Berlin Wall

Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall

by Tim Mohr  · 10 Sep 2018  · 370pp  · 107,791 words

Records of the State Security Service of the Former German Democratic Republic (BStU) Burning Down The Haus Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall By Tim Mohr ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL 2018 Contents Preface Introduction I: Too Much Future II: Oh Bondage Up Yours! III: Combat Rock IV

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in the East and established in the process the ethos of the fledgling new society being built almost from scratch after the fall of the Berlin Wall. This kaleidoscopic world I had fallen in love with was their world, their creation. At the time I had no idea I would eventually become

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unbelievably important—perhaps more important than even the participants themselves realized. Here were the people who had actually fought and sacrificed to bring down the Berlin Wall. My initial belief in the importance of this story was reinforced after I returned to the U.S. and recognized an ominous echo in developments

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. Burning Down The Haus Official youth culture in East Germany: a Free German Youth rally Harald Hauswald / Ostkreuz Agency Introduction By the late 1970s the Berlin Wall—actually two walls with a notorious death strip between them—had been up for little more than fifteen years, but it had already become a

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, the physical embodiment of a division of the world that felt as if it could go on forever. The young on either side accepted the Berlin Wall as permanent—it had always been there and probably always would be. Every aspect of life on the east side of the Wall was hyper

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East to West Berlin. Some kind of barrier began to look inevitable. So inevitable, in fact, that in July 1961 alone—the month before the Berlin Wall finally went up—30,000 East Germans fled. Another 45,000 left during the first two weeks of August before the Wall appeared on the

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the city’s elevated S-Bahn trains. It was September 1977. Major’s proper name was Britta Bergmann, and she had learned lessons about the Berlin Wall early. Britta had never known her own father, but she had an older sister whose father was a West Berliner who occasionally came to see

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in a band. The band was called Antifaschistischer Schutzwall, or AFS for short. Antifaschistischer Schutzwall was the East German government’s official name for the Berlin wall: the anti-fascist protection barrier. Whoa, thought Pankow, that is cool! An actual band! Pankow could hardly believe it, it seemed so far from the

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of a basement bowling alley in East Berlin at closing time. Midnight. It was the night before the twentieth anniversary of the building of the Berlin Wall. The streets were quiet and dark; the teens were loud and drunk. One of these teens was Esther Friedemann. She had grown up in the

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, but in this case a funny political phrase accompanied each new day. She had flipped through a few pages. For August 13, the day the Berlin Wall had gone up back in 1961, it said, Zwanzig Jahre Mauer, wir werden langsam sauer, which was a rhyming phrase that meant: “Twenty years of

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out of the project. Sascha Anderson arranged for a West German diplomat to smuggle the remaining tapes of his band and Schleim-Keim across the Berlin Wall for him—Anderson had contacts everywhere, it seemed—and the albums were quickly pressed. Only 1,500 copies of the album DDR von unten were

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. It was two days before a major national holiday, A-Micha remembered. August 13 would mark the twenty-second anniversary of the building of the Berlin Wall and another year of successfully fending off capitalist aggression. The cops often rounded up punks before big public events to keep them out of sight

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knew Kriening from hanging out with him at the punk meeting spot in Plänterwald. Paul had grown up in a neighborhood so close to the Berlin Wall that police patrolled the area day and night, often with dogs, and even children needed special permits to visit friends in some of the buildings

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in the U.S. On June 12, the day following the protests in West Berlin, Reagan delivered his speech at the Brandenburg Gate, with the Berlin Wall as a backdrop. Police sealed off the entire Western district of Kreuzberg in order to contain protesters they feared would overwhelm the modest audience assembled

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to hear the music; for Reagan, they didn’t bother. “Mr. Gorbachev,” Reagan intoned, “tear down this wall,” And nobody on either side of the Berlin Wall gave a fuck. 51 Two days later, organizers of the Church Conference from Below met in Halle for the last major planning session prior to

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—even after they were expatriated following their release from prison; this had led to one of the more bizarre incidents in the history of the Berlin Wall. Thomas Onisseit and his older brother, Jürgen—who, unbeknownst to Thomas and his friends, had gotten them sent to the slammer back in 1983 by

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former Weimar punks, had decided at the end of 1986 to paint a white stripe along the entire length of the West side of the Berlin Wall. It could take weeks to complete, but they felt compelled to do it. The Weimar punks hated the way the barrier had become a canvas

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the country seemed unchanged. A few days after the January 12 youth analysis report was issued, Erich Honecker made his famous pronouncement affirming that the Berlin Wall would still be standing in fifty or even a hundred years if the reasons for its existence had not yet been vanquished. And on February

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offstage, they were mobbed by friends from East Berlin, all talking at once, and it was true, it was true: the checkpoints were open. The Berlin Wall had fallen. As news spread inside the club, the bar passed out free beer. Unbeknownst to the people at the concert in Pike Club, East

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greeting other Easterners as they entered the West. People chanted and sang. It was a huge street festival in the middle of the night. The Berlin Wall had fallen. Toster and Dafty and the rest of the band wandered the streets of West Berlin all night with friends, smoking dope and drinking

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politische Bildung, Bonn, 2002) Rüddenklau, Wolfgang. Störenfried:DDR-Opposition 1986–1989 (BasisDruck Verlag, Berlin, 1992) Sarotte, Mary Elizabeth. The Collapse: The accidental opening of the Berlin Wall (Basic Books, New York, 2014) Stephan, Gerd-Rüdiger (Hg). “Vorwärts immer, rückwärts nimmer!”: Interne Dokumente zum Zerfall von SED und DDR 1988/89 (Dietz Verlag

1989 The Berlin Wall: My Part in Its Downfall

by Peter Millar  · 1 Oct 2009  · 220pp  · 88,994 words

1989 The Berlin Wall My Part in Its Downfall PETER MILLAR Contents Title page Acknowledgements Foreword 1. Oh, What a Night! 2. The Street of Shame 3. A Place

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least for those unfamiliar with the autobiographical works of Spike Milligan: I make no claim whatsoever to having been instrumental in the fall of the Berlin Wall any more than any other of the millions of people who experienced life behind it and the tremendous exhilaration of seeing its ugly scar removed

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biggest party the world had seen in four decades. My wife’s tears were tears of joy. The night was November 9th, 1989, and the Berlin Wall was coming down. For the first time in a century it seemed the whole world was empathising with the Germans. But for me, on that

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in East Berlin knew it would happen. Not even as they gave them. They had intended something else. Something else entirely. The fall of the Berlin Wall was the triumphant vindication of the ‘cock-up’ theory of history, of what happens when those seemingly immovable objects of political inertia and the status

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before walked through a gap in the Wall they thought would keep them apart forever. If for the world at large the fall of the Berlin Wall was theatre on a grand stage, for me it was as first-hand as a family wedding. Eight years earlier my wife and I had

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of going to Berlin as a foreign correspondent for Reuters news agency was first put to me back in 1981, it was inconceivable that the Berlin Wall could ever fall. Hanging on my wall at home I had a big map of Europe, showing the split in the world that everyone thought

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really knew what the rules were anymore. One pickaxe of course was never going to do serious harm to a structure as solid as the Berlin Wall. At least not physically. But the images that went round the world – and more importantly back into East Germany where millions also sat glued to

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Wall, were reserved for the lengthy colour/analysis piece on the Focus pages inside. But even that was not the whole of the story. The Berlin Wall was not just a concrete manifestation of the Iron Curtain, it was its most potent symbol. Almost its soul. Its fall was to bring in

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only fools would throw away. 2 The Street of Shame The long and winding road that led me to Checkpoint Charlie on the night the Berlin Wall came down began improbably enough thirteen years earlier on the outskirts of Paris where I was trying to hitch a lift to the Côte d

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Wall had – as both sides tacitly acknowledged, without mentioning it overmuch to the Germans – stabilised the situation: a concrete agreement to differ. By 1981 the Berlin Wall was twenty years old and it seemed as if it would be there forever. It was easy to forget that in the first hours of

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, he explained – shouting over the roar of the rotors – that that was exactly what it was: a walled garden. I was already aware that the Berlin Wall had been the greatest – and most cruel – postcode lottery of all. When the Allies had come to divide up the city, they simply did it

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down, hundreds of feet below our whirling rotors, I could just make out something I would not otherwise have believed possible: a door in the Berlin Wall. And next to it, what else but a doorbell! It was permanently guarded, the pilot explained to me. If a West Berlin allotment-owner fancied

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then they slip one of them a cabbage or two.’ As we headed back to the landing ground he showed me one more of the Berlin Wall’s anomalous ‘exclaves’, as bizarre as the isolated allotments: the hamlet of Steinstücken. By any sensible point of view Steinstücken was part of Babelsberg, a

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orderly filing system had the curious result that such historical gold dust as reports of the first reactions of Berliners to the building of the Berlin Wall and the eyewitness account of the Reuters man who was the first to pass through it, were buried amongst obscure coverage of football results. One

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humour. The band were belting out, ‘Saturdays in Silesia, holidays are for heroes.’ Another track on the same album was fancifully entitled ‘Dancing on the Berlin Wall.’ I often wonder if they knew something the rest of us didn’t. We spent the night in a dingy hotel where the menu featured

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to explode. But it was only a theory. Europe’s ideological divide was laid down in concrete: the physical concrete all too evident in the Berlin Wall. And no one was about to change that. It was as unimaginable as the idea that the beautiful old city that hosted the Winter Olympics

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the right time.’ He wasn’t wrong. * Sadly the ‘Corrie’ did not last long, but even more sadly it outlived David. A week after the Berlin Wall came down he was in El Salvador covering the guerrilla conflict, cursing himself and the world because he was not in Berlin, when he was

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the West German Embassy in Vienna, and within hours the West German Embassy in Budapest had sent passports by bus for the new citizens. The Berlin Wall was still standing and according to Erich Honecker, would ‘stand for a hundred years’, but all of a sudden the rusty Iron Curtain had started

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that these days it was the presence of a Soviet leader that gave a glimmer of hope to Germans on the wrong side of the Berlin Wall. As it was a Saturday, time was running out fast for a Sunday newspaper man; I would have to get it across to the foreign

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on November 9th. It was Dario who ended up kicking himself. With hindsight it seems improbable in the extreme that barely a week before the Berlin Wall came down, a journalist who had spent years living there, and even covering the remarkable events happening in Eastern Europe over the previous months, had

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passport to stunned-looking border guards. How long would I still need to do so, was the question neither asked nor answered. The night the Berlin Wall came down was the ultimate vindication of the ‘cock-up theory’ of history. Over the years since, Krenz, Schabowski, even Gorbachev who more than anyone

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difficulties on the international level. It was a stopgap policy. All they were proposing to do was cut the red tape, not throw open the Berlin Wall. But all that remained in the minds of anyone listening was that one sentence: ‘We have decided today (um) to implement a regulation that allows

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was happening other than the obvious delirious scenes against which well-groomed anchor men and women posed and talked twaddle. But the twaddle declared the Berlin Wall history, and millions of East Germans on the march – believing what they saw on television – had made it so. On Friday, under fresh instruction from

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our Wall too. And we were glad to see the end of it. The significance of what had happened began to sink in fast. The Berlin Wall was the Iron Curtain, far more than any other Eastern European frontier. But the East German communists had played their last card, gambling on a

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I had sat and tried to do almost literally poetic justice to the most exhilarating two days in my life since the fall of the Berlin Wall, though as that was only three weeks earlier, things were getting hard to keep track of. I wrote it as I had experienced it, trying

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of Poland’s Solidarity union and the East German grass-roots protest movement in one go. It succeeded faster than they could have imagined. The Berlin Wall was the Iron Curtain, and its collapse was the crucial event that meant the domino effect would go all the way to the end. Even

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what the public may see, or do. I would not have thought, in East Germany in 1989 as we rejoiced at the crumbling of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of corrupt governments who thought their power over their populations was total, backed up by policemen – secret or otherwise – who considered themselves

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and author, named Foreign Correspondent of the Year 1989 for his reporting of the later days of the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall for The Sunday Times. He is the author of All Gone to Look for America, and the translator of several German-language books into English

Behind the Berlin Wall: East Germany and the Frontiers of Power

by Patrick Major  · 5 Nov 2009  · 669pp  · 150,886 words

924328–0 1. Germany (East)—History. 2. Germany (East)—Politics and government. 3. Germany (East)—Social conditions. 4. Power (Social sciences)—Germany (East)—History. 5. Berlin Wall, Berlin, Germany, 1961–1989. 6. Walls—Social aspects—Germany (East)—History. 7. Boundaries—Social aspects—Germany (East)—History. 8. Germany (East)—Boundaries—Germany (West) 9

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‘the tip of the iceberg’ of a more general ‘demarcation syndrome’.³⁷ More recently still, Thomas Lindenberger ³¹ Alan Shadrake, The Yellow Pimpernels: Escape Stories of the Berlin Wall (London: Hale, 1974); Anthony Kemp, Escape from Berlin (London: Boxtree, 1987); Bodo Müller, Faszination Freiheit: Die spektakulärsten Fluchtgeschichten (Berlin: Links, 2000); Christopher Hilton, The Wall

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the Holocaust (London: Little, Brown & Co., 1996); Robert Gellately, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 12 Behind the Berlin Wall to catch up with history from below, although historians of the interwar Soviet Union have begun to discuss popular opinion under Stalinism, often reaching surprising

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der Kennedy-Administration: Eine Fallstudie zum außenpolitischen Verhalten der Kennedy-Regierung in der Berlinkrise 1961 (Frankfurt: Haag & Herchen, 1977); Honoré M. Catudal, Kennedy and the Berlin Wall Crisis: A Case Study in US Decision Making (West Berlin: Berlin-Verlag, 1980); Michael Beschloss, Kennedy versus Khrushchev: The Crisis Years 1960–63 (London: Faber

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im ausgehenden Kalten Krieg im Spiegel amerikanischer Akten’, in Landesarchiv Berlin (ed.), Berlin in Geschichte und Gegenwart (Berlin: Siedler, 1989), 143–67. 24 Behind the Berlin Wall from previously inaccessible archives behind the iron curtain.⁶ Nuclear fears, diplomatic recognition for the post-1945 settlement, and Chinese rivalry were undoubtedly all Soviet motives

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Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1958), 74. ¹⁹ Gerhard Keiderling, ‘Rosinenbomber über Berlin’: Währungsreform, Blockade, Luftbrücke, Teilung (Berlin: Dietz, 1998), 55–64. 28 Behind the Berlin Wall East Berlin was all but cut off. Only when the West abandoned moves towards a separate West German state, or so the Kremlin implied, would

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–1961 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1994); Volker Ackermann, Der ‘echte’ Flüchtling: Deutsche Vertriebene und Flüchtlinge aus der DDR 1945–1961 (Osnabrück: Universitätsverlag Rasch, 1995). 58 Behind the Berlin Wall families, not as an ideological statement, but to normalize daily life. In the early postwar years, and beyond, there was considerable natural internal migration between

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Corey Ross, ‘Before the Wall: East Germans, Communist Authority, and the Mass Exodus to the West’, Historical Journal, 45 (2002), 471–4. 66 Behind the Berlin Wall and become a focus of police activity.’³⁹ Internally, the authorities admitted that their own insensitive policies, ‘lacking any finesse’, were alienating leavers.⁴⁰ This included criminalization

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The Lutheran Church and the East German State: Political Conflict and Change under Ulbricht and Honecker (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 21. 68 Behind the Berlin Wall causes of Republikflucht, while ‘‘personal or material reasons’’ only serve as an external pretext or trigger.’⁵² The group which merited closest Stasi attention as ‘especially

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wirtschaftlichem Gebiet’ in Daniel Küchenmeister (ed.), Der Mauerbau: Krisenverlauf—Weichenstellung—Resultate (Berlin: Berliner Debatte, 2001), 74–87. ¹²³ Steiner, ‘Vom Überholen eingeholt’, 260. 80 Behind the Berlin Wall opportunities, job responsibilities, and roots to home and hearth.¹²⁴ The decision to go could be an agonizing one, as one doctor explained: You know my

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sewers, welding up the final escape routes with underwater grilles, and congratulating itself that MfS officers, ‘despite their desk duties, have remained true workers.’¹⁸⁴ The Berlin Wall had arrived. ¹⁸² ‘Bericht der Kommission des Stadtbezirks Mitte . . . ’, 24 Aug. 1961, LAB (STA), Rep. 124/213. ¹⁸³ RdSB Friedrichshain, ‘Vorschlag zur erweiterten Sicherung der Grenze . . . ’, 19

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. ⁴⁰ SED-BL Berlin (Org-Kader), ‘Information zu den Schutzmaßnahmen’, 13 Aug. 1961 (10 a.m.), LAB, BPA SED Berlin, IV2/12/1278. 124 Behind the Berlin Wall shouting: ‘Socialism triumphant, marching inexorably onwards!’⁴¹ Meanwhile, the party kept the ‘neuralgic points’ under close observation,⁴² while police patrols filmed street scenes.⁴³ Nevertheless, during the

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.²²⁸ Since these were judicial bodies investigating premeditated killings, deaths by misadventure were not included. The ‘Arbeitsgemeinschaft 13. ²²¹ Ibid., 86–7. ²²² Pertti Ahonen, Victims of the Berlin Wall: Stories of Political Martyrdom in Divided Berlin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), ch. 2. ²²³ MfS-ZAIG, ‘Bericht’, 17 Aug. 1962, BStU-ZA, ZAIG 10725, fos

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Zentrale Erfassungsstelle berichtet über Verbrechen im SED-Staat, 2nd edn (Frankfurt: Ullstein, 1993), 255–317. ²²⁸ ZERV, Jahresbericht 2000 (Berlin: Polizeipräsident, 2001), 8. 148 Behind the Berlin Wall August’ at the Haus am Checkpoint Charlie, continuing its posthumous war on the GDR, has insisted on higher but speculative totals, including accidents and East

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‘1 Berlin’, 788–92. See also Gisela Karau, Grenzerprotokolle: Gespräche mit ehemaligen DDR-Offizieren (Frankfurt: dipa, 1992). ²⁵⁵ Schultke, ‘‘Keiner kommt durch’’, 120. 152 Behind the Berlin Wall especially in the later years. The routine of patrolling the border and manning the watch-towers was excruciatingly boring for most. The Border Troops lived

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(PhD thesis, Princeton, 1997). ⁵ Schaut auf diese Stadt (Gass, 1962). ⁶ ‘Drei Jahre danach: Der 13. August 1961 aus heutiger Sicht’ (DFF, 1964). 156 Behind the Berlin Wall child-snatchers; families from people-trafficking blackmailers; factories from head-hunters. Humans will be protected from monsters, order from the disorderly, the hard-working from

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). ³¹ Weber, DDR, 98. ³² Fulbrook, People’s State, 18. ³³ Rita Kuczynski, Mauerblume: Ein Leben auf der Grenze (Munich: Claassen, 1999), 70. ³⁴ Newman, Behind the Berlin Wall, 76. 160 Behind the Berlin Wall Others have compared the numbing process to that of an amputee, as Berliners developed a ‘phantom pain’ and symptoms of ‘hospitalism’.³⁵ One of

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1989: A Precarious Stability (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2003), 177–8. ¹⁴⁴ Wolfgang Hilbig, ‘Ich’ (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1993), 154. ¹⁴⁵ Koepke, ‘The Invisible Wall’, in Schürer et al. (eds), Berlin Wall, 74. ¹⁴⁶ Wand connotes an internal wall; Mauer is the more correct translation. My thanks to Siegfried Lokatis for this information. ¹⁴⁷ In Hans Werner Richter, (ed

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: Aufbau-Verlag, 1963). ¹⁶¹ Ibid., 211. ¹⁶² Ibid., 245. ¹⁶³ Ibid., 120. ¹⁶⁴ Ibid., 78. ¹⁶⁵ Ibid., 250. ¹⁶⁶ Christa Wolf, Der geteilte Himmel (Halle: Mitteldeutscher Verlag, 1963). 180 Behind the Berlin Wall socialist responsibility.¹⁶⁷ The factory where she is gaining work-experience, and whose director commits Republikflucht in the spring of 1960, becomes a metaphor for GDR

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Lochen and Christian Meyer (eds), Die geheimen Anweisungen zur Diskriminierung Ausreisewilliger: Dokumente der Stasi und des Ministeriums des Innern (Cologne: Bundesanzeiger, 1992). 210 Behind the Berlin Wall In the absence of a transparent procedure, would-be emigrants inevitably resorted to the venerable practice of petitioning. Nevertheless, emigration petitions bore a different character

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, ‘Zusammenfassende Darstellung’, July 1987, BAB, DO-1/8/41630. ¹²⁸ Hertle, Fall der Mauer, 78. ¹²⁹ Eisenfeld, ‘Flucht und Ausreise’, 391. ¹³⁰ Neubert, Opposition, 529. 216 Behind the Berlin Wall In 1985 13,000 political-operative deportations followed, but by 1986–87 the authorities registered increased activism among groups in Arnstadt, Schwerin, and Jena. Yet

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Sowjetunion und das Ende der DDR’, in Jarausch and Sabrow (eds.), Weg, 124. ¹⁹ Hertle, Fall der Mauer, 264. ²⁰ Gedmin, Hidden Hand, 50. ²¹ Taylor, Berlin Wall, 400. 232 Behind the Berlin Wall notion of ‘new thinking’ for implying a ‘community of guilt for the explosive international situation’. It was instead chiefly applicable to the imperialist

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Roggemann, Systemunrecht und Strafrecht: am Beispiel der Mauerschützen in der ehemaligen DDR (Berlin: Berlin-Verlag, 1993); Henning Rosenau, Tödliche Schüsse im staatlichen 264 Behind the Berlin Wall of those shot. Yet, there was also growing resentment as the trials unfolded that western justice was being applied to eastern perpetrators. The accusation was

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⁷² Interessengemeinschaft Mauerstreifen Berlin e.V., hoarding at corner of Bernauer and Swinemünder Straßen, Feb. 2001. ⁷³ Verein ‘‘Berliner Mauer’’ (ed.), Berliner Mauer, 19. 280 Behind the Berlin Wall envisaged 70 metres of the death strip, flanked by two polished steel walls. In July 1995 the Federal government chose the latter. Financial difficulties further

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political science.¹⁰⁹ Some treatments remained particularly ¹⁰² Dieter Hildebrandt, Die Mauer ist keine Grenze: Menschen in Ostberlin (Düsseldorf and Cologne: Diederichs, 1964), 140. ¹⁰³ Newman, Behind the Berlin Wall. ¹⁰⁴ David Shears, The Ugly Frontier (New York: Knopf, 1970). ¹⁰⁵ Bailey, Along the Edge, 9. ¹⁰⁶ Ibid., 16. ¹⁰⁷ Len Deighton, Funeral in Berlin (London: Jonathan Cape, 1964

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Gesellschaft der DDR (Berlin: Links, 2005). ¹²⁷ Kowalczuk, ‘Die innere Staatsgründung’, in Diedrich and Kowalczuk (eds), Staatsgründung, 369. ¹²⁸ Allinson, Politics, 119. ¹²⁹ Ibid., 165. 290 Behind the Berlin Wall Wall. Rather than solving the GDR’s domestic problems, the border closure ‘reconfigured’ them.¹³⁰ Indeed, as more and more histories move from the early phase

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. Plenum des ZK der SED 1965: Studien und Dokumente (2nd edn; Berlin: Aufbau, 2000). Allan, Seán, ‘Projections of History: East German Film-makers and the Berlin Wall’ (unpublished paper at Liverpool conference, Sept. 2006). Allgemeiner Deutscher Nachrichtendienst (ed.), Tatsachen über Westberlin: Subversion, Wirtschaftskrieg, Revanchismus gegen die sozialistischen Staaten (East Berlin: Kongreß, 1962

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1737–1989 (New York: Rizzoli, 1990). Barck, Simone et al. (eds), Zwischen ‘Mosaik’ und ‘Einheit’: Zeitschriften in der DDR (Berlin: Links, 1999). 298 Behind the Berlin Wall Bauerkämper, Arnd, Ländliche Gesellschaft in der kommunistischen Diktatur: Zwangsmod-ernisierung und Tradition in Brandenburg 1945–1963 (Cologne: Böhlau, 2002). Beckmann, Herbert, Atlantis Westberlin: Erinnerungsreise in

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Mauer: Die Propaganda der Sowjetunion und der DDR als Werkzeug der Außenpolitik im Jahre (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1971). Davey, Thomas, Generation Divided: German Children and the Berlin Wall (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994). Davies, Sarah, Popular Opinion in Stalin’s Russia: Terror, Propaganda and Dissent, 1934–1941 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997

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im Zwischenraum (Berlin: Links, 1999). Detjen, Marion, Ein Loch in der Mauer: Die Geschichte der Fluchthilfe im geteilten Deutschland (Munich: Siedler, 2005). 300 Behind the Berlin Wall Deutscher Bundestag (ed.), Materialien der Enquete Kommission ‘Aufarbeitung von Geschichte und Folgen der SED-Diktatur in Deutschland’ , 9 vols (Baden-Baden: Nomos/Suhrkamp, 1995). Diedrich

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in den 80er Jahren (Berlin: Links, 2005). Gellately, Robert, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 302 Behind the Berlin Wall Gentzen Udo and Karin Wulf, ‘Niemand wußte, wohin wir gebracht werden. . . ’: Zwangsumgesiedelte von 1952 und 1961 berichten über ihr Schicksal (Hagenow: Boizenburg, 1993). Geraghty, Tony

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Republic: An Essay in Conceptual History’, World Politics, 45 (1993), 173–202. Höpfner, Jürgen, Gleisverwerfung (Halle: Mitteldeutscher Verlag, 1982). Hoerning, Erika M., ‘Memories of the Berlin Wall: History and the Impact of Critical Life Events’, International Journal of Oral History, 8 (1987), 95–111. Zwischen den Fronten: Berliner Grenzgänger und Grenzhändler 1948

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Böhlau, 1992). Hoffmann, Dierk et al. (eds), Vor dem Mauerbau: Politik und Gesellschaft in der DDR der fünfziger Jahre (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2003). 304 Behind the Berlin Wall Hoffmann, Frank, Junge Zuwanderer in Westdeutschland: Struktur, Aufnahme und Integration junger Flüchtlinge aus der SBZ und der DDR in Westdeutschland (1945–1961) (Frankfurt: Peter Lang

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the International Brigades 1945–1989 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Maaz, Hans-Joachim, Der Gefühlsstau: Ein Psychogramm der DDR (Berlin: Argon, 1990). 308 Behind the Berlin Wall Madarász, Jeannette Z., Conflict and Compromise in East Germany, 1971–1989: A Precarious Stability (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2003). Maddrell, Paul, Spying for Science: Western Intelligence in

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Opposition in der DDR 1949–1989 (Berlin: Links, 1997). Neue Justiz (ed.), Der Politbüro-Prozeß: Eine Dokumentation (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2001). Newman, Bernard, Behind the Berlin Wall (London: Hale, 1964). Niemann, Heinz, Meinungsforschung in der DDR: Die geheimen Berichte des Instituts für Meinungsforschung an das Politbüro der SED (Cologne: Bund, 1993). Hinterm

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on Global Change and World Peace, occasional paper no. 15, Dec. 1992). Plato, The Laws, trans. Trevor J. Saunders (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970). 310 Behind the Berlin Wall Plato, Alexander von and Wolfgang Meinicke, Alte Heimat—neue Zeit: Flüchtlinge, Umgesiedelte, Vertriebene in der Sowjetischen Besatzungszone und in der DDR (Berlin: Verlags-Anstalt Union

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vor der Wende (Frankfurt: Campus, 2002). Renft, Klaus, Zwischen Liebe und Zorn: Die Autobiografie (Berlin: Schwarzkopf, 2001). Rice, Leland, Up Against It: Photographs of the Berlin Wall (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1991). Richie, Alexandra, Faust’s Metropolis: A History of Berlin (London: HarperCollins, 1998). Richter, Hans Werner (ed.), Die Mauer

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). Sevin, Dieter, Textstrategien in DDR-Prosawerken zwischen Bau und Durchbruch der Berliner Mauer (Heidelberg: Winter, 1994). Shadrake, Alan, The Yellow Pimpernels: Escape Stories of the Berlin Wall (London: Hale, 1974). Sharp, Tony, The Wartime Alliance and the Zonal Division of Germany (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975). Shears, David, The Ugly Frontier (New York:

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von ‘‘Republikflucht’’ über andere Ostblockstaaten’, in: Heiner Timmermann (ed.), Die DDR—Erinnerung an einen untergegangenen Staat (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1999), 91–122. Taylor, Frederick, The Berlin Wall: 13 August 1961 to 9 November 1989 (London: Bloomsbury, 2006). Thacker, Toby, ‘The fifth column: Dance music in the early German Democratic Republic’, in Patrick

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, Walter Ulbricht und die geheime Sicherheitspolitik der SED: Der Nationale Verteidigungsrat der DDR und seine Vorgeschichte (1953 bis 1971) (Berlin: Links, 2002). 316 Behind the Berlin Wall Walckhoff, Dirk-Arne, Der 13. August 1961 in der Traditionsarbeit der Grenztruppen der DDR (Hamburg: Lit-Verlag, 1996). Walter, Joachim, Sicherungsbereich Literatur: Schriftsteller und Staatssicherheit

The Berlin Wall: A World Divided, 1961-1989

by Frederick Taylor  · 26 May 2008  · 564pp  · 182,946 words

WALL CAME TUMBLING DOWN 404 AFTERWORD 429 NOTES 450 BIBLIOGAPHY 482 INDEX 490 ABOUT THE AUTHOR PRAISE COVER COPYRIGHT ABOUT THE PUBLISHER FOREWORD of the Berlin Wall on 13 August 1961 divided, overnight and with savage finality, families, friends, and neighborhoods in what had until 1945 been the thriving, populous capital

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weary subjects did not resist. Brandenburg-Prussia embraced the form of efficient, measured and (for most people) benevolent despotism that became its hallmark. 8 / THE BERLIN WALL The ‘Great Elector’, as Frederick William became known, also founded an institution that would have enormous significance: the Prussian army. When he succeeded to the

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training for boys? It was also true that, as a counterbalance to nationalist xenophobia, Marxist internationalism had grown into a hugely powerful political 20 / THE BERLIN WALL force in Germany. The Social Democratic Party (SPD), founded in 1875, became the defining mass movement of the quickly expanding German working class. When the

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his sacred company. At home, the KPD showed worrying signs of independence during the early 1920s, resisting ‘Bolshevisation’ (that is, Russification) of its 26 / THE BERLIN WALL organisational structure and electing to senior posts comrades the Soviet leadership didn’t like. Ulbricht helped organise a counter-coup. Ernst Thälmann, a Hamburg-born

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Ulbricht’s group got their first look at conquered Berlin. Wolfgang Leonhard described that first journey through the eastern suburbs into unimaginable suffering: 34 / THE BERLIN WALL Our cars made their way through Friedrichsfelde in the direction of Lichtenberg. The scene was like a picture of hell—flaming ruins and starving people

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not prepared to risk outright war. But their Yak fighters did everything short of inviting combat. They played ‘chicken’ with the incoming planes, 58 / THE BERLIN WALL buzzing them aggressively and performing dangerous acrobatics around the air corridors. The Soviets blinded Allied pilots with searchlights, jammed radio frequencies, and carried out ‘exercises

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political consciousness. Not all his colleagues shared his unbending views. Rudolf Herrnstadt, editor of the SED newspaper, Neues Deutschland (‘New Germany’) and the 80 / THE BERLIN WALL head of the secret police, Wilhelm Zaisser, openly supported a more flexible, liberal course and told Ulbricht so. They began talking to Soviet representatives along

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so assiduously. There was a confusing contradiction even in the pronouncements of the SED’s mouthpiece newspaper. Three days later, Herrnstadt wrote in 82 / THE BERLIN WALL the same newspaper, expressing doubt about the new norms and arguing that they should not be imposed ‘dictatorially’ but only after consultation with the workers

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to spread their message as they headed back towards the Stalinallee. There the crowd broke up, parts of it heading towards Lichtenberg and 84 / THE BERLIN WALL other eastern suburbs, where many lived. Touchingly, the governmentproperty loudspeaker van was parked where the authorities could find it.19 In Berlin, two night shifts

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credentials, had shamelessly abandoned the last remnants of them. In his poem, ‘The Solution’, Brecht satirised 17 June 1953 with supreme irony: 90 / THE BERLIN WALL After the uprising of 17 June The Secretary of the Writers Union Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee Stating that the people Had forfeited the

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Brandt did not always find conformity easy. By 1949, he had joined the group of young Social Democratic high-flyers surrounding the newly 98 / THE BERLIN WALL appointed West Berlin mayor, Ernst Reuter. They were the generationin-waiting. Many post-war democratic leaders were former Weimar-era politicians, in their fifties, sixties

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comparison did not favour the United States. The Gagarin flight, notwithstanding its apparently innocent publicrelations benefits, also underlined the military potential of Soviet 116 / THE BERLIN WALL rocketry. Khrushchev himself had, by this point, become drawn into a passionate, quite strange love affair with missile-delivered nuclear weaponry, and the success of

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Berlin, Mikhail Pervukhin, told Moscow with weary understatement, there was ‘a certain inflexibility of the GDR leaders in practical activity concerning West Berlin’. 122 / THE BERLIN WALL Exasperated, Khrushchev demanded that Ulbricht desist from further provocations until they next met at the end of November. Ulbricht backed down for the moment. Their

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government had been invited. He called it a ‘gettogether’ (Beisammensein).46 It was not unusual for Politburo members and ministers to meet at 160 / THE BERLIN WALL Döllnsee for occasional weekends to brainstorm problems or to finalise major decisions. Cooks and other staff from Wandlitz would be present during the daytime, then

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truckloads police, accompanied by armoured cars, machine gun carriers and other vehicles, arrived at large industrial site near Rummelsburg S-Bahn station.6 176 / THE BERLIN WALL In the same cable, Lightner noted that the Soviets, though holding back their military hardware from the city itself, were monitoring events closely. Many Soviet

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large groups of East German citizens that might be accumulating at potential flashpoints. The agents’ reports to party headquarters were not entirely encouraging. 180 / THE BERLIN WALL Just as Western youths like Wolfgang Baldin and his friends reacted passionately to the outrage, in the East it was also the young who threatened

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their frustration by bawling insults at the Eastern guards, and chanting slogans: ‘Down with the pointy beard! Ulbricht, Murderer! Budapest! Budapest! Budapest!’ 184 / THE BERLIN WALL Eastern guards and Western demonstrators were roughly the same age. Till did not turn around. He kept walking until he got to the next SBahn

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direction of BerlinMitte—Ackerstrasse, Gartenstrasse and Strelitzer Strasse—had all been closed off with barbed wire. There were Eastern police with guns blocking 188 / THE BERLIN WALL access. Already paramilitary workers seemed busy constructing a more permanent barrier. The Kielbergs had been planning to drop over to their relatives for coffee later

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that the ‘anti-Fascist protection barrier’ represented. This was ‘a black day for the warmongers…the track-switch has been set to peace- 190 / THE BERLIN WALL …the workers’ response: production records’. A front page editorial was headlined ‘Clear Conditions!’ and said of the West Berlin authorities: ‘With one stroke it

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on to the offensive, pointing out that the restrictions were in ‘direct contravention’ of the four-power agreement and represented a ‘damning 206 / THE BERLIN WALL admission by the Soviets of the inability of communist society to compete with a free society’.4 The official State Department response—discussed and approved

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French counterpart. Journalists, including Robert Lochner, the American-born and German-raised director of RIAS, had also found their way into East Berlin 214 / THE BERLIN WALL during the early hours and supplied eyewitness accounts of the tragic, sometimes chaotic scenes at the border crossings, especially the Friedrichstrasse station. Media people were

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press magnate was obviously displeased that the Allies had ignored his advice. That morning, 16 August, Springer’s Bild ran a banner headline 228 / THE BERLIN WALL attacking Western inaction. ‘The West does nothing!’ the front page bellowed. ‘President Kennedy stays silent…Macmillan goes hunting…and Adenauer hurls abuse at Brandt.’ Another

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to make detection easier, and the barring of the intersector sewer system, through which several spectacular escapes had already been made.28 266 / THE BERLIN WALL Surprisingly, not all ministers supported the idea of a wall. Stasi Minister Mielke thought a barbed-wire barrier would be ‘more durable and suitable for

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XXII. Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in Moscow, a huge international showcase for the international Communist movement. 268 / THE BERLIN WALL Ulbricht hoped that Khrushchev would use the congress to formally announce the signing of a peace treaty with East Germany, and therefore the assumption by

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travelling in official cars.’ After reading a report from his embassy in Washington on the Friedrichstrasse crisis, the Prime Minister scribbled some marginal 286 / THE BERLIN WALL comments. ‘What does the Foreign Office intend to do about this?’ Macmillan asked. ‘It’s rather alarming’ He wondered how long Britain could continue to

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supplied in cleverer ways; for instance, to influence the propaganda war. A German-speaking BOB representative was added to the team that 292 / THE BERLIN WALL interviewed East German refugees, especially army and border-police deserters like Conrad Schumann. The BOB man’s job was to quickly digest the material thrown

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actually have an alternative. Once the immediate brouhaha had settled down, this point seemed to percolate into the minds of the general population. 344 / THE BERLIN WALL In West Berlin, as autumn drew on, the Mayor’s representatives sat down and hammered out ‘crossing-permit agreements’ with East German representatives. The involvement

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, and increased support from other East Bloc governments, the perception of most East Germans in the later 1960s and 1970s was of 348 / THE BERLIN WALL relative comfort and prosperity. Private consumption per household rose by almost a quarter between 1965 and 1970. There remained problems with the supply of everyday

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Turkish restaurants. Americans, Brits and the French looked after security, and the Berliners had grown accustomed to the Wall. And there was something 356 / THE BERLIN WALL else new in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Often, all too often, there were demonstrations taking place, demonstrations against the protecting power, America, which

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Teufel and Dieter Kunzelmann, and the precocious Ulrich Enzensberger, younger brother of the famous German writer, Hans-Magnus Enzensberger, set up the so- 362 / THE BERLIN WALL called ‘Commune One’ (Kommune 1). Here sexualised politics and politicised sex became the order of the day. What most people understand as politics often receded

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had become accustomed. The particularly surprising friend was Franz-Josef Strauss, the bulllike, aggressively conservative Bavarian political boss who had been Defence Minister when the Berlin Wall was built. Strauss, vilified twenty years previously by East German propaganda as an ultra-reactionary warmonger who was trying to get his hands on a

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at which the East German leader refused to discuss Soviet-style reforms. Honecker asked instead, ‘Has your population enough food, bread, and butter?’ 410 / THE BERLIN WALL And he compared the standard of life in the USSR unfavourably with that in the GDR. The relationship between the two leaders deteriorated further during

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in the chant. In the next few days, demonstrations spread through the GDR, to Magdeburg, Potsdam, Halle, Karl-Marx-Stadt and elsewhere. 412 / THE BERLIN WALL Krenz and his fellow conspirators started to build the pressure on Honecker straight after Gorbachev’s departure. They put together a document admitting the regime

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temporary practice of issuing (travel) authorisations through GDR consulates and permanent exit with only a GDR personal identity card via third countries ceases. 424 / THE BERLIN WALL 3. The attached press release explaining the temporary transition regulation will be issued on 10 November. Responsible: Government spokesman of the GDR Council of Ministers

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at this stage seems to have been his political position: to the General Secretary’s disappointment, several of his reformist nominations for 426 / THE BERLIN WALL membership of the Politburo had been rejected by the Central Committee, in which the hardliners still formed a strong block. Immediately after the meeting was

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radical social and economic reorganisation in the Communist interest, by 1961 such formerly prosperous and advanced parts of Germany as Thuringia, Saxony and 444 / THE BERLIN WALL Saxony-Anhalt, not forgetting East Berlin, had lost huge swathes of their productive capital, industrial know-how, patents and management skills to the dynamic, free

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gro es Loch innerhalb unserer Republik dar’ in Vor dem Mauerbau (Schriftenreihe der Viertelsjahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte Sondernummer 2003) as above pp. 315f. 458 / THE BERLIN WALL 27 Harrison, Driving the Soviets tip the Wall p. 170. Pervukhin’s report to Foreign Minister Gromyko of 19 May 1961. 28 Taubmann, Khrushchev p

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available on www.berlinische-monatsschrift.de. In common with many other historical events that happened to occur during the summer months, the building of the Berlin Wall is commonly and sincerely—though incorrectly—recollected as taking place on ‘a glorious summer’s day’, with the proceedings ‘bathed in bright sunshine’ and

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Lewis. The Cold War, A New History. New York, 2005. Gearson, John, and Kori Schake (eds). The Berlin Wall Crisis: Perspectives on Cold War Alliances. Basingstoke & New York, 2002. 484 / THE BERLIN WALL Gelb, Norman. The Berlin Wall: Kennedy, Khrushchev and a Showdown in the Heart of Europe. New York, 1988. Grimm, Thomas. Das Politbüro Private

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London, 2003. Thatcher, Margaret. The Downing Street Years. London, 1995. Todd, Albert C., and Max Hayward (eds.), Twentieth Century Russian Poetry. London, 1993. 486 / THE BERLIN WALL Tunner, William H. Over the Hump. New York, 1964. Tusa, Ann and John. The Berlin Blockade. London, 1988. Tusa, Ann. The Last Division: Berlin and

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Veigel, web-published account of student escape activities at http://www.fluchthilfe.de/ Other books and publications consulted Buckley Jr., William. The Fall of the Berlin Wall. Hoboken, 2004. Childs, David. The Fall of the GDR. Harlow, 2001. Dokumentationszentrum Berliner Mauer, Die Berliner Mauer Ausstellungskatalog. Dresden, 2002. Funder, Anna. Stasiland. London,

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Containment and Coexistence. Washington, 2001. Glees, Anthony. The Stasi Files. London, 2003. Hartewig, Karin. Das Auge der Partei: Fotografie und Staatssicherheit. Berlin, 2004. 488 / THE BERLIN WALL Hauswald, Harald, and Lutz Rathenow. Ost-Berlin: Leben vor dem Mauerfall. Berlin, 2005. Hilton, Christopher. The Wall: The People’J Story. Stroud, 2001. Klausmeier, Axel

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Philharmonicorchestra, 34 Berlin rail corridor, 38, 54, 65 Berlin Steering Group, 223-4, 229 Berlin Task Force, 172-3, 202 Berlin Transport company (BVG), 179 Berlin Wall, 91; Ulbricht hints at, 137; route, 146; materials, 147; initial barrier erected162-3, 189; increasing permanence, 199, 223; permanene construction begins, 234, 241-2,

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the city and nation they inhabited, can do it justice.” —Salon.com “A major contribution to the story of Dresden.” —Christian Science Monitor Copyright THE BERLIN WALL. Copyright © 2006 by Frederick Taylor. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted

After the Berlin Wall

by Christopher Hilton  · 15 Dec 2011  · 306pp  · 92,704 words

AFTER THE BERLIN WALL AFTER THE BERLIN WALL PUTTING TWO GERMANYS BACK TOGETHER AGAIN CHRISTOPHER HILTON First published 2009 The History Press The Mill, Brimscombe Port Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG www.thehistorypress.co.

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in Vienna, Khruschev tries to pressure US President John Kennedy to demilitarise Berlin 1–12 August 21,828 refugees arrive in West Berlin 13 August Berlin Wall built 1963 26 June Kennedy visits Berlin and makes his ‘Ich Bin Ein Berliner’ speech 1968 21 August Warsaw Pact countries crush Prague Spring 1970

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is guardian of The Wall, what does he think of the twin row of cobblestones? Now they are incorporating little metal plates beside the cobblestones, BERLIN WALL 1961–1989, but they are positioned to be read from the West ... The cobblestones mark the outer Wall, but the real wall for the GDR

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was put into storage, not destroyed. Some people regarded the act as sacrilegious and some as vandalism against a protected monument. As at February 2008, Berlin Wall Online was listing fourteen places where either some of The Wall or a watchtower still stood. There seems to be more in the United States

The Year That Changed the World: The Untold Story Behind the Fall of the Berlin Wall

by Michael Meyer  · 7 Sep 2009  · 323pp  · 95,188 words

own country but across the East bloc. In a conspiracy worthy of the most contrived Cold War spy thriller, they deliberately took aim at the Berlin Wall—and more than any others, it was they who brought it down. Theirs is the great untold story of 1989. A second myth concerns

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as the interplay of great and almost inevitable forces. Seen from the ground, however, it looked very different. If you were there the night the Berlin Wall fell, you knew that it came to pass, in the way it did, because of a freak accident, a small and utterly human blunder.

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idea that all totalitarian regimes are similarly hollow at the core and will crumble with a shove from the outside. If its symbol is the Berlin Wall, coming down as Ronald Reagan famously bid it to do in a speech in Berlin in 1987, the operational model was Nicolae Ceausescu’s Romania

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legacy he clearly saw as his own. “He acted to defend liberty wherever it was threatened. He called evil by its name.” The famous Berlin Wall was the concrete symbol of communism and its hated masters. Among those who swung their hammers to bring it down, said Bush, there was no

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Reagan, too, was called a ‘warmonger,’ an ‘amiable dunce,’ an actor detached from reality. Yet within a few years after President Reagan left office, the Berlin Wall came down, the Evil Empire collapsed, the Cold War was won.” Everyone hears the echo. Everyone knows the reference. “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall

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pages. And that was that until two years, four months, twenty-eight days and nine hours later—long after Reagan had left office—when the Berlin Wall actually came down. Abruptly, it was as if word were deed. Ronald Reagan became not only a prophet, foreseeing what no one else had,

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War was over. We won! At least, this is the spin we Americans put on it. In recent years, particularly among U.S. conservatives, the Berlin Wall speech has taken on the talismanic weight of an ideological icon, both the symbol and founding idea of a new post–Cold War weltanschauung. As

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the Reagan echo with a nod to Winston Churchill. Be resolute, and the enemy will blink. Goodness and light will triumph. The fall of the Berlin Wall serves as proof and inspiration. There’s only one problem—that of disjuncture, a confusion of cause and effect. What if it didn’t happen

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“Alles auf!” he ordered. “Open up,” and the gates swung wide. A great roar rose out of the crowds as they surged forward. Suddenly, the Berlin Wall was no more. “Die Mauer ist Weck,” the people cried out as they celebrated atop it before the cameras throughout the night. “The Wall is

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took an epic turn. A frontier that for five decades divided East from West was breached. Within the blink of an eye, it seemed, the Berlin Wall fell. The Cold War ended. Germans, suddenly, were once again Germans. Berliners were Berliners, no longer “East” nor “West.” Earlier in the evening, just

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uproar in the pressroom. Amid the instantaneous hubbub of shouted questions, one rang sharp and clear. “Mr. Schabowski, what is going to happen with the Berlin Wall?” As if finally sensing danger, the ground shifting beneath his feet, Schabowski dodged. “It has been brought to my attention that it is seven p

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own hands. They brought down the Wall, not armies or world statesmen. And then they danced atop it. Accident played an enormous role. Would the Berlin Wall have fallen, as dramatically as it did, were it not for Gunter Schabowski’s bungle? It was the shrug that changed the world. And what

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1986, where in an extraordinary meeting of minds the two men came close to a deal to abolish nuclear weapons. By the time of his Berlin Wall speech, Reagan was well along in changing his thinking about Gorbachev. The president had read his recently published book, Perestroika: New Thinking for Our

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opposition within his administration, just as Gorbachev himself had to negotiate a delicate and often perilous path among the factions of his own government. The Berlin Wall speech gave Reagan cover, notes James Mann, author of Rise of the Vulcans, a definitive portrait of George W. Bush’s foreign policy team.

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twenty-one described their titular East German brethren as Ausländer, or foreigners. In the summer of 1985, Allensbach researchers asked how long people thought the Berlin Wall would stand. The average response: thirty-four years. Amid the tens of thousands of documents released by the government Office on Intra-German Affairs concerning

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of the shortages of basic foods, and especially luxuries such as bananas: “How do you use a banana as a compass? Place it atop the Berlin Wall. East is where a bite has been taken out of it.” Political jokes took on a particularly hard edge: Honecker meets Mao and asks, “

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ahead. It opened the way for everything that would follow,” he said, from the creation of a democratic Hungary to, ultimately, the fall of the Berlin Wall. This brief encounter with Gorbachev, coming with the first breath of spring after a long winter, would prove to be a hidden but decisive turning

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the top of his government needed to be briefed on the likely scenario to come. It was a nightmare straight from 1961, the reason the Berlin Wall had been built in the first place: to stop communism’s unhappy citizens from voting with their feet. If Hungary’s border to the

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was not informed. It was not the first such contact, nor would it be the last. To understand the revolution in Hungary, and how the Berlin Wall came down, it is critical to understand West Germany’s role. Teltschik was the point man. Curly-haired and almost elfin, easygoing and quick to

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Germans who crossed the border would be transported to Giessen, in central West Germany, that very day. Imagine the scene. Four hundred miles from the Berlin Wall, the Pan-European Picnic began. A brass band played. Folk dancers in traditional Hungarian and Tyrolean garb cavorted in the meadows. There were banners and

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produce a real change in Hungary’s relations with the West. It would turn out to take just two months. Four hundred miles from the Berlin Wall, the Pan-European Picnic, with its folk dancers and brass band, had set in motion developments that would build with such incredible speed and force

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as to bring down Erich Honecker and topple his Berlin Wall. Directly to the east of Hungary, now boiling with change, was Ceausescu’s Romania. How to describe it? By metaphor, it would be Dante’

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doubt I ever will again. If only Eastern Europe’s subsequent revolutions were so light of spirit, or so painless. A few hours after the Berlin Wall fell, so did Bulgaria’s communist leader of thirty-five years, Todor Zhivkov—notorious for so many nefarious geopolitical plots, from the poisoned-umbrella slaying

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1997, he was sentenced to six and a half years in jail for crimes against humanity, specifically manslaughter of Germans attempting to escape over the Berlin Wall. Erich Honecker fled to Moscow after the collapse of the GDR, to be extradited in 1992, tried for treason and jailed in the Federal Republic

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to race around Kennebunkport, Maine. Then, amid all this boy-racer bric-a-brac, one comes across something much more serious: a slab of the Berlin Wall, encased in Plexiglas. An accompanying video explains what it represented and how it came to fall, with America and the Bush administration very much at

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States was free of the constraints and limitations that bound normal nations. Again Ronald Reagan was the exemplar. He confronted the Evil Empire and the Berlin Wall fell. He ran an arms race that the Soviets could not afford, and communism crumbled. He confronted dictators, and they backed off. Their people,

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definitive history; this book might better be thought of merely as a firsthand account of the revolutions in Eastern Europe and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Unusually among foreign correspondents, I was on scene for most of the events described, with few exceptions. My beat for Newsweek ran from Germany

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2007; Remarks to Conservative Union at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, February 8, 2008. I drew additional background from contemporary news accounts, including “Raze Berlin Wall, Reagan Urges Soviet” by Gerald M. Boyd, the New York Times, June 13, 1987, as well as retrospectives on the twentieth anniversary of the speech

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things is the source of the Allensbach data on West German attitudes toward the Wall and reunification; William F. Buckley Jr., The Fall of the Berlin Wall, 2004. One of the best travelogues of this genre ever written is Anthony Bailey’s The Edge of the Forest, a reporter-at-large feature

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214 Allensbach, 24 Allensbach Institute, 75, 223 Alliance for Free Democrats, 32 Allies Normandy invasion during World War II, 28, 69 role in construction of Berlin Wall, 17 Al Qaeda, 219 Altenburschla, 19 Alt-Herren Riege (team of old men), 26 American Conservative Union, 2 American Diplomacy and the End of the

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–161 remnants remaining, 16 September 11, 1989 border opening, 113–126 symbolism behind, 1, 3, 5–9, 15–16, 89, 171. See also Iron Curtain Berlin Wall, The (Taylor), 223 Bernstein, Leonard, 204 Beschloss, Michael R., 222 Beyond the Wall (Pond), 227, 234 Bill of Rights, U.S., 30 Bismarck Strasse (

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Bulgaria, fall of communism in, 190–191 Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, 227 Bush, George H. W. election to presidency, 39–40, 60, 227 fall of Berlin Wall and, 9, 175, 211–212, 222, 235–236, 237 foreign policy of, 213–215, 224–225, 227, 231, 232 Hungary and, 95, 232 legacy

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Comintern, 21 Committee for Historical Justice (Hungary), 85, 230–231 Common Fate Camp, 97–98 Common Market, 21, 93 communism anticommunists and, 29–31 Berlin Wall and. See Berlin Wall G. W. Bush on, 2, 5 fall of, in Bulgaria, 190–191 fall of, in Czechoslovakia, 28, 114, 128, 135–143, 175–190,

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Doina, 197–198 counterculture, 21 Cousteau, Jacques, 95 crash of 2008, 218 cult of personality, 110 Cuthbertson, Ian, 228 Czechoslovakia denouement, 205–206 fall of Berlin Wall and, 8 fall of communism in, 28, 114, 128, 135–143, 175–190, 205–206, 233 Prague Spring (1968), 39, 45 refugees from GDR and

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invasion of (1968), 105–106, 205 See also Prague Dalai Lama, 135, 206 Danner, Mark, 237 Davis, John, 231 DDR Museum (Berlin), 224 death strip (Berlin Wall), 16–18 democracy in Czechoslovakia, 185, 186, 206 in Eastern Europe, 99 in Hungary, 29–32, 41, 55–58, 110, 230–231 in Poland, 58

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), 229 European Union, Cold War and, 21 “Evil Empire,” collapse of, 2, 14, 215–216 exit visas, 8–9, 118, 165, 168 Fall of the Berlin Wall, The (Buckley), 223 Fall of the Wall, The (BBC-Spiegel TV documentary), 228, 231, 232, 234, 235 Farocki, Harun, 236 Faust’s Metropolis (Richie),

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also Soviet Union, former Gerasimov, Gennady, 150 Geremek, Bronislaw, 47, 53, 59–60, 225, 233 German Democratic Republic (GDR) attitudes toward German reunification, 23–28 Berlin Wall. See Berlin Wall closes borders, 142 denouement, 203–204 economic problems of, 114, 117, 125, 133–135, 137, 143, 157, 160–161, 164–165 fall of, 163

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12, 29–30, 37, 157 Gorbachev, Mikhail background of, 11 Cold War and, 22, 70, 237–238 Czech Velvet Revolution (1989) and, 183 fall of Berlin Wall and, 70–75, 91–93, 204 GDR Jubilee of 1989 and, 135, 147–152 glasnost (openness), 4, 12, 29–30, 37, 157 Honecker and, 27

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background of, 90 collapse of GDR and, 133–135, 137–138, 164–165, 172, 204, 228, 230–231, 232, 234 construction of Berlin Wall, 16–17, 66, 68 fall of Berlin Wall, 65–66, 69–70, 88–94, 172 Freedom Train “solution,” 123–124, 133–134, 142–143, 152–153, 154 Jubilee of 1989

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, 229 Internet, 21 Iran, 83, 217 Iraq, 2, 212, 214, 216, 218, 222 Iron Curtain Cold War and, 36 symbolism of Berlin Wall and, 5–9, 15–16 See also Berlin Wall Israel, 106 Jakes, Milos, 140, 143, 148–150, 233, 234 refugees from GDR and, 122–123 Velvet Revolution (1989) and, 179–

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Solidarity elections of 1989, 82, 84 Klaus, Vaclav, 184 Kochemasov, Vyacheslav, 154–155, 234 Kohl, Helmut attitudes toward German reunification, 23–28, 127 fall of Berlin Wall and, 9, 72–76, 175, 228–229, 235–236 Gorbachev and, 12 nuclear deterrence and, 74–76 refugees from GDR and, 113–114, 125–127

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95, 98, 101, 113, 207, 232 Lance missiles, 229 Largo Desolato (Havel), 136 League of Young Democrats (Fidesz), 32 Lebow, Richard, 224 Leipzig fall of Berlin Wall and, 172, 234 refugees from GDR and, 124, 135, 160 rise of opposition, 152, 153, 155, 158–159 Lenin’s Tomb, 65–66 Letna Park

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Endowment for Democracy, 2, 222 National Gallery of Art (Budapest), 86 National Salvation Front (Romania), 197 National Security Archive, 231 National Security Council fall of Berlin Wall and, 10, 13 National Security Archive, 230–231 U.S.-Soviet relations and, 60, 76, 226 NATO. See North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Nazi

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51, 225 private property, 206 Protestantism, 68 proxy wars, 210 Radio Free Europe, 33, 99 Rakowski, Mieczyslaw, 81, 131, 137 Rather, Dan, 183 Reagan, Ronald Berlin Wall speech (1987), 2–5, 9–14, 16, 27, 215–216, 222 G. W. Bush admiration for, 1–2, 215–216, 221–222 death of, 222

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Cathedral (Prague), 142 Saint Sebastian, 2 Sakharov, Andrei, 36 samizdat, 32 Schabowski, Gunter collapse of GDR and, 165–173, 204–205, 234–235 fall of Berlin Wall and, 7–10, 65, 69–70, 91, 165–173, 223, 234 Politburo and, 140–141, 148–150, 165–173 refugees from GDR and, 116–117

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157, 191, 194–198, 201 Securitate (secret police in Romania), 106, 191, 194–198, 201 September 11, 2001, 2, 215 Shevardnadze, Eduard, 148 fall of Berlin Wall and, 90–91 German reunification proposal and, 125–126 refugees from GDR and, 118 replaces Gromyko, 12 Shultz, George, 75, 227 Siani-Davies, Peter, 236

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U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), 21 U.S. Chamber of Commerce, 222 U.S. Constitution, 30, 206 U.S. State Department fall of Berlin Wall and, 10, 13 U.S.-Soviet relations and, 61–62 University of Budapest, 34 Urban, Jan, 178–179, 184, 187, 205, 233, 236 Urban,

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Vienna, 70 Vietnam War, impact of, 23 Vlad, Iulian, 194, 195 Volkskammer (People’s Parliament), 89 Volkspolizei (state police) at the Berlin Wall, 3, 5–6, 16, 27 fall of Berlin Wall and, 5–9 Walesa, Lech new Polish government and, 128, 131–133, 135–136 Nobel Peace Prize (1983), 47 as president of

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177–181, 183–186, 190, 205 Wenn Mauer Fallen (Krenz), 158 “We Shall Overcome,” 153 West Germany attitudes toward German reunification, 23–28, 213 Berlin Wall. See Berlin Wall fall of Berlin Wall, 5–9, 65–76, 88–94 See also Berlin We the People (Ash), 230 Wiecko, Andrzej, 225 Wiedervereinigung (reunification), attitudes toward, 23–28

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Brandenburg Gate and, 3 chief victors in, 211 Cold War versus, 20 end of, 10 Normandy invasion, 28, 69 Poland in, 44–45 symbolism of Berlin Wall and, 1, 5–9, 15–16 Wuensdorf, 210 Wyden, Peter, 27, 223 Yakovlev, Alexander, 63, 227 YouTube, 3 Yugoslavia, 174, 213–214 Zagrodzka, Danuta,

The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall

by Mary Elise Sarotte  · 6 Oct 2014  · 587pp  · 119,432 words

.” —Serhii Plokhy, author of The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union “From a remove of 25 years, the fall of the Berlin Wall seems foreordained. In fact, as Mary Elise Sarotte shows, this historic moment was an improbable concatenation of events and decisions triggering in perfect if accidental

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-century history. This is essential reading for those who want to understand the role of contingency and human agency in the unexpected opening of the Berlin Wall.” —Angela Stent, author of The Limits of Partnership: US-Russian Relations in the Twenty-First Century The Collapse The Collapse The Accidental Opening of

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Cold War Europe Map 2. Divided Germany in 1989 Map 3. Leipzig City Center and Ring Road Map 4. Divided Berlin in 1989 Photos The Berlin Wall and the Brandenburg Gate The Death Strip Abandoned Vehicles Anniversary Deployment Sequence of Surveillance Photos Protest in Leipzig, October 9, 1989 Press Conference in East

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as the Stasi) NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization NBC US broadcast network NSC US National Security Council RHG Robert Havemann Society (initials in German) SBM Berlin Wall Foundation (initials in German) SED East German Socialist Unity Party (the East German ruling party, initials in German) UK United Kingdom of Great Britain

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9, 1989, as in the preceding years and decades, the East German ruling regime had maintained forceful control over the movement of its people. The Berlin Wall in front of the Brandenburg Gate, circa November 1984, with a sign in the foreground reading, “Attention, you are now leaving West Berlin.” The

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sparks into the supercharged atmosphere of the autumn of 1989 and ignited a dramatic sequence of events that culminated in the unintended opening of the Berlin Wall. This book will examine not only those sparks but also the friction between the two competing and contemporaneous processes in East Germany that produced

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the past.27 Learning the story of the rise of the peaceful revolution, the collapse of the East German regime, and the opening of the Berlin Wall therefore means learning about more than one particular country or event. It involves understanding the larger challenges inherent in making a nonviolent struggle against dictators

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has announced that its borders are, starting immediately, open for everyone.” Friedrichs announced that his news show would turn live to a journalist at the Berlin Wall. Once Robin Lautenbach, the correspondent in West Berlin, appeared on camera standing at the Invaliden Street border crossing, however, Lautenbach could only show what

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along the former path of the Wall, now a bike path, particularly at locations where deaths occurred. And at its Bernauer Street location, the Berlin Wall Foundation focuses its energies on keeping alive an awareness of the Wall’s inhumanities, not on celebrating its demise in a triumphalist manner. The foundation

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and Albert Minicucci, my godparents, have been unparalleled family-by-choice for decades. Steven Sarotte, my brother, helpfully reminded me that David Hasselhoff opened the Berlin Wall whenever I was on the verge of forgetting it. Finally, the memory of my parents, Frank and Gail Sarotte, remains sustaining even though they are

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Sheehan, Where Have All the Soldiers Gone? The Transformation of Modern Europe (Boston: Mariner Books, 2008). 14. On the history of the Berlin Wall, see Pertti Ahonen, Death at the Berlin Wall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Hope Harrison, Driving the Soviets Up the Wall (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); and Gerhard

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Dresden Abt. II, 10448. 25. Hertle, Berliner Mauer, 22–23, 106–116. For an overview of the history of the Wall, see Frederick Taylor, The Berlin Wall: A World Divided, 1961–1989 (New York: Harper, 2008); specifically on its construction, see Frederick Kempe, Berlin 1961: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Most Dangerous

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längste Nacht, der grösste Tag: Deutschland am 9. November 1989 (Munich: Piper, 2009); for information about border fortifications more generally, see Patrick Major, Behind the Berlin Wall: East Germany and the Frontiers of Power (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). 17. Gerhard Haase-Hindenberg, Der Mann, der die Mauer öffnete: Warum Oberstleutnant

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of the United States series could state that, following the ouster of “the recalcitrant hard-liner Erich Honecker,” on “November 9, his successor opened the Berlin Wall to passage without visas” (Herring, From Colony to Superpower, 905). 35. The gist of this narrative is that when Reagan speaks, “even walls fall

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to both Axel Klausmeier and Manfred Wichmann, its director and curator of collections, respectively, for their help with my research. For more information about the Berlin Wall Foundation and the memorials that it maintains, see its website, available in English at www.stiftung-berliner-mauer.de/en. 58. On the competition for

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., Der Weg zum Denkmal für Freiheit und Einheit. For more on the difficulties of commemorating the past in contemporary Germany, see Hope M. Harrison, “The Berlin Wall,” in Mark Kramer and Vit Smetana, eds., Imposing, Maintaining, and Tearing Open the Iron Curtain: The Cold War and East-Central Europe, 1945–1989

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for West Germany, 170 Bavaria, 105 Beer Hall Putsch, 114 Beil, Gerhard, 115 Berger, Matthias, 32 Berlin design competitions, 2007 and 2010, and memorial to Berlin Wall opening, 184 Berlin (divided) in 1989, 93 (map) legal authority in, xix movement within, 8 subdivision and occupation of, post-World War II, original intention

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historical associations of date of, 114 triumphalist assumptions about, cost of, xxv willingness of peaceful revolutionaries to trust and, 180–181 See also Border openings Berlin Wall Foundation, 183–184 Berliner Morgenpost, 119 Bertele, Franz, 32–33 closure of office due to refugees, and, 94–95 Bias of hindsight, and causality

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Street border crossing; Invaliden Street border crossing; Sonnenallee border crossing Border guards/soldiers, 136–137 ambiguous orders to shoot and, 11–12, 13, 16 and Berlin Wall opening, response to, 161, 164 legal proceedings against, after German reunification, 174–175 loss of authority/employment of, after German reunification, 172 at November 4

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183 “wild pigs” as nickname for “troublemakers” at, 138 See also Border crossings Brandenburg Gate, xvii, xviii, xix–xx, xix (photo), 160 (photo) climbing of Berlin Wall near (November 9), 150–152 East German regime retaking control near, 155–156 scene near, on November 9, 150–152 Brinkmann, Peter, 115, 116, 118

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162 Iraq and, 179 new world order and, 169, 170 and post-Cold War Europe, political structure of, 169–170 Presidential Library of, pieces of Berlin Wall embedded in, 183 triumphalism and, 121 Catholic churches as havens/shelters, 9, 181 See also specific churches Causality in history, and bias of hindsight, xxii

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1990 and, 170 Churches, Catholic. See Catholic churches Churchill, Winston, “Iron Curtain” speech of, 183 Civil resistance (nonviolent resistance) movement, xx, xxv–xxvi Cold War, Berlin Wall opening as symbol of end of, xxiv–xxv Cold War Europe, post-, political structure of, 169–171, 176–177 Collateral, children and spouses as, and

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181 Cooper, Belinda, 66, 79–80, 80, 85 Corbett, Robert, 121 Covert courier service. See “Information smugglers”/underground journalistic network/covert courier service Credit, and Berlin Wall opening, and travel law, draft of, 97–98 Crimes/abuse, by East German regime, investigations/legal proceedings and, 49, 174–175 CSCE. See Conference on

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road march and, 54 and travel law, draft of, 93, 100, 105–106 Dictators, disobedience by subordinates of, xxv Die Zeit, 13 Dissidents/activists and Berlin Wall opening, displeasure with, 153 churches as havens/shelters for, 9 election 1990 and, 172 Gethsemane Church and, 85–87 vs. Nikolai Church leaders, 32, 34

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55 Dresden, 30, 32, 40, 180 Dual-track decision of 1979, 34 Duisberg, Claus-Jürgen, 102 East Berlin. See Berlin (divided); Berlin Wall; Berlin Wall, construction of; Berlin Wall, opening of East German regime and Berlin Wall opening, response to, 159–161 collapse of, xx, xxv collapse of, and document disappearances, 49 control by, 3–4 crimes by

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by, 171 as supporter of peaceful reform, 52 Gould, Cheryl, 131 Grätz, Manfred, 159 Great Britain and announcement of travel law, reaction to, 121 and Berlin Wall opening, response to, 162 and Germany, division and occupation of, after World War II, 4–6 Green Party, 34 Greenwald, Jonathan, 101 Grinin, Vladimir,

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Haydn, Joseph, 162 Helsinki Final Act (Helsinki Accords), 18, 65, 181 human rights clauses, 18, 171 Hempel, Johannes, 41 Herger, Wolfgang, 105 Historical record, of Berlin Wall opening, xxiii History, causality in, xxii–xxiii Hitler, Adolf, xxi, 114 Höfer, Ernst, 97 Hoffman, Hans-Joachim, 112 Hole variant, and emigration, 101–103, 105

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, 109–110, 111, 158 significance of, 103 See also Travel and emigration; Travel law, draft of Hollitzer, Tobias, 81 Honecker, Erich, 122 and Berlin Wall, justification for construction of, 8 and border openings, instructions for use of force at, 139–140 border sealing and, 29–30 and border shootings, ambiguous

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for, 136 Jahn, Roland, xxiv, 56–57, 61–62, 80, 81, 142–143, 180, 181 at Cuckoo’s Egg (bar in West Berlin) to celebrate Berlin Wall opening, 52 news reports and documentaries incriminating East German regime by, 175 Jakeš, Miloš, 99 Jaruzelski, Wojciech, 23, 121 Jena, 175 Jiang Zemin, 178 Johannisthal

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26–27 and travel law, draft of, and credit and Berlin Wall opening, 98 Kontraste (television program), 57 Krenz, Egon, 26, 164 and Berlin Wall, opening of, 150 and Berlin Wall, opening of, responsibility for, 177, 178 and Berlin Wall opening, inaccurate information to Gorbachev regarding, 160–161 and Berlin Wall opening, response to, 159–150, 161 and border shootings

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115 Lamprecht, Jerry, 116, 130, 152 Lange, Bernd-Lutz, 55 Lässig, Jochen, 38, 51, 59 Lautenbach, Robin, 145 Lauter, Gerhard, xxiv, 114, 176, 179 and Berlin Wall, opening of, 156 and travel law, and text on permanent emigration and temporary travel, 107–109 and travel law, draft of, 93–94, 96–103

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, 57 and travel law, Schabowski’s announcement of, 113 (photo), 114–119 See also specific broadcasters/broadcast networks; news agencies; television news programs Memorials to Berlin Wall opening, 183–184 Berlin design competition, 2007, 2010, 184 and nationalism and triumphalism, 183 Merkel, Angela, 147, 150 Meyer, Wolfgang, 112, 114, 115 Michaelis

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122, 170, 171 Mittig, Rudi, 156 Mock, Alois, 24 Mölbis, 33 Momper, Walter, 92, 142 and announcement of travel law, reaction to, 119–120 and Berlin Wall opening, response to, 164–165 and travel law, draft of, 97 Nagy, Imre, 23 National Defense Council, 159 National Security Agency, 98 Nationalism, 183 NATO

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arrest, 43 “peace prayers” changed to “Monday prayers” and, 41 ring road march (October 9) and, 64, 65, 66–69 Nonviolence, 184 adherence to, at Berlin Wall opening, 180 at Leipzig ring road march (October 9), party secretaries’ appeal for, 69 at Leipzig ring road march (October 9), protestors’ appeal for, 55

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press conference, reaction to, 119–124 announcement of travel law at international press conference and, 113 (photo), 114–119, 127–128, 159, 179, 184 and Berlin Wall, opening of, 150 fate of, after German reunification, 175 at November 4 demonstration (East Berlin ), 95–96 and travel law, draft of, 97 Schalck-Golodkowski

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, Alexander, 90–91 and travel law, draft of, and credit and Berlin Wall opening, 97–98 and travel law, draft of, and free elections, 98 Schäuble, Wolfgang, 91 and travel law, draft of, and free elections, 98 Schefke

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Snetkov, Boris, 52 Social Democratic Party of East Germany, 95 Socialist Unity Party (SED), xxiii, 95 ambiguous orders to shoot and, 11–12, 13, 16 Berlin Wall construction and, 8 control by, 8–9, 10, 13, 20 crimes by former officials of, and legal proceedings/investigations, 174–175 as de facto ruler

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Germans, confrontations between, 88 See also Armed forces Soviet Union, xix, 178, 179 and announcement of travel law, reaction to, 120–121 and Berlin Wall, opening of, 156–158 and Berlin Wall opening, response to, 156–158, 159–161, 162–163, 164 collapse of, 171 and German Democratic Republic as new state, 6 and

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law, draft of, 91–92, 93–94, 96–103, 108 applications and stamps and, 108 applications for visits abroad and, 96–97 Berlin Wall opening and, 179 credit and Berlin Wall opening and, 97–98 failure to question wording of, 111–112, 179 free elections and, 98 hole variant and, 101–103, 105,

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defense of, 94 outrage against, 97 permanent emigration and, 99–103 temporary travel and, 100 thirty-day discussion period and, 97 Travel regulations (November 9) Berlin Wall opening and, 109 failure of communication and, 111–112 instructions for announcement of, 109 misleading title of, 111 and Schabowski’s announcement of, at international

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press conference, reaction to, 119–124 text on permanent emigration and temporary travel and, 107–109, 109–114 Travelers, Stasi surveillance on, 136 Triumphalism and Berlin Wall opening, cost of triumphalist assumptions about, xxv Bush, George H. W., and, 121 and memorials, 183 Trust, xxv, 180–181 Turek, Michael, 36, 40

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Ulbricht, Walter, and Berlin Wall, justification for construction of, 8 UN Convention on Refugees, 24 UN High Commission on Refugees, 26 Underground journalistic network. See “Information smugglers”/underground journalistic network

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forces, xix, 10–11, 12–13, 50, 53, 54–55, 172 Weber, Juliane, 123 Wedding district (West Berlin), 142 West Berlin. See Berlin (divided); Berlin Wall; Berlin Wall, construction of; Berlin Wall, opening of West Germany. See Federal Republic of Germany; Germany; Germany (divided) Western media, 181. See also Media coverage Wheatley, Bill, 116, 131, 151

Stasiland: Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall

by Anna Funder  · 19 Sep 2011

Stasiland Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall Anna Funder Dedication For Craig Allchin Epigraph ‘…a silent crazy jungle under glass.’ The Member of the Wedding, Carson McCullers ‘The two of you, violator

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Queen. ‘Sentence first—verdict afterwards.’ Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll Contents Cover Title Page Dedication Epigraph Map of Germany 1945–90 Map of Berlin Wall 1961–89 1 Berlin, Winter 1996 2 Miriam 3 Bornholmer Bridge 4 Charlie 5 The Linoleum Palace 6 Stasi HQ 7 The Smell of Old

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pats her large bosom with a flat hand—‘to his palace. But of course I couldn’t go.’ Of course she couldn’t go: the Berlin Wall ran a couple of kilometres from here and there was no getting over it. Along with the Great Wall of China, it was one of

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photographs, but there are none on the walls, and none that I can see in the cabinets. On the night of 12–13 August the Berlin Wall was rolled out in barbed wire. Frau Paul lived then with her husband in this same half-house deep in the eastern sector. They didn

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network of collaborators and informants numbered one in every six people. Anna Funder went back to East Germany seven years after the fall of the Berlin Wall to interview those whose lives had been affected by the Stasi. Her portraits are by turns funny, heartbreaking, and stirring. She tells the story of

Tunnel 29

by Helena Merriman  · 24 Aug 2021  · 333pp  · 101,677 words

the conifers and pines of Grunewald forest. We stand there a moment and Joachim gestures in front of us, pointing into the distance where the Berlin Wall once stood. I think of those images from 1989, the night when people climbed on top of the Wall, danced on the concrete, then hacked

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down. Every year that ends in a nine, we replay that moment, but I’ve always been more interested in the other end of the Berlin Wall story: 1961. The year it was built. What happens when a government builds a barrier that cuts a city or country in half? That question

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was living in Jerusalem and spent hours queueing at checkpoints to cross into Gaza or the West Bank. People talk about the fall of the Berlin Wall as the end of an era, and in one way it was: it marked the end of the Cold War. But a new era

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what I thought I knew about many things: the end of the Second World War, the beginning of the Cold War, the building of the Berlin Wall, the birth of TV news, and what it means to become a spy and betray the people around you. The result is this book. Any

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forever in mid-air as he hovers over the barbed wire, somewhere between East and West, creating one of the most iconic images of the Berlin Wall. Within hours, the photo is on the front pages of newspapers around the world, one caption reading: THE GDR’S OWN TROOPS ARE RUNNING

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the districts of Wedding, Moabit and Tiergarten in the West, all the way down to the River Spree. Compared to other walls in history, the Berlin Wall in its early stages is shoddy, an embarrassment of engineering. One onlooker says it looks as though it’s been put together by ‘a band

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. Some of the most extraordinary escapes happened on a mile-long street called Bernauer Strasse, a street now famous all over the world as the Berlin Wall ran right down the middle of it. The living areas of the houses were in the East, pavements in the West. To escape, all

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back in 1961, it was the site of the city’s most famous tourist attraction: the Wall. For Bernauer Strasse is the street that the Berlin Wall carved in two, where people threw themselves from windows the week after it was built. The eastern side is deserted, grass now covering the cobbles

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, they drove there, filming hundreds of West Berliners shouting and screaming at the Russian soldiers protruding from the top. For forty-eight glorious hours, the Berlin Wall story was theirs and theirs alone, their network rivals (ABC and CBS) racing to West Berlin from West Germany. The first footage that American audiences

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saw of the Berlin Wall was NBC’s, and at a time of intense rivalry between networks, this was one of the sweetest feelings Reuven Frank had ever had. On

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of West Berlin’s American garrison, who managed to get a message to President Kennedy: ‘Mr President, an escapee is bleeding to death at the Berlin Wall.’ They wanted instructions. None came. Soon, word spread through West Berlin that something awful was happening at the Wall: reporters climbed ladders, taking photographs of

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extravagant but Reuven Frank loved the romance of it, talking in hushed tones in luxurious European restaurants about the most daring escape operation under the Berlin Wall. Sitting down at Maxim’s, cocktail-eyes flicking round to see if there are any famous diners here tonight, Piers and Gary tell Reuven what

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to dismantle every single one of his missiles in Cuba. It was a victory for Kennedy, the man who’d done so little when the Berlin Wall was built. The ‘boy in short pants’ had learnt from that experience, shown he could stand up to Khrushchev. The press soon moved on

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and that tunnel. Over the next seventy-eight minutes, in eighteen million homes, people who so far have only seen short news reports about the Berlin Wall, people who had little understanding of what was happening in the city, watch the story unfold. They see the Wall, the death strip, the tank

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. © ullsteinbild / TopFoto The Wall changed the geography of East Berlin, creating dead-ends where children gathered with balls and bicycles. © Thomas Hoepker/Magnum Photos The Berlin Wall was 96 miles long: 27 miles separating East and West Berlin; 69 miles separating West Berlin from the East German countryside. © Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

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along the Wall between East and West Berlin were border crossings, like the famous Checkpoint Charlie. © Erwin Reichert/AP/Shutterstock Though Walter Ulbricht described the Berlin Wall as an “anti-fascist protection barrier,” designed to protect East Germans from spies and saboteurs in the West, the binoculars of the VoPos were always

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of wall separating countries all over the world, often accompanied by watch-towers, mines, electric fences, armoured vehicles, night-vision cameras, dogs, just like the Berlin Wall. Then there are the walls within countries – the so-called peace walls that divide Protestant and Catholic areas in Northern Ireland, the walls that separate

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only three were successful. The other projects failed – mostly after being betrayed. These escape tunnels demonstrate the despair people had after the building of the Berlin Wall and their longing to find, across the inhumane border, a way to freedom.’ Notes FOREWORD Over seventy countries: This figure comes from Elisabeth Vallet, Director

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over here!’: Author interview with Joachim Rudolph. ‘Beautiful horses’: Quoted in Kempe, Berlin 1961, 109. A hundred and fifty thousand people to Bautzen: Taylor, The Berlin Wall, 47. ‘Hurrah! We’re still alive’: Richie, Faust’s Metropolis, 672. CHAPTER 6 ‘High on the Yellow Wagon’: Author interview with Joachim Rudolph. One of

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territory nearby. Kempe, Berlin 1961, 56. Sidle up to European diplomats: Financial Times, 25 August 1991, IX. ‘Like sausages on an assembly line: Taylor, The Berlin Wall, 116. ‘Chronic opportunist’: Wedge, ‘Khrushchev at a Distance: A Study of Public Personality’, Society 5, 24–28 (1968). ‘Went berserk’: O’Donnell, Johnny, We Hardly

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Knew Ye, 295. Wasn’t going to be constrained: Smyser, Kennedy and the Berlin Wall, 67. ‘Roughest thing in my life’: Harrison, After the Berlin Wall, 152. Wept on his brother Bobby’s shoulder: Hersh, The Dark Side of Camelot, 383. Doodle the word ‘Berlin’: O’Donnell

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Ye, 306. ‘I think they have the right’: Reeves, President Kennedy: Profile of Power, 204. ‘A wall is a hell of’: Smyser, Kennedy and the Berlin Wall, 106. ‘Why,’ President Kennedy asks: Ausland and Richardson, ‘Crisis Management: Berlin, Cyprus, Laos’, Foreign Affairs 44 (2 January 1966), 301. ‘Thousands of concrete slabs’: Taylor

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, The Berlin Wall, 241. ‘Look how slowly I’m working’: As recounted by US Army First Lieutenant Vern Pike, quoted in Kempe, Berlin 1961, 473. Walter Ulbricht had

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Mauer”, New Yorker article, 20 October 1962. CHAPTER 15 Wasn’t allowed to study: Author interview with Joachim Rudolph. The party sent Grenzgänger: Taylor, The Berlin Wall, 191. Quadrupled to 7,200: Dennis, The Rise and Fall of the German Democratic Republic 1945–1990, 102. ‘Anti-fascist protection barrier’: Walter Ulbricht, Neues

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: Author interview with Joachim Rudolph. Seven-tonne dump truck: Kempe, Berlin 1961, 405. One day before her birthday: Hertle and Nooke, The Victims at the Berlin Wall, 37. ‘The blood stain’: PdVP-Rapport Nr 234, 23.8.1961 in PHS, Bestand PdVP-Rapporte, Archive-No. 8037, Bl. 8. ‘Violating the laws’: Hertle

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, The Berlin Wall Story, 53. ‘ULBRICHT’S HUMAN HUNTERS’: BZ newspaper, 25 August 1961. One last time: Kempe, Berlin 1961, 366. Making notes of future trouble-makers: Hertle

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and Nooke, The Victims at the Berlin Wall, 25. CHAPTER 17 ‘Oh man. The clouds’: Author interview with Joachim Rudolph. CHAPTER 18 Stone has fallen: In my interview with Joachim, he used a

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Sesta in Der Tunnel, dir. Marcus Vetter, 1999. Felt the Wall looming: From author interview with Evi Rudolph. Over eight thousand had escaped: Hertle, The Berlin Wall Story, 106. Walter and Wilhelm: Stasi file on Eveline Rudolph, BStU / MfS 0202. Hauptabteilung II/5. ‘Friends visiting’: Ibid. CHAPTER 22 Glad of the coat

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: Author interview with Joachim Rudolph. Lowest birth rates: Taylor, The Berlin Wall, 357. Eventually, after an hour: Hertle and Nooke, The Victims at the Berlin Wall, 63. CHAPTER 23 Stands in front: The details of this meeting with Bodo Köhler come from Siegfried Uhse’s

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Film The Tunnel, broadcast 10 December 1962. CHAPTER 26 Hundreds of gravestones: Author interview with Joachim Rudolph and Uli Pfeiffer. He was arrested: Profile on Berlin Wall Memorial Site: www.berliner-mauer-gedenkstaette.de/en/hasso-herschel-789.html. ‘One of these days’: Interview with Hasso Herschel in Der Tunnel, dir. Marcus

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29 ‘Four Blasts in 15 Minutes’: New York Times, 27 May 1962. Along with sandbags: Mitchell, The Tunnels, 65. ‘I intended this signal’: Hertle, The Berlin Wall Story, 80. CHAPTER 31 Reuven Frank took his seat: Frank, Out of Thin Air, 172. ‘Open with a shot’: Frank, Out of Thin Air, 30

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. ‘Those swine shot me’: This was twenty-seven-year-old Heinz Jercha – a butcher and father. Details from Hertle and Nooke, The Victims at the Berlin Wall, 74. They could smoke away: Wolf Schroedter interview, as well as Sesta, Der Tunnel in die Freiheit, 43–47. Front-page scoop: Der Spiegel, ‘Escape

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President’: Wyden, Wall, 273. ‘He is dead’: Ahonen, Death at the Berlin Wall, 55. ‘The matter has’: Wyden, Wall, 273. ‘Protecting power’: Ahonen, Death at the Berlin Wall, 56. They knew that: Hertle, The Berlin Wall Story, 83. Monitor everyone: Ahonen, Death at the Berlin Wall, 60. ‘The life of each’: Schwarzer Kanal, DDR-Fernsehen, 27 August 1962

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road: Author interview with Wolf Schroedter. CHAPTER 50 ‘Remember,’ says Reuven: Frank, Out of Thin Air, 195. General Clay thought Kennedy: Smyser, Kennedy and the Berlin Wall, 128. ‘Shelters: How Soon’: Time magazine, 20 October 1961. The Americans switched on: Cate, The Ides of August, 482. Ordering four submarines: Taylor, The

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Berlin Wall, 283. Most dangerous moment: William Kaufman, a Kennedy administration strategist who advised on both Berlin and Cuba said: ‘Berlin was the worst moment of the

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points out: Rod Synnes in The Milwaukee Journal Stations, Friday 14 December 1962. Half a million Berliners: Smyser, Kennedy and the Berlin Wall, 4. Wipe confetti off: Smyser, Kennedy and the Berlin Wall, 4. ‘We’ll never have’: Sorensen, Kennedy, 61. For the first time: The film shown in West Berlin was an edited

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was holding herself that she was smiling. CHAPTER 73 Am I going to solitary: Author interview with Wolfdieter Sternheimer. There were 12,000: Hertle, The Berlin Wall Story, 99. CHAPTER 74 Siegfried sits in: Stasi report, 4 November 1977, BStU / MfS AIM 13337/64 Part I/I (000269). Other escapes he’d

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: Koehler, Stasi, 410. A final request: Funder, Stasiland, 254. Most slid into: Koehler, Stasi, 29. Soon be sold: One of the longest sections of the Berlin Wall anywhere in the world is in Los Angeles, running along Wilshire Boulevard in the Miracle Mile district, erected as part of a commemoration project. These

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old pieces of the Berlin Wall have now become a site for protests against other walls, such as the Mexican–American wall. WHAT THEY DID NEXT 50 million TV viewers: The

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: A Reader on the GDR Secret Police (Department of Education and Research, Berlin, 2015). KEY ARTICLES Bainbridge, John: ‘Die Mauer: the early days of the Berlin Wall’ (The New Yorker, 20 October 1962). Frank, Reuven: ‘The Making of the Tunnel’ (Television Quarterly, 1963). FILMS AND DOCUMENTARIES Der Tunnel, Documentary directed by Marcus

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US. INTERVIEWS (ALPHABETICAL) Ulrich Pfeiffer Eveline (Schmidt) Rudolph Joachim Rudolph Wolf Schroedter Ellen (Schau) Sesta Renate Sternheimer Wolfdieter Sternheimer BOOKS Ahonen, Pertti, Death at the Berlin Wall (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). Beevor, Antony, Berlin: The Downfall (London: Penguin, 2002). Cate, Curtis, The Ides of August (Berlin: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1978). Clare

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: Why We’re Living in an Age of Walls (London: Elliott & Thompson, 2018). Mitchell, Greg, The Tunnels: The Untold Story of the Escapes Under the Berlin Wall (London: Transworld Publishers, 2017). O’Donnell, Kenneth and Powers, David, Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye: Memories of John Fitzgerald Kennedy (Boston: Little, Brown, 1983). Preston

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Jumper (New York: Pantheon, 1983). Sesta, Ellen, Der Tunnel in die Freiheit (Berlin: Ullstein, 2001). Smyser, W.R., Kennedy and the Berlin Wall (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010). Taylor, Frederick, The Berlin Wall: 13 August 1961 – 9 November 1989 (London: Bloomsbury, 2006). Veigel, Burkhart, Wege durch die Mauer: Fluchthilfe und Stasi zwischen Ost und West

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few buildings have changed beyond recognition, but most are still intact, many of them now museums dedicated to preserving memories from the days of the Berlin Wall. For an interactive, searchable map, click on: bit.ly/Tunnel29Map. FORMER WEST BERLIN • Haus der Zukunft – House of the Future: This was the headquarters of

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with a watch-tower. The site also contains the moving ‘Window of Remembrance’, a collection of photographs of those who died at the Berlin Wall. Bernauer Strasse 111. • RIAS radio: This was on Hans-Rosenthal-Platz, Schöneberg. It is now the site of Deutschlandfunk, one of Germany’s most popular

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the phone during lockdown. You put up with my endless questions in the hope that by telling your story, a new generation would understand the Berlin Wall and its consequences better. Without you, this book would not exist. I am enormously grateful to the other diggers, messengers and escapees who spoke to

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Holloway Helena Merriman is a broadcast journalist who presented and produced Tunnel 29, BBC Radio 4’s new podcast about a miraculous escape under the Berlin Wall. She is also the co-creator of British Podcast Awardwinning series The Inquiry, and previously worked as a reporter for the BBC in the Middle

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by Lonely Planet

All the Money in the World

by Peter W. Bernstein  · 17 Dec 2008  · 538pp  · 147,612 words

What Should I Do With My Life?

by Po Bronson  · 2 Jan 2001  · 446pp  · 138,827 words

A Fraction of the Whole

by Steve Toltz  · 12 Feb 2008  · 773pp  · 220,140 words

Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt

by Michael Lewis  · 30 Mar 2014  · 250pp  · 87,722 words

The Bonfire of the Vanities

by Tom Wolfe  · 4 Mar 2008

Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?

by Thomas Frank  · 15 Mar 2016  · 316pp  · 87,486 words

How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities

by John Cassidy  · 10 Nov 2009  · 545pp  · 137,789 words

California

by Sara Benson  · 15 Oct 2010

England

by David Else  · 14 Oct 2010

Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future

by Robert B. Reich  · 21 Sep 2010  · 147pp  · 45,890 words

Costa Rica

by Matthew Firestone, Carolina Miranda and César G. Soriano  · 2 Jan 2008

The End of Wall Street

by Roger Lowenstein  · 15 Jan 2010  · 460pp  · 122,556 words

Too big to fail: the inside story of how Wall Street and Washington fought to save the financial system from crisis--and themselves

by Andrew Ross Sorkin  · 15 Oct 2009  · 351pp  · 102,379 words

Frommer's New York City Day by Day

by Hilary Davidson  · 6 Jan 2006

Ireland (Lonely Planet, 9th Edition)

by Fionn Davenport  · 15 Jan 2010

How to Murder Your Life: A Memoir

by Cat Marnell  · 30 Jan 2017  · 416pp  · 121,024 words

China: A History

by John Keay  · 5 Oct 2009

Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making

by David Rothkopf  · 18 Mar 2008  · 535pp  · 158,863 words

1967: Israel, the War, and the Year That Transformed the Middle East

by Tom Segev  · 2 Jan 2007  · 1,145pp  · 310,655 words

The City Always Wins: A Novel

by Omar Robert Hamilton  · 12 Jun 2017  · 276pp  · 74,074 words

Eat People: And Other Unapologetic Rules for Game-Changing Entrepreneurs

by Andy Kessler  · 1 Feb 2011  · 272pp  · 64,626 words

The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information

by Frank Pasquale  · 17 Nov 2014  · 320pp  · 87,853 words

Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy

by Robert W. McChesney  · 5 Mar 2013  · 476pp  · 125,219 words

Generation Kill

by Evan Wright  · 19 May 2004  · 392pp  · 122,282 words

The Mad Man: Or, the Mysteries of Manhattan

by Samuel R. Delany  · 1 Jun 2015  · 647pp  · 201,252 words

Fodor's Costa Rica 2012

by Fodor's  · 6 Oct 2011

Lonely Planet Barcelona

by Isabella Noble and Regis St Louis  · 15 Nov 2022  · 541pp  · 135,952 words

The Rough Guide to France (Travel Guide eBook)

by Rough Guides  · 1 Aug 2019  · 1,994pp  · 548,894 words

The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution

by Gregory Zuckerman  · 5 Nov 2019  · 407pp  · 104,622 words

Red Platoon: A True Story of American Valor

by Clinton Romesha  · 2 May 2016  · 400pp  · 121,378 words

Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance

by Nouriel Roubini and Stephen Mihm  · 10 May 2010  · 491pp  · 131,769 words

Lonely Planet Cyprus

by Lonely Planet, Jessica Lee, Joe Bindloss and Josephine Quintero  · 1 Feb 2018

The Rough Guide to Cyprus (Travel Guide eBook)

by Rough Guides  · 30 Apr 2019

The Fund: Ray Dalio, Bridgewater Associates, and the Unraveling of a Wall Street Legend

by Rob Copeland  · 7 Nov 2023  · 412pp  · 122,655 words

Limitless: The Federal Reserve Takes on a New Age of Crisis

by Jeanna Smialek  · 27 Feb 2023  · 601pp  · 135,202 words

The Gods of New York: Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City: 1986-1990

by Jonathan Mahler  · 11 Aug 2025  · 559pp  · 164,804 words

Moon Prague, Vienna & Budapest: Palaces & Castles, Art & Music, Coffeehouses & Beer Gardens

by Jennifer D Walker, Auburn Scallon and Moon Travel Guides  · 15 Oct 2024  · 806pp  · 221,571 words

In FED We Trust: Ben Bernanke's War on the Great Panic

by David Wessel  · 3 Aug 2009  · 350pp  · 109,220 words

Daemon

by Daniel Suarez  · 1 Dec 2006  · 562pp  · 146,544 words

What Happened to Goldman Sachs: An Insider's Story of Organizational Drift and Its Unintended Consequences

by Steven G. Mandis  · 9 Sep 2013  · 413pp  · 117,782 words

The Greed Merchants: How the Investment Banks Exploited the System

by Philip Augar  · 20 Apr 2005  · 290pp  · 83,248 words

Confessions of a Wall Street Analyst: A True Story of Inside Information and Corruption in the Stock Market

by Daniel Reingold and Jennifer Reingold  · 1 Jan 2006  · 506pp  · 146,607 words

The Rough Guide to Ireland

by Clements, Paul  · 2 Jun 2015

The Buy Side: A Wall Street Trader's Tale of Spectacular Excess

by Turney Duff  · 3 Jun 2013  · 262pp  · 93,987 words

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by vpavan