On February 5, 1989, 20-year-old East German waiter Chris Gueffroy decided to take a chance at a new life in the West. Having heard that the East German border guards’ shoot-to-kill order had been repealed, Gueffroy and a friend, Christian Gaudian, chose to scale the Berlin Wall near a remote canal on the edge of the divided city.
Their information was wrong. When the pair passed the first 3.5-meter wall that night, they tripped an alarm signal, bathing them in white light. They were then hit by a hail of bullets as they tried to climb the last 2.9-meter metal barrier that stood between them and freedom.
Gueffroy died from a shot to the heart; Gaudian was seriously injured and taken into custody.
They were the last escapees from East Germany to be felled by border guards’ rifles. Nine months later, the shoot-to-kill order was indeed suspended, as border controls were slackened in East Germany and removed altogether in other Eastern Bloc countries.
Then, on November 9, 1989, after an erroneous announcement by an East German official about free travel to the West, thousands of clamouring East Germans forced the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain open once and for all.
In Moscow, Mikhail Gorbachev was not even woken by his aides as the news came in. But the Soviet leader’s foreign affairs adviser, Anatoly Chernyayev, recorded the moment in his diary.
“The Berlin Wall has collapsed. This entire era in the history of the socialist system is over,” he wrote.
The suddenness of the Berlin Wall’s figurative and physical removal was an historical echo of its hasty appearance, 28 years before.
On the morning of Sunday, August 13, 1961, Berliners woke to find East German workers throwing up wire cordons around the Soviet sector, soon to be replaced with brick walls and then tall concrete barriers and deadly defenses.
Authorized by East German leader Walter Ulbricht and Soviet General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev, the Wall insurmountably partitioned the former German capital. The remaining 866 miles of the inner border of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) were similarly fortified.
In addition to Berlin’s double-layered, 96-mile-long wall, watchtowers, spotlights, trip-wires, stake traps, anti-vehicle ditches, sniffer dogs and trigger-happy conscripts lowered chances of successful flight to a minimum.
“Everyone knew it was suicide to try to escape,” said Joseph, 63, a former GDR construction engineer whose work premises adjoined the wall in the district where Gueffroy died. “To do so would be like me trying to climb Mt. Everest without training and equipment.”
As well as escape, the whole subject of the Wall and the partition was also taboo, he recalled: “West Berlin wasn’t even shown on maps at the time.”
But his department still had strict instructions to keep ladders and other handy items for escape bids as securely locked up as the GDR’s 16 million citizens.
“We thought the Wall would last forever, that’s what we were told,” added Joseph’s wife Monika, 61. “[In January 1989, GDR leader Erich] Honecker said the Wall will stand for another hundred years.”
Initially intended to stem the migrant flood of workers and their families from the GDR to the western sector, the so-called “Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart” was supposed to avert sabotage of the “will of the people” in building a socialist state in East Germany. It was classic Orwellian doublespeak: the Wall was there to protect East Germans... by imprisoning them.
The West Berlin city government called it the “Wall of Shame” for its restriction on freedom of movement.
Nonetheless, between 1961 and 1989, some 5,000 people escaped over, under, or through the Wall. Some swam across canals and the sea, others fled by zip-wire, tightrope, or via tunnels and sewers.
Some 300 escaped through about 70 tunnels dug under the wall over 28 years. One superbly designed tunnel secreted 57 out of the East before it was detected. [Hear the superb podcast about this tunnel here: bit.ly/berlintunnel]
Meanwhile, an estimated 137 were killed by security forces while trying to escape. More died in related accidents, jumping from windows (in the early days, when some houses backed directly onto the new border), drowning while swimming across the River Spree and city canals, or suffocating in collapsing tunnels.
Chris Gueffroy was the last person killed by the border guards, but the second last to die attempting to escape. On March 8, 1989, gas refinery worker Winfried Freudenberg died when his home-made air balloon crashed after flying over the border.
Some elaborate escape schemes failed because of bad luck or betrayal, while other more impulsive attempts miraculously succeeded.
In April 1963 Wolfgang Engels pulled off possibly the most basic and reckless escape bid of all: The young civilian worker for the military stole an armored vehicle and drove it headfirst into the wall. Shot twice by East German border guards while pulling himself free, Engels was rescued by a group of drunken West Germans who emerged from a bar while federal police provided covering fire. His rescuers then carried him into the bar where he asked for a cognac. “I knew I was safe when I saw the western spirits bottles on the shelves by the bar counter,” Engels, now 71, told Russian Life during a recent visit to the spot.
Engels settled in West Germany and says he has no regrets, even though he was formally disowned by his mother for his escape. He later found out that she worked for the Stasi state police, which, according to declassified documents, had planned to abduct Engels as late as the 1980s and bring him back to stand trial for desertion.
The first person to escape was East German soldier Conrad Schumann, on August 15, 1961. His feat was captured as he leapt over barbed wire to the West – an image that became iconic of the Cold War.
Before he committed suicide in 1998 after a long depression, Schumann had said, “Only since 9 November 1989 have I felt truly free.”
A stretch of preserved Wall at the Bernauer Strasse memorial complex.
Wolfgang Engels revisits the site of his escape from East Germany.
Vigorous western condemnation of the Wall’s construction belies the complex and harshly pragmatic international climate that prevailed throughout the Cold War period.
While Ronald Reagan famously demanded in 1987 that Gorbachev “tear down this wall,” the reality was that US and leading western governments did not necessarily want the Wall removed, or at least not with such landslide speed.
Economics and the ever-present fear of a resurgent or Soviet-aligned united Germany kept a firm lid on emotions behind the scenes.
Prior to the Wall’s construction, from the late 1940s to August 1961, a tide of 3.5 million East German refugees had fled west (including 100,000 East Germans who fled in the first half of 1961), threatening to destroy the GDR’s economy and overwhelm the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). Removing the Wall, some felt, would be like opening floodgates.
In April 1989, according to Gorbachev’s foreign policy adviser Anatoly Chernyayev, British Premier Margaret Thatcher told Gorbachev that “Britain and Western Europe are not interested in the unification of Germany.”
“We are not interested in the destabilization of Eastern Europe or the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact either... I can tell you that this is also the position of the US president,” Thatcher added, citing a personal message from George H. W. Bush.
But history had other plans. After Hungary, with Moscow’s tacit assent, opened its border with Austria in the spring of 1989, thousands of East German “tourists” fled through the fraternal state into Austria and then on to West Germany (where they were guaranteed right of citizenship). Most famously, some 700 GDR citizens crossed on August 19, during the so-called Pan-European picnic, when Hungary opened the border near Sopron for the first time for a few hours, Thousands more left in September.
Interestingly, the Wall was not uniformly welcomed by the Soviet leadership. A year after the Wall went up, US officials learned from British diplomats that Soviet Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan had agreed with British Labour Party Leader Harold Wilson’s statement that the Wall was a “scandal and a blot on Communism.”
Two decades on, in 1989, while Soviet authorities were not averse to a physical barrier to halt the growing refugee crisis and preserve the GDR, they also did not seek to retain it by force, experts said.
“With all the documents we’ve seen, there is not a single indication that any senior [Soviet] security, military or political official even raised the issue,” wrote Svetlana Savranskaya of the National Security Archive at George Washington University, the world’s largest nongovernmental collection of declassified documents.
Under Gorbachev’s policies of glasnost and perestroika, closer integration with Europe was seen as the only solution for the Soviet Union’s deep economic woes. For this to happen, Eastern Europe had to be opened up.
“For the Soviets, when the wall came down, it was just another border opening up,” Savranskaya added. “They just wanted to keep it peaceful.”
According to the archive’s research project on the Wall, during a Politburo Session on November 3, 1989, Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze even suggested that the Soviets take the Wall down themselves.
And Gorbachev shared his foreign minister’s view that “the West does not want unification of Germany, but it wants to prevent it with our hands.”
If the border relaxations in Hungary had created cracks in the Wall, the earthquake arrived on November 3, 1989, when half-a-million East Germans staged a pro-democracy demonstration on East Berlin’s Alexanderplatz. Four days later, two-thirds of the East German Politburo resigned.
Then on November 9, a fateful lapse in coordination led to the actual Mauerfall, the falling of the Wall. The East German government decided to defuse the situation by relaxing the system for emigration to West Germany, and begin issuing 30-day travel visas.
Then, at a chaotic press conference, GDR Politburo member Günter Schabowski mistakenly said that the changes would take effect immediately.
Within hours, thousands of Germans were clamouring at the wall, demanding to be let through. Fearing a stampede, the guards opened the gates. The ensuing scenes of people pouring into West Berlin, standing on the Wall and attacking it with pickaxes and hammers were broadcast worldwide.
Mike, a British student in Berlin on a university exchange, was at a rock concert by West Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz when the singer shouted during the encore “Die Mauer ist weg!” (The Wall is gone!)
“It was truly surreal,” Mike said. “We left and went straight to the Brandenburg Gate. At that stage, hardly anyone was there, the East German guards had everything under control on their side. We were among the first to hoist ourselves up on the Wall. That’s when they were still trying to water-cannon people off from the eastern side.”
“Although it was pretty exciting, I didn’t fully appreciate the full significance. If I had, I’d have got down off the Wall on the East Berlin side and gone for a stroll on the wild side. But it seemed to me more like a temporary blip and I was still afraid of the border guards.”
But short of mass, violent repressions, there was no turning back. Over the next days and weeks, lines of East German Trabants and pedestrians poured into West Berlin, with each visiting GDR citizen receiving 100 Deutschmarks spending money from the West German government.
Thousands of trophy hunters used hammers and drills to break off chunks and even whole sections of the Wall, unhindered by the East German guards, who still patrolled the dead zone between the parallel walls, but who were now mostly unarmed.
In a telephone conversation with President Bush on November 10, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl gushed about the previous night’s events.
“It is like witnessing an enormous fair,” he told Bush, according to notes taken by Robert Gates, then a White House staffer. “It has the atmosphere of a festival.”
Bush, who had been worrying for several months that things were moving too fast, was noticeably cautious.
“I want to see our people continue to avoid especially hot rhetoric that might by mistake cause a problem,” he told Kohl.
Publicly, Bush’s reaction was also muted, in part to avoid provoking or humiliating the Soviets. In a press conference after the Wall fell, Bush was even asked why he wasn’t more elated. “I am not an emotional kind of guy,” he responded.
Meanwhile, Soviet leaders at the time seemed to have felt that East German leader Erich Honecker could have saved the GDR and himself had he not refused for years to implement perestroika- and glasnost-style reforms. Honecker was instead ousted by his Politburo colleagues on October 18, 1989, just weeks before the Wall came down.
“He could have said to his people that he has had four operations, he is 78, he does not have the strength to fill his position, so could they please ‘let him go,’ he has done his duty,” Chernyayev quoted Gorbachev as saying. “Then, maybe, he would have remained an esteemed figure in history.”
Honecker’s successor, Egon Krenz, promised more freedom, fair elections and a relaxed travel regime, but it was too little too late.
In December, the East German parliament revoked the leading role of the East German Communist Party (SED). German reunification came a year later, on October 3, 1990.
While many Russians still blame Gorbachev for the Soviet collapse, Chernyayev praised him for his role in the events in Berlin, for ending the Stalinist legacy.
“This is what Gorbachev has done,” he wrote in his diary. “And he has indeed turned out to be a great leader. He has sensed the pace of history and helped history find a natural channel.”
Meanwhile, the fires burned furiously in Soviet outposts in East Germany, as the KGB destroyed sensitive documents about networks and informers.
“I personally incinerated a huge amount of material,” Russian President and former KGB operative in Dresden Vladimir Putin recalled in his autobiography. “We burned so much that the stove burst.”
“In fact, I understood that it [Mauerfall] was inevitable,” Putin added. “To be honest, I was only sorry about the Soviet Union’s lost authority in Europe, although I understood that a position built on walls and water barriers cannot last forever.
“I wanted it to be replaced by something different. But no one proposed anything different, and that’s the pity of it all. We just dumped everything and left.”
“We had hoped that the GDR would remain an independent state but with more freedom,” said Joseph, the former construction worker.
He and his wife said they don’t suffer from ostalgie for the GDR (a play on words using the German word for East, “Ost”). They lament the loss of what they say was a much better educational system in the GDR, but also remember the chronic material shortages. To this day, Monika said she buys “spares” of many items when she shops. But the couple also said they do not recall any unhappiness at being GDR citizens, or feeling acutely “deprived.”
“You’re only unhappy when you have something to compare it with,” Joseph said, referring to most East Germans’ profound isolation from the outside world. “If you got to look at a western store catalogue, you could feel envious. But without ‘blue notes’ [West German marks] it was impossible anyway.”
Christoph Hein, a writer and intellectual in East Berlin, had long been an outspoken critic of the state. But in excerpts of his diary published in the New York Times in late 1989, he said he wanted the GDR not to vanish but to evolve: “This is our one chance – our first and last. If we fail, we will be devoured by McDonald’s.”
Today, visitors to Checkpoint Charlie – the most famous East-West border crossing – cannot fail to notice how the fast food chain looms over the historic site.
Elsewhere, stretches of the Wall have been preserved, and the path of the Wall is mapped on sidewalks and street signs. Central locations like the Brandenburg Gate are laden with reminders of how they were once sealed off, how performers like David Bowie played here in the 1980s, in solidarity with the music-starved East Germans. And memorial plaques and photographs remind visitors how young men and women like Chris Gueffrey dreamed of travelling the world and staked everything on one fleeting opportunity.
Checkpoint Charlie. The tourist magnet and Cold War relic marks the spot of the most famous Berlin Wall crossing point.
But despite the physical signs, the concept of what the Wall actually was is also slowly fading with generations.
A recent poll showed that fewer than one third of Germans under the age of 30 could name the date in 1961 when the first barbed wire barriers were rolled out. Former East Germans were better informed: 69 percent knew the significance of August 13, compared to 45 percent of ex-West Germans.
Generally, the older generation can at a glance or after hearing a sentence still spot an “Ossie” from a “Wessie,” from their language, their bearing, and sometimes their material attitudes. “The differences are still there like they always were,” said Monika. “But our children can’t tell the difference.”
With Berlin now hot on the heels of Paris as Europe’s most visited city (both trail London), the Cold War history draws flocks of visitors to sites like Checkpoint Charlie. For younger visitors, however, preserved wall sections are more often the site for selfie photo ops, rather than a place for serious reflection. And then there is the pervasive and gaudy fare of DDR-themed retro parties, T-shirts depicting the infamous Brezhnev-Honecker fraternal kiss, and novelty rides in sputtering Trabants.
“The memory of the GDR is being peddled and also reduced to a footnote in our education,” Berlin’s Tagesspiegel recently objected. “And so we are losing our past.”
But genuine reflection on the Wall and its victims, and its impact on a nation, continent and the world are receiving new impetus in the build up to November’s events marking 25 years since the Mauerfall. One highlight will be the 10-mile “Lichtgrenze” (light border) of 8,000 illuminated balloons placed along the Wall’s route. In August, 300 runners took part in the third 100MilesBerlin extreme sports event, tracing the old line of the wall.
In the bigger picture, there are also plans to create a 4,200-mile cycling path along the route of the Iron Curtain that divided East and West Europe for almost half a century.
Meanwhile, number crunchers are still thrashing out how much reunification has cost Germany since 1989. Some economists put the figure as high as 2 trillion euros (almost $2.6 trillion), triggering a fresh round of unseemly squabbling in this commemorative year.
“Instead of recognizing and valuing this as a great feat of solidarity that we have accomplished in Germany, the discussion is being reduced to a one-sided transfer balance sheet,” Reiner Haseloff, premier of Saxony-Anhalt, told media.
Meanwhile, the escalating conflict in Ukraine has impacted Russia’s place in modern German history and cast its war memorials into question. It is a particularly emotive issue for Russia, given its huge troop losses in the final push to capture Berlin in 1945.
In April, two German newspapers launched a petition to have a pair of Soviet T-34 tanks removed from their pedestals near a Red Army cemetery in the heart of the city.
“In an era when Russian tanks are threatening free and democratic Europe, we don’t want any Russian tanks at the Brandenburg gate,” the organizers said.
One of the Soviet T-34 tanks that German tabloids tried to have removed in April because of the Ukraine crisis.
The campaign failed after the German government said it remained committed to agreements to preserve sites marking Soviet war losses.
As for Berlin’s identity, it is inevitably shaped, but still not defined, by the history of the war and the partition. The city has an extraordinary past, but it doesn’t live there; it continues to grow and evolve independently of the history of its division. In fact, the German capital is now the centre of “hip” Germany, buzzing with a distinctive art scene. It is also celebrated for its tolerance and – for now – a relatively cheaper cost of living.
Formerly drab GDR city districts Prenzlauer Berg and Friedrichshain are “light years from what they were when I got to know them 25 years ago,” said Mike, the wall-climbing student who came here in 1989 and stayed. “Millions of people are shaping the city who have no idea about what it was like. That produces an exciting dissonance.” RL
Today, the Wall is painted with murals, as this one depicting the famous fraternal kiss of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and GDR leader Erich Honecker, and is more the site for light-hearted selfies than somber reflection.
Revision of the Soviet legacy took another turn in August when Berlin City authorities upset plans for a major exhibition of monuments by saying that the star exhibit – a giant 3.5 ton head of Vladimir Lenin – was “lost.”
The red granite head was buried in Köpenick Forest on the capital’s southeast fringes in 1992, along with 128 other pieces of the dismembered 19-meter Lenin that had long stood in an East Berlin square.
The city said it would not sponsor a search for the head or its excavation, due to “technical and financial reasons,” prompting an outcry from left-wing parties.
“Therefore one cannot simply bury Lenin [in history],” Gregor Gysi, the leader of the federal socialist Left party, told media, pledging to fight for the head’s recovery. “He must be shown and grappled with.”
(Above, photographer Michael White, superimposes a pre-demolition photo onto the current landscape where the massive Lenin statue once stood.)
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