NYU Berlin Assistant Director for Academics and historian Roland Pietsch reflects on the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and how it is being observed at NYU Berlin:
“Incredible! Just incredible!” was the common exclamation of Berliners East and West when the wall fell over night in November 1989. They used the German word “Wahnsinn”, literally translated as “madness” or “crazy”, but meaning something like incredibly amazing. What was “incredible” and “crazy” back then has now become everyday life. This month marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the most symbolic event of the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe. In some parts of Berlin it has become difficult to identify where the wall once stood. It is perhaps no coincidence that as part of the official celebrations marking the 25th anniversary the authorities opted for a light installation that recreates the wall and then lifts it into the sky, to remind Berliners of what a harsh division through their city this was.
As part of NYU Berlin’s Global Orientations course – a class taught at each of NYU’s global sites, which introduces students to the past and present of the city that will be their home for a semester – NYUB’s professors take the newly arrived students in small groups on their own Berlin Wall walk, mixing the general history with their personal experiences. The wall separated Berlin into East and West from 1961 to 1989, and it turned West Berlin into an island within East Germany. It was the most visible manifestation of the “Iron Curtain” that divided Cold War Europe, allowing visa-restricted traffic from West to East yet hardly any movement at all from the East, with border guards even shooting at people who tried to cross into the West.
I shared my group walk with Dr. Elke Brüns, who teaches an Introduction to German Literature to those NYU Berlin students who have advanced knowledge in the German language. Elke Brüns has published widely on post-Wall literature in East and West Germany. She and I are neighbours and hence decided to merge our groups, aiming to give the students two Western perspectives, with Elke as someone who moved to West Berlin as a student and me who was born here. Walking along the former border where we live, in the West Berlin districts of Neukölln and Kreuzberg, means walking along the water: first the canal and then the river Spree (the wall stood on the opposite shore). Nowadays it is part of my running routine to jog along the Western side of the canal, and then switch over at the bridge near the river and run back home on the former East’s side. I do this without thinking how easily I change sides where not too long ago an impenetrable border stood, or that I actually run along a cleared path that used to be called the “death strip”. Actually, today it already appears unimaginable that this wall once stood here, not only to our NYU students, but also to any Berliner born after 1989 and if I’m honest even to myself – a wall that provides such sad tales as the one we tell the students at the spot at the river where we have our lunch break: In May 1975, the boy Cetin Mert, on the day of his fifth birthday, was playing here with a ball, on the West Berlin side. Cetin’s parents had emigrated from Turkey and settled like so many Turkish families in the West Berlin borough of Kreuzberg, a district that due to its many borders with the East had been considered undesirable in West Berlin. At one point, Cetin’s ball rolled down the steep river bank into the water. When he tried to fish it out of the water with a stick, Cetin fell into the river himself. The river Spree at this point was East German territory. West Berlin emergency services arrived within minutes, but with the water being watched by armed border guards likely to shoot, neither they nor any onlookers dared to dive into the river to search for the boy. Frantic negotiations at the border crossing at the nearby Oberbaum Bridge lead to nothing, and so it took forty minutes until an East German border patrol boat finally arrived, only for its divers to recover Cetin’s dead body. The five-year old had drowned only a few meters from the shoreline.
Cetin was not the only boy: four other West Berlin children drowned at the same spot under similar circumstances, each tragedy being followed by a debate in how far the political situation had prevented a timely rescue. While the West branded the cases as evidence of the barbarity of the East, the East insisted that they had been mere accidents and that the West was blocking any agreement on how to deal with such emergencies. Indeed the West feared that East Germany would use such a treaty to press for an official recognition of the legality of the border. Cetin’s death finally forced both parties to sign such an agreement for emergencies in border waters, allowing rescue from the West. The West also put up a fence at the river, so that no more children could fall in. The border became more established. In the same year, 1975, the East began to renew the wall by installing its latest model of the concrete barrier, the one that we commonly associate with the wall and that is today scattered as souvenirs around the globe.
Other dramatic scenes had played out near the site of our walk’s lunch break. In 1962, at the lock, where the canal hits the river, a group of thirteen men and women, one with a baby, trying to flee East Germany, hijacked an East Berlin leisure boat, rammed it into the canal lock and jumped onto the West Berlin shore while dodging the bullets of the East German border guards.
Yet as Elke and I walk along the water that once divided the city, instead of shuddering in horror at these stories, we quickly fall into happy memories, painting an almost idyllic picture of life by the wall in West Berlin. While photos of West Berlin in history books and television documentaries usually feature a lot of concrete and grey colours, our memories appear green and fun, an urban life with all its excitements but less of the hectic pace of normal big cities. In terms of space, West Berlin almost equalled the combined size of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Staten Island and the Bronx together, but it only had a third of the population.
The contrast between our happy memories and the deaths at the Wall are difficult to explain to the NYU students. Elke also has to tell them why it was not a contradiction that she moved to a walled-in city for the freedom it offered, as did so many other young people from West Germany. West Berlin to them was an escape from the perceived boredom and provinciality of their West German home towns. Here they experimented with new forms of living and working together, living in large flat shares or even squatted houses – both possible thanks to West Berlin’s population drain and government keeping rents low to counter the abandonment of the city. All of her friends, Elke remembers, were active in artistic, political or social projects. And nightlife changed into day-life seamlessly, with no curfew interrupting it. This actually continued in post-Wall Berlin, as East Berlin brought with it many more abandoned buildings and spaces along with lax regulation by the authorities. It does not sound like a walled-in prison, does it? Elke rhetorically asks the students. She never regretted moving to West Berlin.
I on the other hand had no choice: I was born in West Berlin. I have lived my entire youth surrounded by the wall. My generation did not know anything else. Yet we hardly ever noticed the wall in our everyday lives. West Berlin was our world. Though Westerners were allowed to enter the East by paying for a visa, few of us were interested in what went on behind the wall, in supposedly dull grey Socialism. To most young West Berliners born during the time of the wall, the East was primarily something they had to get through on their way to their holiday destinations (to do that, they had to stick to certain motorways and trains, or airplanes, to avoid having to pay for a visa). Maybe we were sometimes even a bit proud of the wall: it made us feel special, the world’s attention was on us, fuelling the illusion that we were living in an international metropolis when in reality West Berlin felt in many ways more like an oversized village. For once you left the centres of alternative culture that Elke Brüns nostalgically described to the students, West Berlin was as provincial as any German town Elke and her friends had left behind.
In our eyes, the wall was the Easterners’ own doing. It was their wall, and it was they who were trapped behind it, not us in free West Berlin. We were undoubtedly children of the Cold War, on both sides. Clearly defined physical border lines had opened up gaps in the city, buildings that once stood on the front line had made space for the empty “death strip”. East and West Berlin had literally moved out of sight of each other. It looked as if the “Iron Curtain” had succeeded in estranging East and West Germans, at least those that were not bound by family ties. We rarely questioned the wall until a few months before it fell. Politically we were more occupied with campaigns against the South African Apartheid regime or the deepening of the (Western) European Union than with the wall in front of us dividing Germany. That only changed in 1989 when thousands of East Germans openly questioned the “Iron Curtain”: then interest and solidarity were reawakened.
My own knowledge of the East had been slightly better than that of others my age, since my mother had left East Germany (and her parents) shortly before the wall was built. Hence we spent about four holidays a year visiting my grandparents, aunties and cousins at the Baltic Sea; when the price of the daily visa increased, the holidays became shorter but even more special occasions. Today we joke that family relations were never again as close and harmonious as they were during the time of the division. My cousins, incidentally, fled East Germany via Czechoslovakia in October 1989. By the time they arrived at our doorstep, half of East Germany had already been to West Berlin entirely legally. For the wall had fallen on November 9th. It was the combination of an almost casual comment by a government official at a press conference, a decision-making vacuum in the East German leadership, and an excited rapid response by masses of people and the Western media that turned the intended loosening of travel restrictions for East Germans into the complete opening of the wall overnight, creating a party-atmosphere that delivered a symbolic final blow to the Communist regime. It did not come as the complete surprise as it is sometimes portrayed, however, as the loosening of travel restrictions had been discussed by the East German authorities in the days leading up to that joy- and tearful night on November 9th. Albeit they had planned something more controlled like a visa-restricted travel allowance of a limited number of days per year per person. The fact that other Communist countries like Hungary and Czechoslovakia had already created holes in the “Iron Curtain”, and East Germans were fleeing in masses via these countries, while those remaining in East Germany took to the streets in peaceful protests against the government, had left them in need of some response.
I show our students a photo of myself from a history book, taken the next morning after the opening, with me standing in the crowds on top of the wall in front of the Brandenburg Gate (the only strip where the wall had a flat top): I am looking down at my camera, slightly concerned; just at that moment my film must have finished. I am embarrassed to admit that I had deliberately taken only one film with me, not wanting to take too many photos. Analogue photo days were expensive, and I had already spent a lot of pocket money on films during my long summer holiday. So today I am left with 36 photos from the day the Berlin Wall fell, and 180 photos from my summer railway trip through (Western) Europe. But maybe that is indeed the relative importance of historic events to personal lives expressed in numbers. Life goes on, at least on the surface, and perhaps my concerned face in the history book’s photo was also me thinking it was time to go home, for there was an exam in school the following Monday and we had skipped the last class before it. Something similar brought Elke to write her professorial thesis on West and East German literature after the fall of the wall: As a young student she had always imagined how exciting the times of the French Revolution and similar turbulent periods in history must have been for contemporaries. Then the wall fell – and life in West Berlin appeared to simply continue as it did before. But of course it only appeared that way, for today West Berlin is as much consigned to the past as East Germany – a past that we are trying to trace with the students, standing at spots were we once enjoyed the sunshine lying in the grass, very near the wall yet hardly noticing it then – with the result that today again and again we share an unsure look when the students ask us “So was this the spot where the wall stood, or was it over there?”