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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780752466989 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The History Press |
| Publication date: | 07/31/2011 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 480 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
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The Wall
The People's Story
By Christopher Hilton
The History Press
Copyright © 2011 Christopher HiltonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7524-6698-9
CHAPTER 1
Fault Line
The construction workers of our capital are for the most part busy building apartment houses, and their working capacities are fully employed to that end. Nobody intends to put up a wall.
Walter Ulbricht, June 1961
Looking back on it, the mixture of madness and dreams seems logical, with each step leading inexorably to the next but, even so, dividing a major European city by a wall and for twenty-eight years killing anyone who tried to cross it without the right papers still stretches credulity and probably always will; but this is what happened to Berlin and this is what happened to ordinary human beings who lived and died with it.
The credulity is stretched even further because the division wasn't a neat thing: not Paris split either side of the Champs-Élysées, not London camped on either bank of the Thames, not New York riven into East and West of the Avenue of the Americas to make two separate, sovereign countries who hated each other. No: Berlin was bisected along ancient, interwoven, interlocking district boundaries so that the division zigged and zagged through sixty-two major roads, over tram tracks, round a church and through its cemetery, across the frontage of a railway station and, stretching the credulity to its absolute limit, clean through the middle of one house. Each day an estimated 500,000 people had circulated quite normally through what would become the two hostile, alien lands. To take a random year, every day in 1958 some 74,645 bus, tram and underground tickets were sold in the West to people from the East, and that didn't include the extensive overground rail network. Some 12,000 Eastern children went to school in the West.
There was a street called Bernauer Strasse where the apartments stood in the East but the road in the West so that, by opening their front doors, residents stepped from one side to the other. There had been the subway network (U-Bahn), a spider's web, serving the whole city, and the overground train network (S-Bahn) fulfilling exactly the same function. Both were cut by the wall but still overlapped. There had been the sewage system, and electricity, and telephones, and postal districts as common to both sides as they would be in a capital city united since (depending on which date seems conclusive to which historian) at least 1230. There had been waste disposal and burying the dead and walking in the woods on a Sunday afternoon.
No city had ever been subjected to anything like this: a son being refused permission to attend his mother's funeral because he happened to live on the wrong side of the street.
Nor was that all. The dividing line represented the exact point where the two dominant political and financial systems of the twentieth century, each the opposite of the other, met. At Check-point Charlie in 1961 a jolly East German Border Guard called Hagen Koch had been given a bucket of white paint and a brush and told to paint a line across the road. It was, maybe, 6 inches wide but it held apart the equivalent of two tectonic plates: precisely this side was where the power of the United States and its allies ended, precisely that where it ended for the Soviet Union and its allies. That both were immensely armed with nuclear weapons, and that escalation towards their use could well begin with some trivial incident somewhere like here, made Hagen Koch's line a defining place. For three decades people came to gaze at it and what lay around it, and were frightened. They were not wrong.
What logic, what inescapable steps, led to this – both the beginning of it in 1961 and the end of it in 1989? The journey to the answer is itself tortuous and improbable but I am persuaded that without undertaking it – even short-stepping it, as we shall be – you cannot understand why the watchtowers went up or, those twenty-eight years later, why you could have owned one provided only you could take it away and give it a good home.
This book moves in two dimensions, background and foreground. The background is the story of the wall itself and the foreground is what it did to ordinary people. To understand that properly you need the context and the logic. Here it is.
When the war in Europe ended, at 2.41 a.m. on 7 May 1945, central Berlin resembled a moonscape, and that's as good a place as any to set out on the journey. There's a phrase which lingers down the years like an echo of the wrath which had been visited upon the city, Year Zero, as if, now that everything had been destroyed, the trek back to civilisation must begin from here. Few Berliners thought like that yet, because the future meant surviving until tomorrow.
The bombing by the Royal Air Force and the U.S. Army Air Force broke Berlin – not the spirit of the people but most of the infrastructure and a high percentage of the buildings. Statistics are useless to convey the scale. Imagine, instead, gazing down on an area of 2 or 3 square miles and every building there like a blackened, hollowed, broken tooth. Now imagine what that looked like from ground level.
The Soviet armies reached the city in the spring of 1945 and, fighting street by street, conquered whatever resistance remained. There are mute echoes of that still in the East, where the old stone buildings bear the scattered pockmarks of gunfire.
This Prussian city of broad avenues and heavy architecture, cathedrals and churches, embassies and opera houses, hospitals and universities, pavement cafés and naughty nightclubs – this widowed place – had been home to 4 million confident, cheeky people who'd walked the walk and talked the talk of a capital city; and now ate horsemeat if they could find it.
There's another phrase which lingers, Alles für 10 Zigaretten. It was the name of a stage review but it captured the plight of what remained of the 4 million: 'Everything for 10 cigarettes'. Money – the Reichsmark – had no value and the currency passed to cigarettes.
Hitler never liked Berlin but, from taking power in 1933, ruled from the Chancellery, a Prussian building – heavy and classical – in the city centre. Dictators and diplomats came to its courtyard and walked down its marble gallery to the intimidating office where Hitler would inform them what he had decided for the world. The Chancellery was a partial ruin now: not a broken tooth but a badly beaten face. Its landscaped gardens, where his body had been burnt on the afternoon of 30 April, were cratered and grotesquely strewn with debris like a mini-moonscape.
Now the Soviets were here in their baggy uniforms, and the absolute power had passed to them. Soon enough they'd bring the exiled German communists back from Mother Russia and exercise the absolute power through them.
Major-General Wilhelm Mohnke, who'd commanded the government area, would remember after his capture being driven out of the city and 'coming towards us column after column, endlessly, were the Red Army support units. I say columns, but they resembled more a cavalcade scene from a Russian film. Asia on this day was moving into the middle of Europe, a strange and exotic panorama. There were countless Panya wagons, drawn by horse or pony, with singing soldiers perched high on bales of straw.' He added: 'Finally came the Tross or quartermaster elements. These resembled units right out of the Thirty Years War [between Catholics and Protestants at the beginning of the seventeenth century]. All of those various wagons and carts were now loaded and overloaded with miscellaneous cumbersome booty – bureaux, and poster beds, sinks and toilets, barrels, umbrellas, quilts, rugs, bicycles, ladders. There were live chickens, ducks, and geese in cages.'
On the first days after the surrender, many soldiers in Berlin sampled the victors' spoils and no woman was safe. Four decades later, a sophisticated lady summed this up in a phrase: 'And the Russians had their fun.' She looked away when she said it. A shiver of fear had run through Berlin, and nobody knows for how many women – young, old – it was justified; but a lot.
The Germans had fought a barbaric war in the East and now the barbarism had come back to them.
The German communist leader was called Walter Ulbricht, a dour Saxon with a Lenin goatee beard who'd spent the war in Moscow. Several of his comrades had disappeared in the night as Stalin carried out mini-purges but he had survived by unquestioning loyalty and tacking in the wind. One of the men who would accompany Ulbricht, Wolfgang Leonhard, has described it graphically: 'At six o'clock in the morning of 30th April, 1945, a bus stopped in a little side street off Gorky Street, in front of the side entrance of the Hotel Lux. It was to take the ten members of the Ulbricht Group to the airport. We climbed aboard in silence.' They were driven to Moscow airport and flown to Germany in an American Douglas aeroplane.
On the drive into Berlin 'the scene was like a picture of hell – flaming ruins and starving people shambling about in tattered clothing; dazed German soldiers who seemed to have lost all idea of what was going on; Red Army soldiers singing exultantly, and often drunk'. The Berliners, waiting in long queues to get water from pumps, looked 'terribly tired, hungry, tense and demoralised'.
Ulbricht, by nature a bureaucrat and organiser, set about creating an administration, and it would include non-communists to make it seem fully representative. He told Leonhard: 'It's quite clear – it's got to look democratic, but we must have everything in our control.'
The communism which the Ulbricht group brought was based exactly on the Soviet model and, with Stalin watching in all his suspicion and malevolence, would not deviate from that regardless of whatever happened. Leonhard put it this way. 'When he [Ulbricht] came to laying down the current political line, he did it in a tone which permitted no contradictions.'
The Soviet model which Ulbricht brought was already completed in every fundamental, because Stalin had done that through the 1920s and 1930s. It controlled everything. Built onto that was a further factor. No East European communist government came to power with the legitimacy of winning free elections, and each was pathologically suspicious of its own citizens. The logic of this, too, would play itself out.
Germany was no stranger to communism: at one point before Hitler seized power the Communist Party had 100 seats in the Reichstag. Many working-class Berlin districts remained solidly communist all the way to Ulbricht arriving. They believed that communism was a scientific path to peace, prosperity and justice for all and represented the only sane future. They had experienced market economics and had their life savings destroyed in the financial crash of 1929 (when inflation became so intense that diners paid for their meals in restaurants course by course because the price was rising as they ate). They had experienced democracy and it had brought them Hitler. Communism looked very attractive as the women of Berlin formed chains and began to clear the mountains of rubble by passing bricks from hand to hand, and the trek back to civilisation began.
Germany was carved into four Zones: Soviet, American, British and French; and, mirroring that, Berlin was carved into four Sectors. The Soviet Union took the east of the city (and its 1 million inhabitants), the Americans, British and French fashioning their Sectors out of the west (and its 2.2 million). In retrospect, and even knowing where the logic would go, it is extremely difficult to imagine how such an arrangement could have endured untroubled, because Berlin lay 130 kilometres inside the Soviet Zone. Air corridors were formally agreed but land links were not. The autobahn from West Germany to West Berlin stretched like an umbilical cord and Stalin could sever it at any moment he wished.
The Americans, British and French should have taken over their Sectors as soon as the war ended but the Soviets stalled them and it didn't happen until 4 July 1945. A Kommandatura was set up by the four occupying powers and the official statement said 'the administration of the "Greater Berlin" area will be directed by an Inter-Allied Governing Authority ... and will consist of four Commandants, each of whom will serve in rotation as Chief Commandant. They will be assisted by a technical staff which will supervise and control the activities of the local German organs [organisations].'
The population had other concerns. A 10-year-old called Peter Schultz, who would go on to become a distinguished radio reporter, lived with an uncle. 'I remember destroyed houses and no traffic at all except the military. I remember a jeep with a very big black American sergeant and he lifted me onto it and he gave me American-Canadian white bread. This is all I can remember about West Berlin in 1945. It was important that I got white bread: American soldiers lived downstairs and they gave me a lot of bread, for me and for the whole family. So we had bread and – this was the most important thing – white bread. I will never forget that. I can still taste it.'
In April 1946 the Communist Party merged with the Social Democrats and became the SED, which would govern East Germany throughout its life, but there were elections that autumn and the SED did badly against the other surviving parties. In Greater Berlin they finished third with 19.8 per cent of the vote and, from this moment on, would never allow another free election in the area under their jurisdiction. There would be further elections, however, on 18 March – 1990.
In retrospect, the Berlin Agreement carried too many anomalies and too many practical difficulties, heightened when the political differences between the Soviet Union and the Allies reasserted themselves as the warmth of shared purpose – defeating Hitler – iced over. That Berlin was an island deep inside the Soviet Sector made it a nerve centre between what would become NATO in the west and the Warsaw Pact in the east.
R.J. Crampton sums it up neatly:
By 1947 the British and American Zones had separated almost entirely from the Soviet and in March of that year the division of Europe into two hostile blocs became much more rapidly focused. The communists left the governing coalitions of France and Italy, the Truman doctrine warned against communist attempts to expand into Greece, and in the summer the Soviets insisted that the east European states should not take Marshall Aid. In May 1948 the new currency introduced into the three western zones of Germany provoked the Soviet blockade of Berlin and the Berlin airlift.
To pass across this terrain citing the steps is all too tempting, but it misses the human element entirely. A British Lieutenant-Colonel, W. Byford-Jones, visited the city in 1947 and wrote:
Epidemics were rampant. The water supply was polluted – there were 521 major breaks in pipes of over 21 inches in the British Sector alone, and 80 per cent of the sewage was not reaching the sewage works. All but one of the 44 hospitals in the British Sector were badly damaged, and the 5,817 beds available were all filled, with long waiting lists. There were no medical supplies, not even anaesthetics, heart stimulants, or sulphonamides. Food was poor and at starvation level....
Bodo Radtke, a Berliner who was to become a leading East German journalist, says that 'it wasn't until 1948 that you felt things were getting back to normal. Every day you saw or heard something: one day, two U-Bahn stations are open again, very good, then three stations, then the bridge over the river Spree is open, oh very good.'
On 20 March 1948, the Soviet delegates walked out of the Allied Control Council and never went back. They were unhappy at how Marshall Aid was affecting Soviet influence throughout Germany and, in an effort to force the Allies from West Berlin, Stalin threatened to sever the umbilical cord: from 1 April road, rail and canal traffic was hindered crossing the Soviet Zone to West Berlin. On 18 June, to Stalin's fury, the west replaced the worthless Reichsmark with the new Deutschmark. Almost immediately it brought an end to the black markets and stimulated industry.
The British and principally the American air forces were able to sustain West Berlin by an astonishing airlift which lasted until May 1949. The Allied pilots, some of whom had been bombing the city barely four years earlier, were now keeping it alive. Enemies were becoming friends.
From Moscow, the perspective was very different. The Soviet Union had been invaded by Hitler in 1941 and almost torn apart by cruelty on a scale unimaginable. It may be that 20 million people died in the Soviet Union: Stalin, and all his successors up to Mikhail Gorbachev, regarded their primary duty as making sure that this never happened again. Stalin constructed a buffer zone of states – Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland – between the motherland and Germany; and would go further.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Wall by Christopher Hilton. Copyright © 2011 Christopher Hilton. Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title,List of Maps,
Acknowledgements,
Prologue,
ONE Fault Line,
TWO Saturday Night,
THREE And Sunday Morning,
FOUR First Week of the Rest of Your Life,
FIVE Cold as Ice,
SIX The Strangeness,
SEVEN The Bullet Run,
EIGHT Thaw,
NINE A Quiet Night Like This,
TEN Dawn,
ELEVEN Pieces,
Epilogue: Corridor of Emptiness,
Notes,
Bibliography,
The Death Strip: The Toll,
Copyright,