This is the fourth in a series of stories from our recent trip to Germany and Austria. You can read part one here, part two here, and part three here.
One of the top venues on my Germany/Austria bucket list was the Berlin Wall Memorial, which is adjacent to several blocks of Bernauer Strasse.
When the wall fell in 1989, it opened up relations between people in East and West Berlin that had, in many cases, been torn apart for a generation. As I walked through the park that now occupies the space which once defined a no-man’s land, I was filled with joy seeing people hanging out on the grass, picnicking, playing with their kids, or just reading.
How different that view was from the block across the street from the Documentation Center, which serves as a museum for the Memorial. From the top of its tower, I could see what it looked like when the barriers were up. There was an inner wall about six feet tall that I could easily scale, but if I did, I would be in the “death strip,” where I would have had to contend with rows of barbed wire and guards in towers who would shoot first and ask no questions later. Should I manage to survive that, the outer wall was ten feet tall, with a rounded top that would make scaling it even more difficult.
Inside the Documentation Center there are first-person videos of people whose lives were torn asunder by the erection of the wall in 1961. East Berliners who commuted to jobs in West Berlin could no longer go to work. Friends and families who had lived a couple of blocks away from each other could no longer communicate. Grandparents couldn’t hug their grandchildren. Lifelong friends couldn’t get together for a drink. People who lived in the apartment buildings next to the wall were forced to resettle elsewhere when their doors and windows were bricked up.
The exhibition even includes video of a man who was forced into the East German Army and assigned as a guard in a tower on the inside wall. His orders were to shoot anyone who breached the area, but the very thought gave him such extreme anxiety that after a couple of weeks — in which no one climbed over — he begged his superiors to move him to another job. He ended up a low-level clerk pushing paper around in some windowless facility, but he was able to go home and sleep at night.
Naturally, a resistance movement grew to help people escape from east to west. The Documentation Center says that in the twenty-eight years the wall stood, over 100,000 people tried to escape East Berlin, but only about five thousand made it over the wall. Many others were killed by East German police.
Several tunnels were dug, including one that stretched from an empty bakery in East Berlin to a former outhouse in West Berlin, nearly 500 feet away. When it was completed, fifty-seven people used it to escape before the Stasi (East German secret police) discovered and closed it. Today, there’s a path on the surface that shows the original route of Tunnel 57, as it was called, with a plaque commemorating its use.
This all happened in my lifetime. I wasn’t old enough to know about the wall when it was first built, but I vividly remember the Wednesday night it came down — November 9, 1989. It happened to be my wife’s birthday, and we had gone out to dinner to celebrate. When we got back in the car after our meal, we heard radio reports about this physical manifestation of the Cold War being demolished. We rushed home, turned on CNN, and watched all night in amazement as Germans from both sides of the wall climbed atop to celebrate, chipping away with picks and axes. Naturally, it was the dominant topic on my radio show the next morning.
Entire panels of the original wall are still scattered throughout Berlin, but they are among the few remaining remnants of a time when political differences literally tore a city apart, creating havoc and the loss of so many lives.
That’s why there was something satisfying about seeing families gathered in the sun in the park adjacent to that location on the day I was there — enjoying freedom in a place where it was once forbidden.
I’ll have more stories from our trip Monday.