieve the impossible and make it disappear. The frontier retreated often by as much as ten to fifteen metres and the Wall as seen by ordinary East Berliners more closely resembled that of a factory compound, just under three metres high and still built of breeze blocks or in places even brick. It bore simple signs that said Frontier area, strictly no admittance or Trespassers will be prosecuted. The difference lay in what everyone knew separated the two walls, the ‘death strip’ of tank trap obstacles, barbed wire and armed guards patrolling with dogs and orders to shoot to kill. At more isolated spots watchtowers sprouted on concrete stalks manned by men with night-vision binoculars and automatic weapons. Over the nearly three decades of its existence at least 136 people died (that is the official figure), but including those dragged back bleeding whose bodies were never recovered, there were certainly substantially more than 200. In the East everyone knew someone who knew one of them.
The East German hope was that for West Berliners, faced with a blank wall, the other half of their city would eventually be forgotten. And gradually it was. West Germans, whom the logic behind the ‘two German states’ doctrine insisted were as foreign as British or French, were consequently just as free to visit East Germany (that is they could apply for a visa, which would not always be granted). But until 1971 the same regulations did not apply to West Berliners (a remnant of the blockade mentality that hoped one day all of Berlin would be capital of the GDR) who were only allowed occasional visits. The West Berlin city senate erected wooden viewing platforms at strategic locations – the Brandenburg Gate, Bernauer Strasse – where you could climb up and peer across at what had once been the continuation of the same street, even perhaps to wave. Few East Berliners dared wave back. Later only tourists climbed the platforms, while the grey expanse of the Wall itself became the world’s biggest blank canvas for graffiti artists. Early examples were political: Shit Wall; Last one to leave, turn out the lights!, then tourists with no traumatised memories and their own trivial axes to grind joined in: Geoff Boycott rules, and Leeds United AFC are but two typical examples from the early eighties. In the end the abstract artists took over dabbing broad swathes of colour. Parts of the Wall attained such a cultural significance in their own right that there would be some who complained of ‘vandalism’ when they were torn down.
But on that night of Thursday, November 9th, 1989, the prospect of the bulldozers moving in went from fantasy to possibility to probability and finally reality within just a few hours. The scenes that most people around the world would have imprinted on their retinas were those from the Brandenburg Gate. That too was one of those accidents of history. There was no crossing point at the Gate, but precisely because it was where foreign leaders were brought to see the ‘inhumanity’ of the Wall, this was the spot where the East Germans had tried to make it least threatening. Here the Wall was lower, and flat-topped, without the cylindrical ‘anti-climb’ drum on top, not least because the Gate itself, as a historical monument, was manned twenty-four hours by East German troops in full ceremonial dress. In true ‘bizzaro world’ form, the East German government also brought visitors to the Gate, to show off the effectiveness of the ‘anti-fascist protection wall’. When faced with concrete proof of an unpalatable reality they chose simply to turn interpretation of it on its head.
But the flat surface meant that on that fateful night, drunk West Berliners could do the unthinkable: climb onto the Wall. And dance. Bewildered East German guards ordered them to get down, then called up reinforcements, but what were they to do? Shoot? Almost uniquely among border guards the world over, their ‘shoot to kill’ orders applied to their own citizens trying to leave rather than others who might try to get in. And in any case they weren’t doing that, were they? They were just dancing, and waving beer bottles. By the time someone had the bright – if just possibly fatal – decision to take a pickaxe to part of it, nobody really knew what the rules were anymore.
One pickaxe of course was never going to do serious harm to a structure as solid as the Berlin Wall. At least not physically. But the images that went round the world – and more importantly back into East Germany where millions also sat glued to their screens, albeit in ever dwindling numbers as they piled into cars or trains and headed for Berlin – were devastating. Yet that too was more circumstance than foresight. The world’s cameramen had gathered at that spot simply because it was the most photogenic – most of the reporters who hurriedly jetted in over the twenty-four hours after the first crossing point was opened spoke little or no German. All they wanted were images. And tipsy West Berliners – goaded on by their presence – provided them. As Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan had prophesied a decade earlier, the medium had become the message.
For those of us on the ground, swept up and carried away by the euphoria it was also difficult not to see philosophy, if not theology, in the tide of history. I could not help but recall that November 9th, 1989 was to the day exactly fifty years plus one after Kristallnacht, Joseph Goebbels’ orchestrated pogrom of violence against the Jews. It was also the anniversary of the defeat of Adolf Hitler’s ‘beer hall
putsch’ in 1923. Even for a convinced atheist it was hard not to feel a shiver down the spine.
THE SUNDAY TIMES, 12 NOVEMBER 1989
A MILLION MARCH TO FREEDOM
By Peter Millar
More than one million Germans from East and West held the world’s biggest non-stop party in Berlin yesterday as their sober leaders tried in vain to dampen euphoria by warning that a united Germany was not yet on the political agenda.
East Berliners poured into West Berlin to celebrate their liberty on free beer and wine and queues of East German cars stretched back for
ty miles from the border. Berlin was a city reborn. The party clogged the streets as the barriers that divided Germany melted like the ice of the Cold War. Officials revealed that well over a million people had passed the frontier from East Germany into West Berlin and West Germany in only a matter of hours.
As the leaders of East and West Germany spoke on the phone, young people from the West tried to speed up history by ripping down parts of the wall by the Brandenburg Gate, long the symbol of division, not just of Berlin but of the European continent. East German border guards dispersed the crowds with water cannon and rebuilt it.
But elsewhere parts of the wall were coming down for good. In East Berlin concrete blocks were being removed from the entrance to an underground station. For the past twenty-eight years West Berlin trains have trundled without stopping through unlit stations beneath the eastern half of the city. Now they will carry East Berliners into the West.
The first new border crossing point came into use just after dawn after a night of activity by workmen with bulldozers, and East Berliners filed on foot from Bernauer Strasse into the West. On Potsdamer Platz, once the Piccadilly Circus of the German empire and a hundred yards from the unmarked underground site of Hitler’s bunker, the bulldozers were creating another crossing to be opened this morning.
Elsewhere official teams were knocking down the wall to create eighteen new crossing points. At one site East Berlin engineers shook hands with their Western counterparts through the gap they had created in the six-inch thick, steel-reinforced concrete.
Tourists watched in amazement, their cameras recording the historic moments. One American borrowed a hammer from a Berliner and told his wife: ‘Get one of me hitting the Wall, honey.’
That was the story that appeared on the front page. My waitresses, my friends and the whole mad mix-up that led to the fall of the Wall, were reserved for the lengthy colour/analysis piece on the Focus pages inside. But even that was not the whole of the story.
The Berlin Wall was not just a concrete manifestation of the Iron Curtain, it was its most potent symbol. Almost its soul. Its fall was to bring in its wake the end of the Cold War, the collapse like dominoes of Moscow’s satellite dictatorships in Eastern Europe and finally the implosion of the Soviet Union itself. The year of miracles, 1989, would give the world a new chance, which surely only fools would throw away.
2
The Street of Shame
The long and winding road that led me to Checkpoint Charlie on the night the Berlin Wall came down began improbably enough thirteen years earlier on the outskirts of Paris where I was trying to hitch a lift to the Côte d’Azur. That was when I learned my first journalistic trick: know how the story is going to end before you start writing it.
I have to give a little context here. I was in the third year of a modern languages degree at Magdalen College, Oxford, reading French and Russian, and spending it, as linguists were supposed to do, abroad. Rather than appreciating a paid job with free accommodation in one of the world’s most glamorous cities, I regarded my ‘year out’ as purgatory away from the hedonistic delights of seventies studenthood.
Theoretically I had landed on my feet, with a position as an ‘assistant’ – you have to pronounce it the French way ‘ass-eees-t’ahn’ – a sort of guinea-pig native speaker for the locals learning English to laugh at – in the posh Lycée Lakanal in the southern Parisian suburbs. I say ‘posh’ because it had a formidable academic record and boasted famous old boys such as André Gide and was housed in its own magnificent parkland in the leafy suburb of Sceaux, which is more or less to Paris what Hampstead is to London. But in the stark reality of a cold wintry day in October with the leaves ripped from the trees by a biting wind, Lakanal’s imposing old brick buildings, seen from the street, looked to me more like a maximum security state penitentiary.
This was not helped when I announced my presence and immediately felt both the immense pressure of French bureaucracy and my own linguistic inadequacy as I was asked to fill in a sheaf of forms with my personal details. I fell at almost the first hurdle. Age, date of birth, sex were no problem but, ‘État civil’? I knew what this meant: was I married or single? I simply had no idea what the French for ‘single’ was. We had learned about people being ‘marié’ but no one had ever taught me the opposite. ‘Simple’ didn’t sound right, nor did ‘unique’ or ‘seul’ or any of the other random words my panicky brain flirted with. Eventually a kindly – if somewhat exasperated – secretary smiled tartly at me and said she presumed, at my age, I was ‘célibataire’. I was horrified. Even as I realised instinctively that that had to be the right word, just the fact that it contained the concept of ‘celibacy’ was so far removed from anything I had hoped for from a year in Paris.
Things did not get better when I was eventually shown to my room, up long echoing wooden-floored corridors and into a bare space with an iron bed, a clunking radiator and fantastically high ceilings. These would have given the room a feeling of lightness and airiness if it weren’t for the fact that the windows were so high up, that at a compact five-foot-six I couldn’t quite see out of them without standing on a chair. Luckily I did have a chair: just one, an old wooden classroom chair which stood next to an old wooden classroom desk, inscribed with the initials – and possibly the teeth marks – of countless generations of bored French adolescents. As they closed the door on me – thankfully without the sound of a key in the lock – I looked around dolefully at my spartan cube, with its walls painted hospital green, obliquely up at the white overcast sky and directly up at the solitary light bulb dangling yards above my head. I reflected that if it ever needed changing I’d be in trouble. Luckily it never did.
Inevitably my last year at Lakanal didn’t turn out to be as bad as it had first seemed. I have bittersweet memories – perhaps as lonely boys sent to English boarding schools do – of pre-dawn starts with steaming bowls of hot milk left to warm on the radiators in the canteen ready for mixing with strong, piping-hot coffee to form your own blend of café au lait; of twenty-five-centilitre bottles of red wine served with lunch to the teaching staff and the university students who in return for free accommodation kept order in the boarders’ dormitories at night; of school lunches that – unlike anything I had ever experienced back home – would creep onto my menus for life: ‘lapin aux pruneaux’, rabbit with red wine and prune sauce.
And one ridiculously romantic vision that – more ridiculous than romantic – was somehow quintessentially French: a bright blue-skyed freezing winter morning beneath the coppiced plane trees in the still empty playground watching the steam rise from the newly-rinsed open-air pissoirs. Monet could have worked miracles with it.
Over time I managed to brighten up my room, most significantly covering one wall with a full-size cinema poster, picked up at Les Puces, the sprawling flea market held each weekend at Porte de Clignancourt. The film: Cabaret, with Liza Minelli, posing large-as-life on my wall in her stockings and bowler hat against the Brandenburg Gate and the film’s French subtitle, Adieu Berlin. It had to be fate.
Which leads me back to that fateful hitchhiking journey south. For all that I had got used to Lakanal and life in the Parisian suburbs, as soon as the weather started warming up – and there was a break in the school timetable – the idea of a few days soaking up the sun in St Tropez, or wherever I could get a lift to, seemed irresistible. That was why I was standing with my thumb out on one of the southern slip roads off the Paris périphérique, only to find that the first car to stop and offer me a lift anywhere in the general direction of the sun happened to be driven by an Englishman.
His name was Terry Williams and he was a journalist. He told me he worked in the Paris bureau of Reuters News Agency. Had I, he asked, as a linguist, ever thought of going into journalism? Well, yes, maybe, sort of, I replied. As much as I had thought about going into anything other than a student bar. The world ‘beyond university’ was unimaginably far away, and didn’t bear thinking about. I was thinking
about getting back there. Not leaving for good. It’s only a year away, you know, he told me as we headed south on the autoroute, the warm wind from the Midi flowing in through the open windows of his sports car. It’ll go fast. He meant the year. I hated him for it. But it was true, I knew. In little over fifteen months I would be out there in the real world. I would have to do something. Maybe even get a job.
It was then that Terry made up for everything with what I now know to be one of the oldest saws in the book: ‘The thing about journalism,’ he said with a grin, ‘is that it’s the worst job in the world.’ And he paused before the punchline: ‘But it’s better than working.’
He didn’t take me very far along my road south, but he did give me a card and told me his brother also ran a newly opened journalism school in Cardiff. A few weeks later I took him up on the invitation to drop in and take a look at the Reuters office in Paris. It wasn’t particularly impressive. Terry was ‘minding the desk’ which meant sitting there with his feet up watching the television news, with a printer from the French news agency AFP (Agence France-Presse) chuntering away next to him, feeding out screeds of paper which he glanced at occasionally and now and then tore off, and attached to a growing pile fixed to a clipboard. ‘Slow news day,’ he said. ‘Might nip out for a beer later.’ The job didn’t seem particularly exciting but it didn’t seem particularly strenuous either. Before I left, however, he did something which is the reason for this little Parisian interlude in a story otherwise primarily concerned with Germany: he told me a secret. ‘If you should ever think of applying to Reuters,’ he said, ‘you should know there’s one question they always ask, and there’s only one right answer.’