Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
Berliners share memories of the divisive Wall
28 years a deadly sentinel
BERLIN: A “history lesson” has become more expensive at Checkpoint Charlie. It costs € 3 (R45) to have your picture taken with a bogus US Army GI. Where during the Cold War the site was a crossing point between the American and Soviet sectors, today amateur actors stand guard outside a replica hut.
On Monday, the wall would have been gone for as long as it stood: 28 years, two months and 26 days.
On the night of November 9, 1989, with the communist-ruled German Democratic Republic (GDR) in the throes of collapse, the Wall was finally breached – peacefully.
Some Germans might be saying: “What? The Wall has been gone that long?” Others regard the period since its fall as much longer, and tougher.
Hans- Joachim Lietsche, 57, is waiting for his group of visitors. He is about to explain to schoolchildren how the East German State Security (Stasi) apparatus locked people like him up because they did not toe the line.
“For 30 years I kept a lid on my detention,” said the trained glazier. He is standing outside what had been the Stasi’s detention facility, now Hohenschoenhausen Memorial, the only place where he can talk about the events.
“That’s because I started so late to deal with it,” he said.
Four years ago, after dining in a dark restaurant, it all suddenly came to the surface – flashbacks of his cell with no windows, his isolation, his fear.
He was found in violation of Paragraph 220, belittling of state bodies. He had been caught handing out leaflets demanding freedom of opinion. He called the female prosecutor a “silly cow”. He was locked away for nine months.
“The fall of the Wall was one of the happiest days of my life,” Lietsche said, his eyes tearful. Being able to see a friend again whose freedom had been bought by West Germany. Travelling to Scandinavia…
But for the longest time his nightmares and feelings of guilt, did not let up. Lietsche has never looked up the prosecutor. “I don’t have a yen for revenge,” he says.
Nowadays, groups of schoolchildren walk past remnants of the Wall between Potdamer Platz and Checkpoint Charlie, led by Markus Mueller-Tenckhoff, who says he is a “sort-of ” history teacher.
“When I lead young people through Berlin, they ask different kinds of questions. That’s when you realise that to them, the Wall is history.”
Mueller-Tenckhoff, who was born in West Berlin, calmly answers their questions: How long did it take to build the Wall? Who built it? He has been doing tours since 1991.
When the Wall fell, he was living in London, but he immediately returned to his home city. The period since the Wall fell seems much longer to him than the period during which Berlin was divided.
Klaus Seifried, a psychologist, has a possible explanation for this: “Experiencing time is very different for each individual. Young people can scarcely imagine the life of 30 or 40 years ago,” says Seifried, who for 26 years was a school psychologist and is on the board of the German Psychologists Association.
When he has visitors and takes youngsters to the Wall memorial site at Bernauer Strasse, to them the history is as distant as Seifried’s parents’ memories of the time before World War II. “The sensory experience is missing.”
Seifried moved to West Berlin in 1972. But there are places that take him back in time.
Recently he stopped at what was once a border crossing between the states of Lower Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt. “I drove there and suddenly all the images came back: How you had to show your ID, how they questioned you, if you had any weapons, and how they made you remove the ‘creating peace without arms’ bumper sticker from your car.” BERLIN: The Berlin Wall stood for exactly 28 years, two months and 26 days and was the symbol of the division between East and West Germany.
According to academic research, at least 140 people died at the Berlin Wall, while 327 died on the innerGerman border. Many were shot trying to flee from the East or were killed by landmines.
Communist East Germany, under party leader Walter Ulbricht, began building the Wall on August 13, 1961. The
Many people in eastern Germany feel disadvantaged to this day, even though living standards have risen since 1989, unemployment has dropped and towns have been spruced up. The people point to their lower retirement pensions, dying villages and the departure of skilled workers.
In the national elections last September, the right-wing populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) emerged as the second-strongest political force wall – winding for 155km – effectively sealed West Berlin off from East Berlin and the surrounding East German countryside.
It was finally breached on the night of November 9, 1989.
The overall border between the two German states was some 1 400km long.
As early as in 1952, East Germany had begun to set up border barricades, which were then expanded and fortified in the years after 1961. – dpa/African News Agency (ANA) in the former East.
Gregor Gysi, the founder of unified Germany’s leftist party, Die Linke had a simple explanation.
“Being of East German background was regarded as something inferior,” said Gysi, one of the few figures of the former communist system to embark on a successful political career in post-unification Gerrmany.
A decisive failure of the reunification process was “that the West really was not interested in the East.”
There is criticism that the history-laden area of Checkpoint Charlie comes across like a kind of Disneyland. A proposed museum explaining the Cold War, in the planning stages for years, is not making any headway.
Meanwhile Anna Kaminsky, a federal government official tasked with reappraising the East German dictatorship, points out that there is not a single university teaching chair for East German history. Scholarly research into the GDR has been declining for years and scarcely any of it takes place in western Germany.
“This not only has grave consequences for the education of tomorrow’s history teachers, but also for the pan-German culture of remembrance,” the 1962-born Kaminsky says.
Surveys show that young people know very little about democracy and dictatorship after 1945. “In turn, such deficits can easily create nostalgia, glorification and myths about the GDR,” she says.
Former political prisoner Lietsche wants to make sure “that something like this does not happen again,” he said.
“That’s what I fear. Dictatorship can come quickly – made possible by the silent masses.” – dpa/African News Agency (ANA)