Part 1: 20th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall: A Personal Story

Part 1: 20th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall: A Personal Story November 9, 1989
Part 2: Barbed Wire
Part 3: Checkpoint Charlie
Part 4: A Run Through”17th of June”
Part 5: Joy and Disbelief

By Barbara Cole
(Article begins below the video)

November 9, 1989
This year marks the twentieth anniversary of an event that holds the honor of being one of the single most significant occasions in German history: the fall of the Berlin Wall. On the night of November 9, 1989 when the news broke of unrestricted travel permits for East German citizens to the West, the proverbial crack in the dam released months of political and social pent-up pressure. This seemingly miraculous occurrence transpired that evening almost as a casual aside as the East German (i.e., German Democratic Republic,) Socialist Unity Party Chairman, Günther Schabowski commented at the conclusion of a press conference that unrestricted travel permits would be granted to all GDR citizens. When a long silence followed in a room full of journalists who ordinarily jockey for airspace, he may well have just announced that the world would come to an end, effective tomorrow. American correspondent Tom Brokaw broke the journalists’ stunned silence when he asked when this would take place. Schabowski retorted simply, “immediately.” That Schabowski had made this announcement was done so without initial clearance with other Party cabinet members. The cabinet had deliberated how to stem the tide of westward bound defectors through the now open borders of Hungary to Austria as the nation was rapidly losing its mostly young, skilled and talented labor. Schabowski had inadvertently snagged a memo that was up for mere discussion among the leading elite, which approval and details had not yet been clarified. And so it came about that an offhanded comment irretrievably ended 28 years of imprisonment for 17.2 million GDR citizens.

The fall of the infamous Berlin Wall was all the more astonishing as it was fully unanticipated, it ended the division of an entire nation after 28 years and, not of least significance by any measure, conclusively ended the Cold War. That this event transpired on the 9th of November is even more intriguing as some of Germany’s most momentous occasions took place on this day. On this very date in 1918, Kaiser Wilhelm the Second fled the country at World War I’s end to the Netherlands, thus abdicating the throne and permanently ending the monarchy in Germany. In 1923, also on November 9, Hitler catapulted himself to fame with his Beer Hall Putsch when he endeavored to take over the Bavarian Government and failed. Then, even more ominously, on this same date, November 9th in 1938, the Reichskristallnacht, or Crystal Night, occurred, thus marking the first pogrom against the Jews during the Third Reich. All of these events share not only the common date, but they comprised a major departure from Germany’s past, for good, as in the end of Monarchism, or, in the cases of the Beer Hall Putsch and Crystal Night, for horrific evil.

Next: Part 2: Barbed Wire

Part 2:Berlin Wall-Barbed Wire

By Barbara Cole
Ms. Cole tells the story of her personal experience before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Part 1: 20th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall: A Personal Story November 9, 1989
Part 2: Barbed Wire
Part 3: Checkpoint Charlie
Part 4: A Run Through”17th of June”
Part 5: Joy and Disbelief

Barbed Wire
My memory of a divided Germany goes back to my earliest years as the creation of the initial barbed wire divide on August 13, 1961 transpired just two days before my fourth birthday. So it always seemed to be self evident that this country, the homeland of my mother, was and would remain, a land segregated against its will into two diametrically opposite political entities. It simply never occurred to most people that this status quo of a concrete barrier segregating an entire nation would ever end, or at least would ever end in their lifetime. It was a hard reality to accept, but accept it we did as part and parcel of the outcome of an egregious World War, a war like none other. But it was also the outcome of an inevitable economic and political clash between the two super powers of the Soviet Union and the United States. The animosity between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. had simmered below the surface throughout the Second World War and was rendered a secondary concern to the immediate threat of a Nazi domination of Europe. Thus, even the worst of enemies could be made friends, if only they had an even greater common enemy. When that common enemy was defeated, the old animosities would rear their ugly heads to clash again as quickly as the bond that united them disappeared. Germany would be the stage of that clash, and Berlin was the epicenter of it all.

The Wall itself was not only a de facto physical division, but it was symbolic also of a division of ideals, of philosophies, of beliefs about both mankind and the workings of economic systems. The radical day and night differences between Socialism (in the German Democratic Republic, or “East” Germany) and Capitalism (in the Federal Republic of Germany, or “West” Germany) were clearly evident like nowhere else than they were in East and West Berlin. The East was dreary, drab, decrepit and lagging in all forms of development. When one thinks of East Berlin, the color gray is the first thing that comes to mind. The West, on the other hand, was colorful, lively, innovative and dazzled the observer with the fast paced recovery brought on by Finance Minister Ludwig Erhard’s Finance Reforms and the American Marshall Plan. This Marshall Plan not only replaced the worthless Reichs Mark with the Deutsche Mark, but bolstered the country with the necessary funding to rebuild a country shattered by years of allied bombing and warfare. Thus, this Economic Miracle transformed Germany from a wasteland of rubble to the third most powerful economy in the world, in a mere fifteen years. Literally overnight the black
market based on a currency of goods rather than cash turned instead to the newly instituted Deutsche Mark. The “Lucky Strike” standard, in reference to the high desirability of cigarettes as an instrument of trade during the post war black market, was rapidly supplanted by a solid form of currency. Because the Allied powers wanted to adhere to at least the appearance of neutral alliance with the Soviets, they declared that West Berlin would have its own currency. This currency was the new Deutsche Mark with a “B” imprinted on it. This was really a retaliatory move as the Soviets had introduced their own currency into all of Eastern Germany and East Berlin just two days prior to this. When the West Berlin Magistrate declared that both forms of currency would be acceptable in all of Berlin, the Soviet authorities countered claiming that the mere possession of the “B” Deutsche Mark would constitute a criminal offense. Nevertheless, the DM, or Deutsche Mark became the currency of choice in Berlin, until, of course, the Wall was built.

Soviet Premier Stalin understood thoroughly that the western Allied powers consisting of British, French and U.S. troops would not easily abandon this city- an island of Western democracy and capitalism in the middle of the Soviet zone of German territory. Without western forces present, West Berlin would only be swallowed up and absorbed into Soviet political control. When it became apparent that the loyalty of Berliners towards the West would also not waver, the Soviets took the drastic measure of gradually strangling the city’s ground-based traffic. This was a progressive measure but reached its apex in 1948 when transport by road or by rail was
completely blocked by the Soviet troops. The Americans and British then launched “Operation Vittles,” known otherwise more famously as the Berlin Airlift, or Luftbrücke, (air bridge) to sustain Berliners with food and fuel for however long it would take and retain a western presence. For more than a year over five thousand tons of coal and food were flown in each day every day, with planes landing at the rate of one a minute. The existing airport Tempelhof was not adequate for the job and so under the severe logistic circumstances brought on by the blockade, a new airport in the French occupation zone was built, Tegel, to accommodate the need for more runways. Lieutenant Gail Halvorsen endeared himself to Berlin’s children by launching operation “Little Vittles” when he tied chocolate bars to mini parachutes made from torn T-shirts or handkerchiefs tossing them from the departing jets. This started a trend as the continuation of the Schokoladenflieger, chocolate jets, went a long way to engendering a view of Americans as the compassionate troops.

The ending of the Berlin airlift when Soviets finally opened ground transportation routes, led to the continued flight of thousands of East Germans by way of Berlin. The border of East Germany to West had long been sealed off in 1952 leaving West Berlin as the sole out for would-be defectors. From there, they could fly out to the West. Thus, West Berlin became a magnet for the young and the ambitious. Soviet Premier Kruschev soon realized that if he wanted to retain a viable working force, he would have to stop the steady departure of workers from leaving, forcibly. Once the Berlin Wall was erected, (and it started on August 13, 1961 initially with rolls of barbed wire and the presence of untold numbers of uniformed men) the heavy hemorrhaging of largely young, educated and talented defectors was dramatically curtailed. Innovative means of escape flourished to include tunnel building, swimming the Spree River, night time excursions in hot air balloons, ramming the entry gates with fast moving or heavy vehicles, riding under the barrier arms in low sports cars, hiding people in various concealed compartments in vehicles and using false passports. There was no limit to the imagination in creative tactics. Of the people who escaped, some ten percent were those designated to prevent defection: the guards themselves. Many of the individuals involved in these dangerously creative escape tactics did not make it and were shot or arrested. Sometimes Stasi agents (i.e. East German secret police) would feign interest in trying to escape in order to become part of a group planning these measures. Usually at the point of escape, be it via a tunnel or passport falsification, the Stasi agent would denounce the would-be-escapees and many, if not all of them, would end up serving lengthy prison sentences. The extent of Stasi betrayal would not be known until after the Wall fell when Stasi files were put under custody of the West German authorities.

Next: Part 3: Checkpoint Charlie

Part 3:Berlin Wall-Checkpoint Charlie

By Barbara Cole
Ms. Cole tells the story of her personal experience before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Part 1: 20th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall: A Personal Story November 9, 1989
Part 2: Barbed Wire
Part 3: Checkpoint Charlie
Part 4: A Run Through”17th of June”
Part 5: Joy and Disbelief

Checkpoint Charlie
Another instance of brutal Soviet oppression in Eastern Europe took place August the 22nd 1968 in a Soviet invasion of Prague, Czechoslovakia to suppress a Czech uprising. I remember this well because my parents, sister and I were vacationing and had spent the previous night in a chalet in the Austrian countryside, close to the Czech border. My mother blanched when she saw a newspaper photo of a man on the streets of Prague baring his chest to a Soviet tank, challenging the Russian soldiers to shoot, “might as well, you’ve taken everything else.”

I have never seen my mother so visibly frightened. She immediately changed our itinerary to avoid traversing through Soviet occupied territory. So instead of traveling to Berlin as planned, we were to circumvent East Germany altogether and proceed directly north to her best friend’s home in Lübeck. Some 17 years later, in 1985, I would see the photo of that same man in the museum display of Checkpoint Charlie at the Berlin Wall. It was a photo not just of the terror of Russian forceful subordination but an unforgettable piece of my own past, and a candid display of emotion I witnessed in my mother that I had never seen before. She of course, knew what it was like to live under a dictatorship as a quarter Jew, or a non-Aryan in Hitler’s Third Reich. As an eleven year old, it was a past I had not yet addressed.

West Berlin cultural and political life took a dramatic turn in the 1960s and 1970s. Part of this had to do with the special status that West Berlin residents enjoyed. Young men who declared permanent residency there were exempt from compulsory military service. The anti-Vietnam War movement that swept through the university campuses of the United States and Europe took on particularly inflammatory overtones in West Berlin. Dubbed “the 1968ers,” the student demonstrators were anti-authority, anti-capitalism, anti-American and pro Marxism. The Free University of Berlin, a university established in 1948 by the Americans as a reaction to the Russian oppressive measures in Berlin, ended up becoming the U.C. Berkley of Germany, as the hotbed of political protest. My mother’s best friend’s son was a psychology major at this very institution in the early 1970s. When I visited this mother and son in Lübeck in 1975 as well as in 1983, the son would always fill my ear with lengthy anti-American monologues. I always wondered why, if living under the protection of American troops was so unbearable that he didn’t take up residency in East Berlin. But then, of course, he would never travel, speak or protest freely again and he knew it. And how could he be so hateful to a country whose soil he had never stepped foot on?

Closely circumvented by the Wall, West Berliners felt oftentimes isolated if not highly vulnerable as an island of capitalism in the midst of a socialist country. East Germany itself was blockaded from the West with a long wall running north to south that sliced the country in two. Topped with barbed wire, like the Berlin Wall, it was monitored by periodic watchtowers manned by soldiers armed to the teeth with weapons of various caliber. From my grandmother’s town of Bad Kissingen in Bavaria, this border was a mere 30 minute drive away, a fact I was oblivious to in my childhood years. We were more concerned about enjoying our plunge into the beautiful hillside swimming pool than we were about watch towers and barbed wire just a short distance away. One time in the mid-1980s as a graduate student in Aachen, I visited one of my friends from our university dorm who hailed from the border town of Wolfsburg. Built to create the Volkswagen factory and house its workers in the 1930s, Wolfsburg was situated directly on the East German border. My girlfriend and I drove to the fencing and feigned escape from the West to the East, taunting the guard in the watchtower. Perhaps it livened up his day to have two coeds mock his nation’s fortified borders, or maybe we ended up in some official government report that day. Who knows? But I’m sure he never thought for a second that we would really relinquish our freedom for his dreary lifestyle.

Next: Part 4: A Run Through”17th of June”

Part 4:Berlin Wall-A Run Through “17th of June”

By Barbara Cole
Ms. Cole tells the story of her personal experience before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Part 1: 20th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall: A Personal Story November 9, 1989
Part 2: Barbed Wire
Part 3: Checkpoint Charlie
Part 4: A Run Through”17th of June”
Part 5: Joy and Disbelief

A Run Through “17th of June”
My only experience of the Berlin Wall itself was in 1985 when I traveled to West Berlin from Aachen to participate in the city’s marathon. The race was to start at the beginning of West Berlin’s most prominent boulevard entitled the 17th of June, named as such by the West Berlin mayor Ernest Reuter in 1953. For it was on the 17th of June that Soviet tanks and troops brutally suppressed an East German workers’ revolt. The revolt was brought on by a government demand for greater worker productivity at the same rate of pay. If the new norms would not be met, salaries would be decreased. The outcome of the revolt was several hundred deaths, 4,000 arrests, even more massive defections of young people to the West and finally, reluctantly, the government relented and allowed the work norms to remain the same. I was blissfully unaware of this tragic story as I trotted along with the throng of other marathoners down the 17th of June boulevard towards the Siegessäule. Really, I was more concerned about the daunting task I had before me of running 26.2 miles and questioning the adequacy of my preparation. This Siegessäule, or Victory Column, was built of cannons from Germany’s victory over France in the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, thus resulting in Germany’s first unification. Again, oblivious to the past’s story here, we continued on the route of the marathon directly forward around the Siegessäule, until the runners were forcibly veered to turn right as there, directly intercepting us was the colorfully graffitied Berlin Wall. Garish colors and screaming slogans embellished this ridiculous obstruction while stern looking military types were observing us from distant watch towers. Three hundred of these watch towers were strategically situated at various intervals to
oversee the open land prior to the Wall on the eastern side. The guards were ordered to shoot to kill at potential freedom seekers. The Soviets handed over the guard duty to East German militia to do the dirty work of shooting at fellow Germans, because, well, it was part of their duties. They were, after all, only following orders. This was precisely the argument used by Nazi higher ups in the Nüremberg Trials. The second time around, however, this argument would not stand with the German magistrates.

The end of the Berlin Wall and the resulting end of the Cold War neither started in Berlin, nor even in Germany. When Mikhail Gorbachev realized that the old system of highly centralized planning of the economy in the Soviet Union was grossly inefficient, he ushered in the policies of Glasnost (restructuring) and Perestroika (openness). Hungary and Poland were the first to test the waters: Poland established the first free trade union in the Communist Bloc, Solidarity in 1980 and Hungary held the first free elections in March of 1989. While in Germany, protests started not in Berlin, but in Leipzig, at the Protestant church which granted free haven to students who attended prayer vigils and drew up demands for a New Forum to include: free elections, free speech and the right to travel among some of the enumerated desires. When I conducted my doctoral dissertation research in Leipzig in 1997, I stayed in a friend’s apartment with a third floor view of the plaza and the Nicolai Church below where the students had congregated for these vigils. I thought how incongruent, and what a relatively peaceful, innocuous and even idyllic appearing location for the tumultuous birth on Germany’s own soil of its reunification.

Next: Part 5: Joy and Disbelief

Part 5:Berlin Wall-Joy and Disbelief

By Barbara Cole
Ms. Cole tells the story of her personal experience before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Part 1: 20th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall: A Personal Story November 9, 1989
Part 2: Barbed Wire
Part 3: Checkpoint Charlie
Part 4: A Run Through”17th of June”
Part 5: Joy and Disbelief

Joy and Disbelief
On the morning of November 10 1989, I was getting ready for French class at LaSalle Université in Québec, Canada when I noticed a scene on the television screen that was being displayed nonstop: young people on top of a massive wall, either standing or sitting with their feet dangling. While I had been closely following the press releases of the flood of East German youth to West Germany via routes of Hungary and Austria and astounded at the resignation of both the entire East German government and Prime Minister Willi Stoph on November 7th, it still had never occurred to me that the Wall itself would be breeched! I immediately called a friend of mine in Berlin from my Baylor University days. Hermann, otherwise dubbed on campus as “Hermann the German,” had just walked in the door from a night of revelry and gave me the skinny on Berlin. The city had been transformed into one big champagne-popping-kissing-crying-hugging jubilee of joy and disbelief. No apprehension had yet emerged of what all this meant for Germany’s future. The usual German reserve towards strangers, even other Germans, dissolved like butter on a hot skillet. Shop owners and residents were distributing free food and drink as West Berlin rolled into party mode. West Berliners pounded on the East German cars with ecstatic thumps when they drove through the gates of the Wall or sprayed strangers with champagne showers. I begged Hermann to send me the cover pages of Berlin’s newspapers. He sent me not only those, but the Extra editions as well which I have often used as historical artifacts for my students since.

A little over a year after the Wall fell, I visited my friend Hermann in Berlin. At my request we wandered through the historical sections near the Brandenburg Gate and down Unter der Linden. He pointed out to me a segment of the Wall on the banks of the Spree River that still had not been excavated in the massive deconstruction of the concrete barrier. “Are you sure that’s it?” I asked him. “I’m positive,” he said. And so I ambled over to the crumbling Wall remains and picked up a fragment, my own little piece of history. Some seven years later when I was living in Berlin to research for my doctoral dissertation, I noted that there in front of the Brandenburg Gate a large red stripe had been painted demarcating the former placement of the Wall through the entire city. At one section a remnant of the Wall was left standing, along with a solitary watchtower. Ironically, this segment runs directly adjacent and parallel to the bombed out remains of the former Third Reich SS headquarters, where Nazi underlings would routinely torture people to extract information deemed threatening to the regime. Only the basement now remains and has been converted to a museum entitled “Topography of Terror.” The Wall’s famous museum at Checkpoint Charlie has long since been removed. Apart from this solitary strip of Wall only the redline notes its previous presence, and the memories of those who experienced it, from either the East or the West. Strolling across territory formerly known as no man’s land, the territory formerly monitored so closely by machine guns and guards, is a nonchalant act now, done without even a second thought. With this massive barrier gone, we can enjoy this right freely. But it is a right that has become subsumed by other matters and the joy of freedom, yearned for, for so long, is taken over now by other concerns.