'Barbed-wire Sunday': A construction project that divided East & West Berlin
Rodden, John
John Rodden 'BARBED-WIRE SUNDAY' The day Berlin was cut apart The 300 watchtowers, the twenty-two bunkers, the guns, the border guards, the dogs, the death strip, Checkpoint Charlie—they're all...
...And so, most aspiring refugees make their way to East Berlin, where many of the streets and subway stations along the border are guarded casually...
...Protecting" East Germans "for their own good," it amputates historic squares, desecrates graveyards and gardens, deforms entire street fronts into sickly concrete slabs, divides families and friends...
...the West Berlin police restrain West Berliners, who are calling for action...
...But where are the 40,000 Western troops stationed permanently in West Berlin for just such an emergency...
...But it began in stealth and secrecy forty Augusts ago...
...Almost every nation outside the Communist sphere condemns the Wall, which now stands as a propaganda symbol to be exploited by the West...
...Forty years marooned in the desert of the GDR (1949-89) sufficed...
...Its aim: to stop the flight of GDR citizens, especially skilled workers, to West Berlin...
...Politically reliable factory brigades and police worked diligently to close all passageways in the circumference of West Berlin's 103mile border...
...Berliners called the Wall "das Unding"—the monstrosity...
...Once known as the "death strip," the Bernauer Strasse is where East Germans made dramatic leaps to freedom from upperstory windows—and where the largest number died attempting to escape...
...An estimated 533,000 East German troops and paramilitary police stand poised, waiting for trouble...
...John Rodden 'BARBED-WIRE SUNDAY' The day Berlin was cut apart The 300 watchtowers, the twenty-two bunkers, the guns, the border guards, the dogs, the death strip, Checkpoint Charlie—they're all gone now...
...Each day they make the trip to West Berlin, showing their GDR identity cards and special work permits to the bored Grepos {Grenzpolizei, border police...
...Mostly hotel and restaurant employees, their jobs are made lucrative by the uneven exchange rate...
...By midnight, the operation had begun...
...By 4 p.m., as temperatures soar into the low 90s, the incendiary materials for a potential conflagration are heating up along the barbed-wire boundary...
...The West Germans call it the "wall of outrage...
...But this morning is different...
...Is interference with the Wall—which, after all, stands on the GDR side—worth the risk of World War III...
...They remember how their world became, as the writer Christoph Hein put it, "this fenced-in playground that was my home...
...And living standards in the East still lag substantially behind those in the West...
...West Berlin had become a den of terrorists serving imperialist intelligence forces...
...party orders can be enforced with maximum repression—and without concern about stampeding millions into fleeing...
...Now the party has no excuses...
...Early Saturday evening, police were summoned, without explanation, to their barracks...
...And on the anniversary of its erection, Berliners remember...
...The West will act only to prevent a Soviet takeover of West Berlin or to maintain access routes to the city...
...In the early morning hours of Sunday, August 13,1961, this top-secret operation was carried out by the military and police, under the direction of the future head of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), Erich Honecker...
...Official East German radio celebrates this barrier as the "anti-fascist wall of protection...
...Commonweal 10 August 11, 2001...
...Now that the party has built the Wall, can it finally "build socialism...
...Only 420 feet of the Berlin Wall remain—chiefly in the Bernauer Strasse in the city's Wedding district—as a tourist attraction, a memorial, and a sobering reminder...
...But no Eastern German seriously wants the Wall back...
...they have always assumed the day of decision was theirs to choose...
...And so, the Grenzgaenger, like most East Germans, have always thought there would be time to pack their bags...
...indeed, not a single word about the operation had been committed to paper until that Saturday evening...
...Overnight, the torrent of East German refugees drops to a trickle...
...The date would go down in German history without any need to mention the year: everyone knew the referent...
...The Communist Party (SED) has apparently found a way to secure its future—by walling its people in...
...it is up to economic planners to prove what they can do...
...The Iron Curtain had literally been built...
...Given that every day up to one thousand people were fleeing to the West, the lifeblood of the GDR was flowing into—and then out of— Berlin, an open wound in the side of the Soviet bloc...
...People would begin to regard East Germany as their Heimat (homeland)—since they now had no choice...
...The police keep East Berliners well back from the ongoing construction...
...Today, many Germans maintain that a wall continues to divide Germans—a psychological and economic wall...
...For almost a decade, East Germany's 600-mile border has been sealed by barbed wire and twelvefoot-high electrified fencing...
...GDR citizens were, in effect, being kidnapped by "slave traders," West German recruiting agents who "lured" them into the West, where they were forcibly inducted into the West German army or made to work in Western munitions factories...
...The border is closed...
...D John Rodden is the author, most recently, of The History of East German Education, 1945-99, forthcoming from Oxford University Press...
...Erected in 1961, the Wall stood for twenty-eight years before crumbling in the face of mass protests in the "unbloody revolution" of November 1989...
...In their barracks...
...The planning group, under Honecker's direction, issued envelopes marked "Top Secret" to all company commanders...
...just inside the fence is a strip of land about fifty yards wide, cleared of brush, dotted with mines, and covered by machine guns in high watchtowers...
...For by walling in the population the regime has undermined the endlessly cited alibi with which it rationalized failure...
...Until 10 a.m., no more than twenty top advisors knew of the plan...
...August 13: barbed-wire Sunday...
...But Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev's incognito tour, in a Mercedes-Benz limousine, through prosperous West Berlin in late July finally convinced him that Ulbricht was right...
...The Wall has saved the GDR, which has lost more than 4 million citizens since 1945...
...Soviet troops, under the command of Marshal Ivan Koniev, were placed on full alert...
...Secrecy was vital: the word "wall" was never spoken...
...That's how the story of the Wall ends, in a wave of hoopla and high spirits...
...Walter Ulbricht, SED chief, had long urged the Wall on his Warsaw Pact allies, who worried that such an expedient might trigger World War III and, in any case, would become a burdensome anti-Socialist propaganda symbol...
...Die Grenze ist geschlossenl" people scream to each other in the early morning stillness...
...As the Grenzgaenger stumble home and East Berliners awaken to the nightmare, it is as if a tremendous howl—the anguished wail of cornered, trapped animals—has gone up throughout East Berlin...
...The total of escapes on barbed-wire Sunday numbers no more than a few hundred, and no more than a few dozen on August 14...
...And 17 million people were now trapped...
...At 4 a.m., West Berlin radio issued the first panicky news reports of the commotion in the streets...
...Die Mauer im Kopf"—the wall in our heads—persists, given that Easterners remain far more supportive of Socialist ideals than Westerners...
...The events of November 1989 provided the sobering, definitive answer—a resounding "no...
...But a few thousand are Grenzgaenger (border crossers), who work in the "other" Berlin...
...Allied military officials have confined soldiers to their quarters...
...Commonweal 9 August 17,2001 Yes, finally, believed SED leaders, citizens would cooperate with the government and accept that their future and the GDR's were the same...
...And, as the Warsaw Pact allies feared, the political cost is enormous...
...There is little the West can do...
...In the months to come, the "anti-fascist wall of protection" will ultimately snake for twenty miles through the heart of Berlin, slashing its way across highways and back alleys, inflicting its schizophrenia on whatever it traverses...
...Here the task of reaching the West is comparatively easy: one can cut through a backyard, or hop the subway and ride it for a stop or two...
...The Wall was thrown up with brutal Prussian efficiency...
...Stasi agents (secret police) immediately took up posts at all major intersections between the Soviet and Western sectors...
...For now the East German work force is captive...
...They were wrong—and now it is too late...
...August 13...
...They remember the fury and the helplessness of suddenly feeling caged in their grey little nation—seemingly forever...
...GDR planners can, at long last, calculate their economic outlays and manpower levels, free from worry that—tomorrow or next week—half of the skilled workers, the technical elite, and the youth will hop the subway and head West...
...The scene ran something like this: As the sun peeks over the horizon on a beautiful Sunday morning, most East Berliners sleep on, unaware that construction of a wall has begun...
...but it has also upped the ante...
...Now, finally, the GDR population will stabilize...
...At 1 a.m., East German troops arrived at border points to unload barbed wire, concrete posts, stone blocks, picks, and shovels...
...The Western media, however, would choose a more ominous term—"the barbed-wire state"—and dub August 13 Stacheldrahtsonntag (barbed-wire Sunday...
...Half a million Berliners, East and West, are massed along the sector line...
...Before it was razed, at least 588 people died fleeing the GDR— including 25 border guards...
...No subway cars are running westward...
...But Ulbricht willingly pays that price...
...Treating massive emigration as a cause rather than an effect of their policies, SED officials now deprive themselves of the "explanation" for their every blunder...
...Grepos turn back Grenzgaenger at every checkpoint...
...Overnight, their world has changed, utterly...
Vol. 128 • August 2001 • No. 14
