I have a few rocks sitting on the mantle of my fireplace, gathering dust. Technically they’re
pieces of construction aggregate, but it’s easier to just call them rocks.
They’re pretty ugly, but I keep them where I can see them because of their
provenance, and every now and then I’ll pick up a piece and look at it. I've
been doing that a bit more often lately because 25 years ago today as I write this, my friends
and I hammered those rocks out of the Berlin Wall.
The Wall was fascinating. I lived in Germany for nine
years during the 1980s and the early ‘90s, so I got to see a lot of the Wall first-hand. It was obscene. It was grotesque. It was morbid and macabre. It was a monument to the worst impulses of humanity. Whenever I’d go to Berlin I’d
spend hours lingering near it. I pissed on it. I taunted the guards who
patrolled it. Part of my job was to blow up the people who lived on the other
side of it. And on New Year’s Eve 1989 I stood on top of it, my coat pockets
filled with the rubble that I had hammered from it. Later that night, I ran
through the streets of an unrestricted Berlin like a mad banshee, alongside throngs
of noisy, happy people from all over the world. I still remember most of what
happened that night, but now those memories are 25 years old, and I think that
I’d better write them down before they fade any further.
I moved to Stuttgart West Germany in the fall of 1983, at a
time when the Cold War was still very cold. It’s silly, I know, but sometimes I
get a bit misty-eyed and nostalgic for those good old days, when the good guys
were good and the bad guys were over there, on the other side of the Iron
Curtain and that god-awful Wall. In the fall of 1983 the Soviet Union and NATO
were in the process of pointing new and more frightening nuclear missiles at one another. I was assigned to an engineering team
that was working on the NATO deployment, so the whole us-versus-them,
good-guy-bad-guy notion was a part of my daily working environment. Because of
my job it took me a while before I ever managed to visit Berlin. Back then, the old German capital was still technically an occupied city. After World War
II Berlin was carved up into four sectors, and each was managed by one of the four
major allied powers: England, France, the Soviet Union, and the United States. East Berlin was of course the Soviet sector. Surrounded
as it was by East Germany, getting to West Berlin meant taking a
special train, driving along a designated corridor that was dotted with Soviet
checkpoints, or flying there on one of the allies’ "flag" airlines: Air France,
British Airways, Pan Am, or Aeroflot. Poor old Lufthansa was not allowed to fly
to Berlin in those days.
Some of my memories are indeed fading, but I’m pretty sure
that my first visit to Berlin was in September of 1986. A group of friends from
the U.S. Army base where I worked were going to run in the Berlin Marathon, and I tagged
along because I wanted to see the city. We flew from Stuttgart to Berlin on Pan
Am, and as soon as we could, my girlfriend and I headed to see The Wall. Even though I'd read a fair amount about it, and seen pictures of it, that first real sight of it was still a shock. No picture could do it justice, and
no words can really describe the feeling of seeing it as it was. It was simply too
monstrous. Standing next to it, it looked so much higher than it did in
pictures. The no-man’s land between the double walls was more intimidating than we’d imagined.
I remember that the day was gray and a little foggy, much as it is in this Wikipedia image:
We were in the Grosser
Tiergarten, which is roughly Berlin’s equivalent of New York City’s Central
Park. We walked along a path in dense woods that abruptly ended in graffiti-covered
concrete. I have a very strong memory of the moment that I emerged from those
woods to stare at the wall. My immediate impulse was to urinate on it, and so I
did. I asked my girlfriend to take my picture, and she obliged. That image is
still one of my favorites:
If I remember right, the picture was taken along a section
of the wall just south of the Brandenburg Gate, on what is now Ebertstrasse. From
there we walked north to the Brandenburg Gate, where the wall crossed the
Strasse des 17 Juni, the city’s main artery. The double walls were much lower there so
as not to obstruct the view, but the no-mans land between them was also much wider and more heavily
guarded. I was young and feeling brash, so I started yelling at the East German
guards in one of the towers. They immediately trained their binoculars on me,
and I felt very satisfied with myself. Then one of them held up his rifle so
that I could see it, and my girlfriend wisely urged me to stop, which I did.
It was easy to fall in love with Berlin. In spite of its sad
history, the western sectors were vibrant and very much alive, and the fact
that the city had been hacked into pieces somehow made the place all the
more intriguing. Because my friends and I were contractors working for the U.S.
military, we also had ID cards that afforded us special privileges. We could
ride public transportation for free. We could stay at U.S.-run hotels for
practically nothing; the best of those was at Tempelhof Airport. And, we could
cross Checkpoint Charlie for day trips into East Berlin on a government bus almost without
being challenged. I've written "almost" because there was a perfunctory border check; We still had to display our government identification cards to Russian soldiers. They didn't board our bus, so we were instructed by our guides to hold our ID cards to the bus window, to stare straight ahead, and to not make eye contact with the Soviet soldiers. The first time that I crossed I couldn't resist violating that last directive. When I saw a big round Russian military hat looming outside of my window, I cast its owner a sideways glance. I saw that he was just a kid, and I smiled at him. He smiled at me, and I regretted that it was my job to blow him up.
I found East Berlin to be exceedingly interesting. The center of the city was blighted by some pretty hideous post-war-east-bloc architecture, yet most of the beautiful old buildings in Berlin that survived the war were in the east as well. The Pergamon Museum was amazing in spite of having been pillaged by the Russians. I saw fascinating rituals of everyday life; One that I remember quite well took place at a shoe store near the Fernsehturm (TV tower) at Alexanderplatz. A long line of patrons waited outside of an entrance that was like an airlock – a double door with a tiny vestibule in between. As one customer left, another was let into the "airlock," and then into the store. Only a very few customers at a time were allowed inside, and only a small number of shoes were on display. The shoes were locked inside glass cases, and each customer was escorted by a salesperson. When a customer wanted to see a pair, the accompanying sales clerk would unlock the case and present the shoes for examination. The entire scene was very odd, and it made me wonder what an East German jewelry store was like, but I never found one.
In the west we could buy a few hundred East German
Deutschmarks at bargain-basement prices, but in the east we had a hard time
spending it all because everything was so cheap. The food was terrible, but the
beer was still German, and it was very good.
I started going back to Berlin as often as I could. On one trip I saw a scene full of pathos that I'm unlikely to ever forget. My girlfriend and I spent the day in East Berlin, but instead of exercising our government privileges, we'd decided to visit the east like "normal" people. We crossed Checkpoint Charlie on foot. Late in the evening on our way back, we saw a middle-aged couple - man and a woman saying goodbye to one another on the eastern side of Checkpoint Charlie. After an embrace he walked back to the west, and she stood in the glaring light beneath the guard towers on the east side, watching him until he disappeared. I wondered then how often they'd repeated that scene; Now I can't help but wonder what happened to them in the years since. I hope that they managed to have a happy life together; I'm going to try and convince myself that they did.
In the
fall of 1989 I planned to meet some friends from London in Berlin for New
Year’s Eve; by then we’d decided that it was our party town of choice. When we made
our plans that year we had no idea what kind of a party it would turn out to
be.
Even though we couldn't have predicted how fast the changes would come, by the summer of 1989 we all knew that something was
up. Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms in the Soviet Union were well under way, and
the cold war was beginning to thaw. A year earlier the Soviet Union and the
United States signed a treaty that would eventually eliminate the missile
systems that I was working on. Every
night on German news we saw filmed reports of East Germans streaming out of the
east block through Hungary and Czechoslovakia, then into Austria, and
eventually to West Germany. Erich Honecker, the old hard-line East German
chancellor who was one of the Berlin Wall’s staunchest defenders, was forced to
resign in October. East Germany was bleeding to death, and Honecker’s resignation
was a desperate measure to stanch the flow. Just a few months earlier he’d
boasted that the “Wall will still be standing in 50 and even in 100 years…” Only days before his
resignation he kissed Gorbachev in Berlin during celebrations to mark East Germany’s 40th
anniversary. It turned out to be his country's kiss of death.
On November 9th 1989 I was sitting in an airport
lounge in Norfolk Virginia, waiting to catch a flight. I remember looking up at
a television monitor, and seeing the first images of people standing on top of the Berlin Wall:
Like everyone else, I was incredulous. I knew that I had
to get there as fast as I could. Something big was happening, and I wanted to
be a part of it. If I hadn’t been in the U.S. for a series of meetings, I’d
have caught the next plane to Berlin. I called my London friends. Could we get
there sooner? We all wanted to, but in the end pragmatism won out, and we
decided to stick to our original plan and meet there for New Year’s Eve.
I arrived in Berlin on the morning of December 31st,
and I met my friends from London at the airport. As soon as we checked into our
hotel, we headed straight to Checkpoint Charlie. Along the way we met up with a
German friend, Tom, who lived in West Berlin. By the end of December the East
Germans had managed to restore some semblance of order, and they were
controlling passage through the wall. Just like the old days, there were
designated crossing points, albeit with some new ones where the wall had been
knocked down. All of those were reserved for German citizens; Foreigners who
wanted to visit East Berlin still had to pass through Checkpoint Charlie on
Friedrichstrasse. The crush of people was huge, and we made a lot of friends
from everywhere while we waited to cross. I became especially popular with the
people around me when I flashed a wad of East German cash – leftovers from
previous trips. I remember feeling like a big shot, and I promised to buy a few
rounds when we made it to the east.
I don’t remember how long it took us to get across. We were slowed because there was a rule that every foreigner who crossed into East Berlin had to exchange at least twenty West German Deutschmarks for east marks at the ridiculous-but-official exchange rate of one-to-one. Once we got in, we tried to find a Kneipe
(pub) to get a drink. I seem to remember
that it was a frustrating experience; every place that we went was overflowing
with people. I do recall that in one bar-restaurant a West German woman
complained loudly to her companion about their waiter: "He’s not serving us
because he’s lazy and doesn't want to work!" to which the poor, beleaguered boy
responded in his best and most patronizing tone, "You’re right, madam. I am
lazy. You’re wasting your time here, so go back to the west!" Or words to that effect; it was a long time
ago.
Eventually we headed to the Brandenburg Gate on the east side,
because that’s where everybody wanted to be, of course. The scene there was
surreal; tens of thousands of people were milling about. In the east side wall a passage had been opened just a week earlier. Like the other crossings it was supposed to be used only by German citizens. I can’t remember if any guards
were around, but no one paid us any attention anyway. We all swarmed through the
hole and into the section of no-mans-land between the walls where the Gate
stood. Dozens of people were climbing to the top of the Gate itself; we
continued to the wall on the west side. There were thousands of people climbing
on it, over it, and hammering away its face. Even if all of my other memories fade, I’ll never forget that sound - the dull thud-thud-thud of those thousands of hammers.
Of course we hadn't thought about bringing any tools of our
own, so we borrowed hammers from obliging neighbors and began to fill our own
pockets with pieces of the wall that we knocked loose. It wasn't easy; the aggregate
mostly splintered into small fragments as we hit it. Tom handed me a
particularly large bit that he’d managed to dislodge; it’s the "rock" in the
photograph at the beginning of this article. Since it came from an east-facing
wall its surface is painted a pale yellow. The color was designed to increase
the contrast and therefore the visibility of any object – I should say body –
that stood in front of it. I have to smile now whenever I see pieces of the
wall that are brightly painted; I’m pretty sure that most of that paint was
added long after the wall was torn down.
One of my London friends, Wendy, was the first of our group
to climb up onto the top of the wall. Somewhere in a shoe box I'm sure that I have a
picture of her standing there; If ever I can find it I'll add it to this post. Eventually
we all joined her, scaling the wall with a little help from people above and below. At
the risk of sounding corny, I have to try to express how exhilarating it was to
stand on top of that infernal thing, that wall, and to stand alongside so many
of the people whose lives it had interrupted for so long.
Eventually we climbed down to the west side. It didn't
escape us that we’d just "escaped" from East Berlin – Something that would have
gotten us shot just two months earlier. We headed back to our hotel to prepare
for the evening ahead – Which of course meant drinking as much as we could
manage, and then stocking ourselves with as much booze as we could carry, which
really wasn't very much. We weren't very well organized.
Sometime around 9:00 o’clock that night we hailed a taxi and
piled in. The driver asked us where we wanted to go. We told him the
Brandenburg Gate, of course, and he groaned. "Get us as close as you can," we
told him, and he did a credible job. By the time we got there the place was a
sea of humanity; it’s pointless for me to even guess how many people were
there. This short video may give you some idea of what it was like.
Our group maneuvered down the Strasse des 17 Juni as far as
we could, and we camped at a spot within several hundred meters of the
Brandenburg Gate. We shared our meager booze supply with the people around us.
They came quite literally came from all over the world – I remember a few from
New Zealand, and Australia, and France and – I wish that I could remember them
all. Nobody could really tell with much precision what time it was, and
nobody really cared. The party carried on until at some point, the collected
mass decided that it was close enough to midnight. The fireworks increased in
intensity, and everyone began cheering. This YouTube video shows what it was
like; the cameraman, Giorgio Magarò, must have been standing fairly close to where we were. The Brandenburg Gate scene at midnight begins at around 1:45:
All of that lasted for quite a while, as I recall. Finally a
mad rush began down the Strasse des 17
Juni and then on to Unter den Linden
– everyone was headed east. We all started running, and everyone was hollering.
We poured through the gaps in the wall, and it was at the moment that it felt
as though the division between east and west had finally, completely vanished.
I became separated from my friends, but it didn't matter. I
took up with a group of East Berliners, and we ran helter skelter through the
streets for most of the night. I’m pretty sure that we ended up on the other
side of the Spree in the area near Alexanderplatz and the TV tower, but I
really don’t remember. We were more euphoric than drunk; though a few bottles were passed around I really don’t think that
we had the chance to drink very much as the night wore on. Eventually I got a ride
back to the west in a Trabant,
or at least I think that I did. To have finished
the evening with a ride in East Germany’s quintessential symbol of industrial
mediocrity seems a little too romantic, so it's possible that 25 years on, my memory is playing tricks on me. But there’s little harm in letting me
believe that it happened, now is there?
When I got back to the west I found a pay phone, stuffed
all of my change into it, and I called my girlfriend, now my wife, who was in
Canada at the time. I tried to tell her how amazing it all was, but we didn't
get to talk for very long before my money ran out. I stumbled back to my hotel
room, which was already packed with snoring bodies, and I slept like a dead
man.
The following year my girlfriend and I made it back to Berlin.
Most of the wall was still standing, and I couldn't resist striking a warrior
pose in one of its gaps:
I meant the picture to be tongue-in-cheek; I never felt
as though any of the military pressure that the west put on the east had much
of anything to do with the destruction of the old East Block; I think, really,
that the time had simply come when it was no longer possible to contain an entire
people. Mikhail Gorbachev recognized that; his successors would be wise to do so as well.
One of the few regrets that I have about my trips to Berlin is that I never got to see the original version of Dmitri Vrubel’s famous mural - The one that recreates another kiss of death - This one between Leonid Brezhnev and Erich Honecker. It was based on a photograph of them at celebrations of East Germany's 30th anniversary in 1979. It was badly defaced and it deteriorated during the 1990s; eventually it was erased and recreated with more durable paint. Unfortunately, the recreation appears to have omitted an inscription that, to me, describes East Germany’s suffering more succinctly than anything else that I've ever read. Translated from German, it said:
My God, Help Me to Survive This Deadly Love.
And that is precisely what East Germany did. I'll always be grateful that I was there to see it happen.
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