The Berlin Wall (59 page)

While the pampered youth of West Berlin was testing how much punishment freedom could take while keeping some recognisable kind
of shape, the East German regime had its own problems, but these did not stop it from tightening its hold on power.

In contrast with the West, where alternative lifestyles were by and large tolerated, in the GDR, between the sixties and the eighties, pressure on ‘hooligan’ or ‘subversive’ elements was intense. Hippies were bad enough, but probably the most serious conflict between the state and its young came in the late 1970s when punk culture spread to East Germany.

It wasn’t just the clothes-the ripped garments, the fetish objects and chains-or the excessive drinking—drugs were almost impossible to get in East Berlin at this time—or the flaunting of evidence of self-harm. There was something else about punk that the authorities couldn’t stand. Perhaps it was the key phrase of the movement, ‘No Future!’ In a society where the past was uncomfortable, the present seriously problematic, but the utopian ‘socialist’ future was
everything
, pessimism of the kind that punks luxuriated in was considered deeply anti-social.

As a matter of official policy, punk groups were refused service in cafés and bars, excluded from social occasions, sometimes thrown off trains and buses. For these young people, a great deal of each day was spent just trying to find a place where they could sit down and order a drink.
Vopos
subjected them to incessant ID checks, even if they were just walking in the park. It was bad enough in the suburbs, where most of these young people lived with uncomprehending or hostile parents, but once they came into the centre of the city they ran serious risks. The Alexander-platz, for instance, was known as a place where they could meet Western punks, usually in the self-service cafeteria by the television tower. This they very much wanted to do. To talk with such Westerners or even—highest honour of all-to be mistaken for a Western punk themselves, though their own S&M finery was generally home-made, remained a burning ambition.
⁹

The punk groups were infiltrated by the
Stasi
, hounded, and often pulled in for interrogation sessions. Many were imprisoned, usually for short, sharp periods of a few weeks or months. They would be seized on charges of hooliganism, subversion or anti-social activity, or—if they got too close to Western punks-of ‘state-endangering links’ or even ‘espionage’. The authorities had a varied bag of catch-all, small-print
legal measures at their disposal. The fact that many punks were the children of loyal party officials did not necessarily protect them. Parents often seem to have ‘turned them in’, either from genuine outrage or fear for their own careers.
¹⁰

From the 1960s onwards, wayward East German youth was subjected to the strictest, in fact downright brutal ‘re-education’ in military-style so-called ‘youth industrial schools’ (
Jugendwerkhöfe
). These were attached to the Ministry of Popular Education (
Ministerium für Volksbildung
), which was presided over by Erich Honecker’s formidable wife, Margot.

For a young person to be incarcerated in such a place, the crime need not be serious. In fact, there need have been no crime at all, in the usual sense of the word. Teenagers between fourteen and eighteen could be confined to these places without trial for minor crimes such as theft or fighting, but also for truancy or (in the opinion of the authorities) anti-social behaviour, such as having long hair, wearing unconventional clothes, or hanging out with the wrong crowd. Children of politically dissident parents, or of parents who had repeatedly requested permanent exit from the GDR, were also at risk.

The time in the institution began with the head being shaved and then several days of solitary confinement. The severe and minutely worked-out regulations, which covered every aspect of behaviour every hour of the day, had been developed in Stalin’s Russia. Their aim was to turn troublesome young people into obedient members of the collective. The director of the most notorious of these youth prisons, at Torgau (a companion to the much-loathed adult prison there), stated that ‘as a rule we need three days for the young people to come into accord with our demands’. Isolation cells, beatings (the teachers were allowed to ‘defend themselves’ and did so with relish), and collective punishments were the rule.
¹¹

In the early 1980s, East German punks found a refuge with the Protestant churches, whose pastors often offered them places to socialise and to practise and play punk music, sometimes as part of ‘modernised’ church services. The numbers of punks increased as in the 1980s discontent grew, along with the ranks of the skinheads, who represented an altogether more sinister trend towards racism and neo-Nazi nostalgia which the state, for all its power and rigour, seemed helpless to prevent.

The mid-seventies were a strange, tense time for the GDR and its rulers. Despite the apparent relaxation of the international situation, in Berlin the Wall was being repaired and extended to a degree that would bring it to its most lethal and secure condition.

What Western tourists called the ‘Berlin Wall’ was known to the Easterners as simply the ‘border marker’. Most ordinary people from the East never even saw it. For them, the barrier existed between sixty and ninety yards back inside East Berlin, in the form of a concrete-slab barrier, the so-called ‘hinterland’ wall. This backed on to ordinary East Berlin streets or open ground and was festooned with stern warnings. Anyone who scaled this initial barrier was outlawing themselves; they were officially a criminal and could be fired upon.

Should anyone climb the hinterland wall without being observed and drop to the ground on the other side, they almost immediately faced the ‘border signal fence’, a structure of barbed-wire and mesh stretched between concrete posts, with a sloping barbed-wire topping to discourage climbing. It was reinforced for a couple of feet at ground level to stop anyone crawling under it. Most importantly, it was wired to set off an alarm sound, and often a floodlight, when touched. If the border guards had not been alerted so far, they now knew an escape was in progress.

But for the escaper there was still a long way to go. Then came specifically anti-personnel devices, be they sharp metal tank-trap-like obstacles known as ‘dragons’ teeth’ (
Höckersperren
) or even nastier arrangements, known in German as
Flächensperren
(literally, ‘surface barriers’), which consisted of steel bars laid out on the ground and covered with metal spikes or teeth. Any would-be escaper leaping down unawares from the ‘border signal fence’ would find their feet or limbs lacerated by these instruments. If the escapers survived this, they would face being observed from one of the manned concrete observation towers that were now situated every hundred metres along the East Berlin/West Berlin border. The guards had orders to shoot. Then came the floodlit supply road that ran the entire length of the city border. And beyond that, the so-called
Kontrolstreife
(control strip)-more accurately known as the ‘death-strip’-which consisted of a several-metre-wide expanse of carefully raked sand, on which footprints or other marks would be instantly noticeable. Often a dog-run would be set up along this part of the border.
German Shepherd dogs were supplied by the
Stasi
’s dog-training school at Lobetal, north-east of Berlin. Each animal would range along a hundred-metre-long wire. The wire, to which their leashes were attached, ran at around five feet above the ground. The animals would react exactly according to their training if they spotted an intruder, seeking and attacking. At night, during the 1970s, the dogs’ lonely howls echoed eerily through the neighbouring areas of East and West Berlin.

Almost nobody got past that point in the 1970s or the 1980s, certainly not in the centre of Berlin. Then, and only then, would an escaper have reached the ‘border marker’ or ‘foremost barrier element’, the twelve-feet-high wall with its rounded, scramble-proof top. This was, for Westerners, the ‘Wall’. The Western side was covered in colourful and wacky graffiti, subject of a million tourist photographs. It was actually all but insignificant from a security point of view.

There were four great reorganisations of the Wall. It was further extended and refined in the 1980s, but by the mid-1970s the defence had become all but impregnable. The guards knew their orders, and also the fact that if anyone did make it through to the West, they would be held responsible. One explained the dilemma:

The responsibility was sloughed off on to the most junior man, the one who was the worst trained. I realised this problem when I myself came to stand guard. I thought to myself, what will you do if someone tries to escape here. We rehearsed that and asked ourselves, what shall we do if something happens at Lamp 35—there was a numbered arc lamp every 35 metres—how shall we catch the border violator. If the visibility got a bit worse, we had to get down from the tower, so as to see better. It can take around fifteen seconds to leave the tower…everyone was happy if he could climb down from his tower with his duty over and with nothing having happened.
¹²

This reluctance on the part of most border troops—who were after all largely conscripts—to fire on their fellow East Germans did not make much practical difference. The authorities were aware of such reservations and ensured that the guards would be too terrified to do anything other than obey orders and open fire. The squeamish guard could not even
ignore the escaper and hope none of his colleagues noticed. Sooner or later, he could be sure that some expert investigator would pick out the telltale footmarks in the raked sand and realise that Soldier X, on duty in that section at that time, had let a ‘border violator’ make it through to the West. Soldier X would then be in very big trouble. Negligence was treated as equivalent to treachery, and penalties for treachery were draconian.

The only devices that were not installed on the Berlin border—though they existed on the border between East and West Germany, more than a hundred miles to the west—were anti-personnel mines and automatic shooting emplacements (
Selbstschussanlagen
), sets of self-firing guns that were triggered by trip wires or other contact indicators. The regime was concerned that international protests would follow the use of these unpleasant installations in an urban area frequented by tourists and foreign observers.

It was true that the East German Politburo was strangely sensitive. Its members wanted to keep their population shut up inside the GDR, but at the same time they wanted themselves and their state to be well thought of. Paradoxically, the maximum strengthening of the Wall occurred in the mid-1970s, after Walter Ulbricht’s death, and also after agreements over West Berlin and the status of the two Germanys, which led to stability and to a regulation of routine travel between them.

Most of the travel was, as before, one-way, from West to East. Until the mid-1980s, only East Germans of retirement age could travel freely to the West. They were, of course, no longer productive. What did it matter if they chose not to return?

In 1969 Brandt became Chancellor of a ‘social-liberal’ coalition with the FDP and was free to pursue his ‘Eastern Policy’. Under the 1971 Berlin Agreement between the Allies and the Soviet Union, West Berlin remained separate from West Germany but had its continued independence guaranteed by the Soviet Union as well as the Allies. The East agreed to ease transit traffic between West Berlin and West Germany. West Berlin would not be ruled from Bonn, but West Germany would represent the city in foreign affairs.

These agreements were conditional on a deal between East and West Germany on transit traffic, directly negotiated at a government level. In
effect, this gave the Allies and the West Berliners stability at the price of
de facto
recognition of East Germany. Formal recognition followed two years later in the
Grundlagenvertrag
(Basic Treaty) between East and West Germany. After tortuous negotiations, this was signed just before Christmas 1972.

Various forms of words allowed West Germany to avoid completely sacrificing the notion of German unity (and its previous claim to be the sole representative of the German people). A formula was arrived at that stopped just short of the two countries’ treating each other like foreign lands. East Germany set up a ‘permanent representation’ (
Ständige Vertretung
) in Bonn, and West Germany did the same in East Berlin. In practice, however, in the twenty-third year of its existence East Germany became a fully independent and accepted member of the international community and a member of the United Nations. No one in the world community seemed much to mind about the Wall.

The Brandt ‘social-liberal’ government’s treaties with the USSR, Poland and Czechoslovakia, acknowledged the results of the Second World War and abandoned claims on territories lost by Germany in 1945. The agreement between the two Germanys represented the realisation of the ‘Eastern Policy’ that had caused such dissent ten years before when Egon Bahr and Brandt first presented it at the Tutzing conference.

So why did the ‘spoiled old men’ (
verdorbene alte Männer
) who ruled in East Berlin, remain so unhappy in many ways?

A clue is in the phrase. The description ‘spoiled old men’ to describe the GDR’s leaders was coined by a figure with whom the élites in neither East nor West were entirely comfortable. His name was Wolf Biermann.

Born in Hamburg in 1936, son a of a half-Jewish Communist shipyard worker who died in Auschwitz, Biermann was an idealistic leftist by birth and conviction. At seventeen, he voluntarily emigrated from West Germany to the East, finishing his school education there and then studying in East Berlin. After working as an assistant at Brecht’s famous Berliner Ensemble theatre after the great man’s death, he founded his own theatre company and began to write political and satirical songs. In 1963, the youthful Biermann got into trouble by producing a play about two lovers separated by the newly built Berlin Wall. It was banned by the
regime before its first performance. He was increasingly subjected to performance bans in the GDR but allowed to tour in West Germany, where he became very popular. For almost ten years, Wolf Biermann was in the bizarre situation of living in East Germany as a critical supporter of the Communist regime, while performance and publication of his work was banned. In the West, however, his records and books were massively popular and his concert tours sell-outs.