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From the wild hedonism of the Weimar years to living in the shadow of the Berlin Wall, Sinclair McKay traces the history of the German city through the lives of its inhabitants
Sinclair McKay traces the history of the German city through the lives of its inhabitants, and how they weathered the tumult of the 20th century – from the wild hedonism of the Weimar years cut short by Nazism, to the fall of the famed wall that divided East and West. Sinclair McKay is the author of Berlin: Life and Loss in the City That Shaped the Century (Penguin, 2022) Buy now on Bookshop.org Buy now on Amazon Buy now on Waterstones
Cold War summits: how USA & USSR leaders worked to end the conflict
On 3 December 1989, the leaders of the USA and the USSR declared an end to the Cold War, after two days of talks at the Malta summit. What typically happened at a summit and to what extent did summitry bring about the end of the Cold War? David Reynolds and Kristina Spohr, editors of Transcending the Cold War, explain
In context: Summits in the 1970s and 1980s, primarily involving the leaders of the US, USSR, and East and West Germany, aimed to tackle two thorny Cold War issues: the nuclear arms race and the German situation. The Reagan-Gorbachev summits of the 1980s resulted in a real improvement of relations. Then, as the Eastern Bloc collapsed from 1989, Helmut Kohl, Mikhail Gorbachev and George HW Bush worked to ensure a peaceful transition from communism. The summits only really got going halfway through the Cold War. Why? David Reynolds: The word ‘summit’ was introduced into common parlance in the 1950s by Winston Churchill, who wanted to have “parleys at the summit” to defuse the Cold War, but in the 1950s and 1960s the confrontation was still too hot. It was not until the era of détente that leaders felt they ought to meet to try to develop mutual understanding, because nuclear weapons were just too dangerous to play around with. Kristina Spohr: Another strand here is the German question at the heart of the Cold War in Europe. West Germany would not de jure recognise East Germany as a separate independent state because it wanted to keep open the option of reunification. It was not until the period of détente that they began to meet, with the West German chancellor Willy Brandt travelling by train to East Germany. This was really, as Brandt said, to “get a smell of each other”. DR: This was a huge icebreaker at a time when there was a fundamental division between the two Germanies. KS: At one point during a meeting in Erfurt, Willy Brandt went to a window and outside was a crowd shouting: “Willy! Willy! Willy!” They meant Brandt, rather than the East German leader Willi Stoph. This spontaneous reaction by its own people totally shocked the East German regime. The locations of summits were clearly important. How were they chosen? DR: Sometimes there were sequences of summits, such as under Nixon and Reagan, moving from one place to another. So Nixon went to Moscow in 1972 – the first time an American president had been to the Soviet capital – but the idea was that Brezhnev would then come to Washington. Yet location also involved issues of precedence and privilege, and that’s why, for example, Reagan and Gorbachev had their first meeting in Geneva, a neutral city. KS: Some of these summits were also reconnaissance trips. Each leader was trying to find out what the other’s place was like. At other times it was better to choose a remote location. In 1979 there was a summit in Guadeloupe, so far away from the media limelight that it was almost in hiding. Read more | Why do we call it the 'Cold War'? Plus 8 other key questions What typically happened at a summit? KS: That depended very much on the summit. At Guadeloupe, for example, there were hours of meetings between US president Jimmy Carter, UK prime minister Jim Callaghan, German chancellor Helmut Schmidt and French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. They discussed world politics and security affairs, but there was also an informal aspect – they went snorkelling, sailing and jogging. It looked like a holiday – the press talked about the “swimming pool summit” – but the discussions were incredibly intense. DR: This partly also depended on the health of the leaders. For much of this period Brezhnev was a basket case: he’d had heart attacks and all sorts of problems. Everything had to be done from prompt cards. For the 1979 Vienna summit [aimed at limiting nuclear weapons] Carter was told the whole thing had to be planned in advance because if Brezhnev had to do anything spontaneous he would completely blow it. It was very different when dealing with a leader such as Gorbachev, who was quick witted and argumentative. The summits were very big, symbolic occasions. Was that the most important aspect of them? DR: In our book we try to emphasise the symbolic and the substantive moments, because both really matter. Undoubtedly the symbolism was very important in the 1988 Moscow summit. Five years earlier Reagan had decried the Soviet Union as “the evil empire”; then, in Red Square, he was asked if he still believed that was true. He said: “Oh, I was talking about another time, another era.” That was very powerful. These opportunities for leaders to meet could be hugely important in how the world saw international relations. But substance also mattered. Reagan and Gorbachev just clicked, which had massive implications. KS: I also think about the Kohl-Gorbachev summit in July 1990. They had a very formal meeting in Moscow, then Gorbachev invited the West German leader to fly with him to the Caucasus and visit his dacha [holiday home]. No other western leader had been invited there, and though this summit was all about substance – how to wrap up German unification and the issue of Red Army withdrawal from Germany – it was also a very symbolic moment. The leaders went together to lay wreaths at Stavropol in remembrance of the Second World War, and the two of them bonded. They felt they had a historic moment in which they could change the world. The summits were often played out in front of a huge media apparatus. How important was public image? DR: It was very important in the 1972 Nixon-Mao summit. There was a belief in China that at the 1954 Geneva conference the then American secretary of state John Foster Dulles had refused to shake the hand of Chinese premier Zhou Enlai – a serious snub. It’s not clear whether the story was true, but the important thing is that Nixon was absolutely convinced he had to deal with it. So when Air Force One lands in Beijing, Nixon came down the steps with his arm straight out the whole way – because the one thing he is going to do is shake Zhou’s hand to show this is now a different era. The timings were arranged for American primetime television, for the evening news bulletins. You had to hit CBS, NBC and ABC, and if you did so, you got the message across. This was a time when news management was vital but it was also possible to control in a way that’s not true now. KS: You could tell a similar story about the Kohl-Gorbachev meeting in the Caucasus. The Germans took a huge media entourage. There were photographs of Gorbachev and Kohl walking by the river in the mountains, then sitting on tree trunks in their woolly jumpers. Pravda [the official Soviet newspaper] called it the “summit without ties”. It looked really informal, but it was media theatre too: the images said that these were two people getting on really well. To what extent did summitry bring about the end of the Cold War? DR: If you try to play counterfactuals, the Soviet system was clearly increasingly rickety in the 1980s but probably would have carried on for an indefinite period of time. Gorbachev was undoubtedly a crucial element: mixing vision, impatience for change, and a naivety about what would happen. None of the changes in eastern Europe would have occurred if he hadn’t signalled that they wouldn’t be crushed by the Red Army. But summits also matter. Reagan and Gorbachev shared a basic belief that the nuclear arms race could be curbed. In the book we emphasise the importance of the 1987 Washington summit, which was the first time the superpowers actually reduced their nuclear arsenals, showing the arms race was not going to spiral out of control. We also emphasise that German reunification, potentially a huge tinderbox, was handled by leaders in a responsible way. Here are two really important moments in which you need to look at summitry to explain why the Cold War ended the way it did, without a major conflict in the heart of Europe. KS: We must remember that the Chinese employed force [at Tiananmen Square in June 1989] and that there was a fear that the same might happen in East Germany. Even at the Malta summit in December 1989, George HW Bush was still trying to get assurances from Gorbachev that the Soviets would not apply force. At the time the Berlin Wall came down, Bush had written in his notebook: “Tiananmen, Tiananmen, Tiananmen”. There was a great fear of the Red Army being let loose in East Germany. A lot of Americans were asking Bush why he wasn’t jumping up and down on the Berlin Wall; he said that he didn’t want to thrust two fingers in Gorbachev’s face. Were leaders at the summits aiming to end the Cold War or just cope with it? KS: We see three separate phases of summitry. The first, in the early 1970s, was really about thawing the Cold War; the end point – for example, German reunification – just seemed so far away. There was a real fear at the time that World War Three could break out. Then, in the mid-1970s, there were ideas of how to make the Cold War liveable. After that, though, superpower relations got much worse, sparking a second Cold War. Finally, we get to our third part, transcending the Cold War. It started with the creative spark that happened with Gorbachev and Reagan and opened up new perspectives. They didn’t think, though, that the Cold War would be over in five years. They were really focusing on curbing nuclear weapons. DR: We often asked each other: what did X think was going to happen in the Cold War in the next 20 or 30 years? What is clear is that the events of 1989–91 were amazing for most people. It’s fascinating to look at what happens when leaders suddenly see doors opening in all directions. How do they respond? This was a period of historic change, like 1815, 1918 and 1945 – except it didn’t involve a major war. The huge political and social changes occurred largely peacefully because, we argue, they were managed cooperatively by the leaders at the top. What intrigues us, in this rather unfashionable study of summitry, is what happens when leaders click, and how much they can actually shape history in a positive way. Kristina Spohr and David Reynolds are the editors of Transcending the Cold War: Summits, Statecraft, and the Dissolution of Bipolarity in Europe, 1970–1990 (Oxford University Press, 2016) This article was first published by HistoryExtra in November 2016
“We missed a precious window”: why did America and Russia squander an opportunity for peace in the 1990s?
US and Russian leaders squandered the opportunity to forge a lasting partnership at the dawn of the 1990s, says post-Cold War historian Professor Mary Sarotte
Nearly 30 years ago, US President Bill Clinton and his Russian counterpart Boris Yeltsin (president of Russia from 1991–99) embarked on an unlikely ‘bromance’ defined by optimism, a willingness to cooperate, and the possibilities of partnership. It was, says Professor Sarotte, the greatest opportunity for nuclear disarmament since the dawn of the atomic age. So, what went wrong? Speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast in December last year, Professor Sarotte explained how a rare opportunity to forge a bright new future for US-Russian relations in the 1990s was squandered by a series of diplomatic missteps. Among them was America’s decision to pursue a more aggressive form of Nato expansion. These missteps helped fuel Vladimir Putin’s resentment towards the west and ushered in a new period of hostility, says Professor Sarotte. “Not one inch”: America’s hypothetical proposal To understand what went wrong, we must first look back at the unexpected tearing down of the Berlin Wall in 1989, which marked the beginning of the end of the Cold War order. Having been divided during the Cold War, it was clear that the country of Germany now wanted to unite. But, crucially, as a result of the Soviet victory over the Nazis during the Second World War, decades later Germany still had occupying forces on its territory – including 400,000 Soviet troops, which had the legal right to remain there. In short, Germany was still technically an occupied country and so could not unify until those occupying countries agreed to let it do so. Mikhail Gorbachev, the then-leader of the Soviet Union, would need to be persuaded to give up his troops before hopes of German reunification could be realised. So how might Gorbachev be convinced? The west wanted to support Germany in its efforts to reunite. So, as part of a host of negotiations, in February 1990 the US Secretary of State James Baker held a meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev. There, as part of a hypothetical bargain, Baker suggested that if Gorbachev would, in effect, be willing to let his part of Germany go, Nato would agree to shift “not one inch” eastward from its present position, Professor Sarotte explains. “In other words, Nato would stay permanently frozen on the Cold War line”. Gorbachev reiterated that any extension of the zone of Nato would be unacceptable – but, crucially, none of this was formalised or written down. “A controversy erupted over this exchange almost immediately, at first behind closed doors and then publicly,” says Prof Sarotte in her book, Not One Inch. When Baker returned to Washington and told President George HW Bush what he and Gorbachev had agreed, he discovered he had been mistaken in his assertion that Nato could stay frozen on the Cold War line – because if it did, united Germany would be half in and half out of Nato, “which of course would make no sense,” says Professor Sarotte. So, President Bush floated a different strategy – instead of agreeing not to shift one inch eastwards, he said Nato would retain its ability to expand (as it had done before the Cold War) and instead offer concessions (some of them financial) as it moved in the direction of Moscow. In particular, Nato would limit what it could do on eastern German territory – the end result being that the former territory of East Germany would be the only part of Europe that is guaranteed by treaty to be nuclear-free. “To this day, there can be no nuclear weapons on what used to be the former territory of East Germany, which today includes Berlin, the capital of Germany, in the middle of it,” says Professor Sarotte. Did the Cold War ever really end? What events led to the Berlin Wall being torn down? <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2022/03/Mikhail-Gorbachev-and-James-Baker-afffb4b.jpg" width="3072" height="2048" alt="Mikhail Gorbachev (centre) chatting to US Secretary of State James Baker" title="The then-leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev (centre), chatting animatedly to US Secretary of State James Baker (left) during a summit in Malta, December 1989. President George HW Bush is pictured right. (Photo by Diana Walker/Getty Images)" /> “Gorbachev was a proud son of the Soviet Union and wanted to save it, not destroy it. He certainly did not intend to let divided Germany go,” says Professor Sarotte. Ultimately, though, Gorbachev did let his part of Germany go. He had been up against Bush and Baker, who were expert negotiators but who had also teamed up with the German chancellor, Helmut Kohl, to “bribe the Soviets out” (as the later US Secretary of Defence Robert Gates would describe it). The trio was successful: Gorbachev accepted Nato’s aforementioned concessions without a promise of Nato non-enlargement. Further still, despite having originally said that any extension of the zone of Nato would be unacceptable, in September 1990 Gorbachev authorised the signature of a legally binding treaty that confirmed the complete opposite – that Nato could extend beyond the Cold War line. On 12 September 1990, The Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany, which reunited the two German states and saw the Soviet Union agree to withdraw its troops by the year 1994, was signed. It was signed by the four non-German powers (France, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Soviet Union), as well as the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) and German Democratic Republic (East Germany). Crucially, the treaty formally recognised that United Germany would be free to join the alliance of its choice – which was Nato – meaning that Nato structures would be extended to the territory of the former GDR (German Democratic Republic) after the departure of Soviet troops. This legally binding treaty, signed by the Soviet Union, effectively said that Nato – by virtue of West German membership – could extend beyond the Cold War line, to East Germany. Read more | Russia-Ukraine crisis: 9 milestone moments in history that explain today’s invasion <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2022/03/German-reunification-treaty-signed-12-September-1990-4ce6442.jpg" width="2048" height="1342" alt="The reunification of Germany treaty, 1990" title="The signing of the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany, which reunited the two German states, on 12 September 1990. (Photo by Vitaly Armand/AFP via Getty Images)" /> Did Washington betray Russia? Baker’s initial suggestion that Nato would move “not one inch” eastward had been crucially important in helping to persuade Gorbachev to recall the hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops that were stationed in East Germany – a move he knew was unpopular with the Soviet public and Soviet military especially. [In fact, military officers became so embittered with Gorbachev’s plans that they eventually launched a coup against him in 1991.] A huge controversy followed over whether, by uttering the words “not one inch” and then changing its mind, Washington had betrayed Russia, says Professor Sarotte. The debate raged on for years – in 1998 the then-Russian prime minister Yevgeny Primakov complained that there had been no agreement in writing. “This is not dusty history – Vladimir Putin complains about it to this day; he justified what he did in Crimea in 2014 because of this huge betrayal, as he sees it,” says Sarotte. Putin repeatedly cites the hypothetical discussion between James Baker and Mikhail Gorbachev in February 1990 as if it were a promise, says Sarotte. In December 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed. “Suddenly, Washington realised it could not only win big, it could win bigger,” says Sarotte. “With the Soviet Union out of the picture, whole new horizons opened up. And gradually, those words ‘not one inch’ came to take on the exact opposite meaning – they came to mean, in Washington’s eyes, that not once inch of territory needed to be off-limits to Nato.” Listen: Professor Mary Sarotte discusses how diplomatic missteps after the fall of the Berlin Wall soured US-Russian relations and fuelled the rise of Vladimir Putin How did these events contribute to the rise of Putin a decade later? At the time of Baker’s hypothetical proposal to Gorbachev in February 1990, Putin was a mid-to-low-level agent within the KGB [the Soviet secret police]. He watched “in horror” as Soviet and East German control collapsed and the Berlin Wall opened – he could not believe that they weren’t fighting back. In his memoirs, Putin recalls asking Soviet military officers to come to his aid with force and being told ‘We can’t do anything without an order from Moscow, and Moscow is silent’. “That phrase, ‘Moscow is silent’, haunted him for years”, says Professor Sarotte. “In his memoirs, Putin says, in effect, that ‘we should have pushed back so hard that our opponents could not rise to their feet again’… Many of the lessons he took from these events helped to shape how he rules as president of Russia. “We tend to think of the end of the Cold War as this period of triumph. But there is another way of considering it… Perhaps the most important outcome of the end of the Cold War was how it shaped Putin and fuelled his rise.” Read more | What brought a thaw in the Cold War? Were America and Britain right to want to expand Nato all the way to Russia’s borders? It’s easy to understand why Nato wanted to expand, says Professor Sarotte. “Nato expansion was neither unprecedented nor unreasonable – Nato had expanded multiple times during the Cold War. And the states of central and eastern Europe wanted to join Nato – they had bravely thrown off the Soviet yoke and they had the right to choose their own security alliances.” But the problem, says Professor Sarotte, lies in how Nato chose to expand. The US had initially opted for a slow and steady form of expansion with what became known as the Partnership for Peace, whereby post-Soviet states like Ukraine could affiliate with and then gradually gain Nato membership in phases. But ultimately the US did a U-turn and chose to embark on a more aggressive form of Nato expansion. Explaining the Partnership for Peace, Sarotte said: “The idea behind it, as expressed by President Clinton himself, was to, as he put it, avoid drawing a new line across Europe. Clinton stated the need to think not just about central and Eastern Europe (i.e., Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic), but also the post-Soviet states – and, in particular, Ukraine. Ukraine was a country with a population of more than 50 million people, on par with the size of Britain or France; it was becoming a democracy; and it was the third-largest nuclear power in the world. So Clinton concluded that they couldn’t ignore Ukraine, but acknowledged it would be unreasonable to simply ‘put’ it in Nato, not least because it shared a huge border with Russia as well as extensive cultural ties. “What we need, said Clinton, is some kind of intermediate organisation which various countries, including post-Soviet states like Ukraine, could affiliate with and then gradually gain Nato membership in phases. It’s worth pointing out that this idea was not very popular with either side, but it was a compromise. And it would have been, I think, a more sustainable way to expand Nato that would have caused less aggravation,” says Professor Sarotte. Read more | Is the future of Nato under threat? Clinton personally went to Poland and also sent his chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General John Shalikashvili, who was born in Poland, to speak to Lech Walesa, Nobel laureate and president of Poland, to urge him to back the Partnership for Peace. “And so, even though they didn’t like it, through gritted teeth the Poles and the Russians agreed to it, and the Partnership for Peace started doing its work.” Russia & Ukraine: events in context Russia-Ukraine crisis: 9 milestone moments in history that explain today’s invasion “Russia has always refused to let Ukraine go”: Keith Lowe on the long roots of today’s crisis Nato, Russia, and the history of the post-WW2 tensions “The language, tactics, and even the weapons of the Russia-Ukraine war hark back to the 1940s,” writes Peter Caddick-Adams Podcast: Ukraine – the WW2 roots of today's conflict Stalin’s famine: a brief history of the Holodomor in Soviet Ukraine Has Russia always played by its own rules? 9 history podcast episodes that chart Russia and Ukraine's changing interactions with the world What does Iron Curtain mean, and who popularised the term? America’s U-turn So, what went wrong? Ultimately, the Americans changed their mind. Their U-turn was inspired partly by “some very tragic choices by the Russian President Boris Yeltsin – most importantly, his decision to shed the blood of his political opponents in Moscow and Chechnya, which forced the west to recalibrate and think ‘maybe the new Russia isn't so different from the old Soviet Union’,” says Professor Sarotte. Also in the mix was mounting pressure on President Clinton to support a more aggressive form of Nato expansion. In the midterm congressional elections of 1994, the Republicans won a dramatic victory, taking both the House and the Senate, largely on the basis of a Contract with America – a long list of positions on various topics, including Nato expansion. “Instead of having an intermediate organisation to modulate the process, which would allow a wide array of countries to have a loose affiliation, the Contract argued for the total opposite – an ‘all or nothing’ manner of expansion where either you give countries the Article Five guarantee right away, or nothing,” says Professor Sarotte. “The Article Five guarantee is, of course, the heart of the Nato treaty, which states that all members of the alliance shall regard an attack on one as an attack on all.” In short, the Republican victory forced Clinton to reconsider his position on the post-Cold War world order. So, despite having initially said he would not draw a new line across Europe, that’s exactly what he did. “He decided that instead of incremental accession to Nato by a large number of states, the alliance would extend the full weight of the Article 5 guarantee to a small number of countries and then just keep going,” says Sarotte. In doing so, America had “switched the mode of Nato enlargement”. This is the manner of Nato expansion that we’ve ended up with today, says Sarotte. “I would argue that that maximised Moscow’s irritation and left Ukraine (which is not a member country of Nato) in the lurch, which became very problematic,” she explained. “There was a gradual shift away from what I argue was a sustainable method of expanding Nato, and that was when things started to unravel. “I am not arguing that the only reason relations between the US and Russia declined after Soviet collapse was because of Nato expansion. I don’t believe in mono-causality. But it fed into what was already a deteriorating relationship. And it happened tragically when Russia, for the first time, was becoming a democracy; right at a time when Russia was most in need of friends. “Cold Wars are not short-lived affairs, so thaws are precious. There was a precious window in the 1990s. And it is clear to me that neither Washington nor Moscow made the best possible use of this thaw. And now we’re back to a new period of hostility.” Clinton and Yeltsin’s ‘bromance’ Russian President Boris Yeltsin and his American counterpart – ‘Boris and Bill’, as they became known – developed the closest relationship ever to exist between a Russian and an American leader, says Professor Sarotte: “I think it’s not inaccurate to call it a bromance.” They visited one another 18 times in total, more than any American and Soviet or Russian leaders before, and Clinton went to Russia more than any other American leader. They enjoyed one another’s company and during their visits they indulged in good meals together. But the relationship declined tragically. “What started off as a bromance descended by the end into alcohol-fuelled tirades by Yeltsin, who had a serious drinking problem, and with Yeltsin hanging up [the phone] on Clinton”, says Prof Sarotte. The deterioration of this personal relationship between Clinton and Yeltsin had grave consequences for the relationship between the two nations, she says. Why did the US miss the opportunity to forge a partnership with Russia? “There was this precious thaw in the Cold War that President Clinton was very conscious of – he would say, ‘we have this chance that hardly any other previous leaders have had to establish peace across all of Europe. We could write a new chapter in the history of the world’,” says Professor Sarotte. “This was the greatest opportunity for disarmament since the dawn of the atomic age – there was so much willingness to cooperate”. But the opportunity was squandered, in large part by the move to more aggressive Nato expansion in 1996, says Sarotte. The then-American Secretary of Defence Bill Perry urged President Clinton against what he described as rushed and premature Nato expansion, warning that it would scupper his efforts to decrease the number of Russian missiles pointed at the United States. But his efforts were in vain. Perry considered resigning but, in the end, stayed put – later, in his memoirs, he said he wished he had resigned, “because the consequences of premature Nato expansion were even worse than he had imagined”, says Sarotte. How do we explain America’s missed opportunity? “Putin has shown a willingness to solve crises – or what he thinks are crises – by escalating them; by using force and violence,” says Sarotte. “America did not anticipate this. I think one of the problems going back to the thaw in the 1990s is that we didn’t understand that Putin’s true character is brinksmanship; we didn’t appreciate his willingness to leave behind the cooperation of the post-Cold War period. “I don't think we understood that, for him, the fall of the Berlin Wall was a tragedy. And he carried with him a great sense of grievance that he shared with all displaced servants in the Soviet state.” Read more | I was there: Ian Kershaw on the fall of the Berlin Wall <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2022/03/Bill-Clinton-Vladimir-Putin-b7ddee2.jpg" width="2048" height="1415" alt="ussian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and US President Bill Clinton" title="Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and US President Bill Clinton decline to answer questions during a photo opportunity in the lobby of the Stamford Hotel in Auckland, New Zealand, on the first day of the annual Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meeting, 12 September 1999. (Photo by Stephen Jaffe/AFP via Getty Images)" /> Elaborating on this in her book, Not One Inch, Sarotte says both the Bush and Clinton administrations “failed to understand the extent to which the liberation of Central and Eastern Europe, when viewed from Moscow, looked more like imperial collapse.” Having nursed his grievances about Soviet collapse over the course of many years, once elected president of Russia they became integral to the way in which Putin ran the country, says Sarotte. Mary Sarotte is Marie-Josée and Henry R Kravis Distinguished Professor of Historical Studies at Johns Hopkins University. She is an expert in post-Cold War Europe and her most recent book publication is Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate (Yale University Press, 2022). You can listen to Professor Sarotte’s podcast interview in full here. Read next: “The language, tactics, and even the weapons of the Russia-Ukraine war hark back to the 1940s,” writes Peter Caddick-Adams
A panel of eyewitnesses recall their memories of the divided city and the dramatic events of November 1989
As we approach the 60th anniversary of the Berlin Wall’s construction, Major General Sir Robert Corbett and journalists Mark Wood and Alastair Stewart discuss their memories of the divided city and the dramatic events of November 1989. The discussion is chaired by the author Iain MacGregor. Iain MacGregor is the author of Checkpoint Charlie: The Cold War, the Berlin Wall and the Most Dangerous Place on Earth (Constable, 2019) Buy now on Bookshop.org Buy now on Amazon Buy now on Waterstones
The Cold War: everything you wanted to know
Everything you wanted to know about history (podcast series)
Michael Goodman responds to your questions on the decades of geopolitical tension that shaped relations between east and west in the second half of the 20th century
From espionage across the Iron Curtain, to the global struggles between communists and capitalists, Michael Goodman responds to your questions on the decades of geopolitical tension that shaped relations between east and west in the second half of the 20th century, in the latest in our series tackling the big questions on major historical topics. The Cold War: 9 key questions
The Berlin Wall: everything you need to know
Professor Patrick Major explores the history of the Berlin Wall – why it was built, how many lives it claimed, and its significance today…
Please note: This article contains images some readers may find distressing It is just over 30 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, East Germany’s concrete solution to the mass haemorrhaging of its citizens to the west across the open border of West Berlin at the height of the Cold War. For 28 years following the fateful border closure on Sunday 13 August 1961, the edifice which inspired the novels of John le Carré and Len Deighton had become a fixture in the Cold War landscape, threatening death to any daring to cross it. An audacious bid to tunnel under the Berlin Wall Why was the Berlin Wall built? In the 1950s, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) – that part of Germany which had been the Soviet Occupation Zone in the post-WW2 division of Germany – was threatening to bleed dry, as one in six people fled, usually in search of work under West Germany’s ’economic miracle’ (but in some cases fleeing political or religious persecution). The GDR desperately wanted to halt this so-called ‘brain-drain’, so in August 1961 the East German communists were given the go-ahead by Moscow to close the border and build a physical barrier. The fact that the west did not officially recognise the so-called ‘GDR’, coupled with the risks of escalation, meant that the decision could only come from the Kremlin. The Berlin Wall turned the usual function of walls – to keep people out – on its head; this wall was solely to keep its citizens in. In pictures: remembering the Berlin Wall 30 years on What was life like in East Berlin before the Wall? What events led to the Wall being built? In 1952 East Germany had sealed its mainland border to West Germany, along the river Elbe and in the mountains of the Harz, with barbed wire and fire zones (where all vegetation was cut back within 100m of the border to allow guards an unencumbered field of fire). But there was an unpluggable leak in the centre of the GDR, in the four-power city of Berlin, whose three western sectors were still protected by the US, Britain and France under post-war agreements which Moscow was unwilling to flout. Did the Cold War ever really end? The Soviets had already tried to force the Western powers out during the Blockade of 1948–49 but were foiled by the famous Anglo-American airlift. The communists closed the sector boundary temporarily after the abortive insurrection in East Germany in June 1953, but within weeks it was open again. So, throughout the 1950s East Germans could simply walk across from East to West Berlin. Underground trains still rumbled below. Once across East Germans, who might otherwise have feared being stopped at the overland border, could fly over it from Tempelhof in the US sector out to the Federal Republic. Day-trippers could come and visit the neon delights of West Berlin, buying the latest records and maybe even a pair of jeans, before disappearing back east. By 1961 there were also around 60,000 so-called Grenzgänger, Cold War commuters who lived in one half of the city and worked in the other, many of them women members of the ‘scrubbing-brush brigade’, working the grey economy for a few hard deutschmarks. Some young East Germans had even learnt to play the border, for instance young men targeted for military service, who ‘contaminated’ themselves with a short stay in the west. West Berlin was also the base for dozens of Western espionage agencies, exploiting its position behind the Iron Curtain. The CIA and Britain’s SIS (Secret Intelligence Service) appeared in the mid-1950s to have pulled off one of the Cold War’s biggest signals intelligence coups with their eavesdropping tunnel under the sector boundary to tap Soviet cable traffic, until it was revealed that the KGB, the Soviet Union's intelligence agency, had known all along through their MI6 super-mole, George Blake. The secret history of the Berlin Wall Western intelligence also interviewed thousands of defectors arriving at the Marienfelde transit camp. Little did they know that one of their own German associates, Götz Schlicht, was a Stasi double-agent – no wonder Berlin became known as the city of spies and counter-spies! When the leader of the Soviet Union Nikita Khrushchev threatened the four-power status of the city with his famous Ultimatum in 1958 – which gave the western powers six months to vacate the city before turning it over to the East Germans as part of their rightful capital – the west, and the US in particular, dug in their heels once again. By 1961 the new US president, John F Kennedy, was even threatening nuclear retaliation if West Berlin were touched. The GDR had therefore run out of ‘territorial’ options to stop the brain-drain by 1961. The Volkspolizei could not pull every suspected defector off trains headed for Berlin; the Stasi could not investigate every tip-off; and it was clear that West Berlin would not be negotiated off the geopolitical map. A more simple but drastic solution was needed. At a press conference in June East German leader Walter Ulbricht famously reassured journalists that “no-one has the intention to build a wall”. Whether this was a Freudian slip (no correspondent had asked about a wall!) or a Machiavellian ploy to encourage a stampede for the exit, it had the desired effect. To halt the exodus that was filling western transit camps to capacity, the East German communists were finally permitted by Moscow to close the border in August 1961 and build a physical barrier. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2019/10/GettyImages-545646813-d90c3b3.jpg" width="1024" height="687" alt="(GERMANY OUT) Germany / GDR. Construction of the wall. East-German Border guards on the wall at Friedrichstrasse. Berlin August 1961 (Photo by Jung/ullstein bild via Getty Images)" title="Germany / GDR. Construction of the wall. East-German Border guards on the wall at Friedrichstrasse. Berlin August 1961" /> What was the Berlin Wall made from? In a top-secret operation, observing radio silence, East German police and militia established a human cordon all along the margins of West Berlin. East German troops formed a second echelon and Soviet army units a third. Assured by their Stasi forward observers in West Berlin that the western military presence would not react, the border forces went from erecting provisional wire-mesh fences to a more solid breeze-block wall, topped with barbed wire. Western commentators, including West Berlin’s mayor Willy Brandt, immediately drew parallels with Nazi concentration camps. The early wooden guard towers looked all-too like something from the recent past. Indeed, Willi Seifert, commander of the GDR’s interior troops tasked with erecting the barrier, had himself been a concentration camp inmate under the Nazis. The GDR portrayed it as a border that saved the peace, even filming spy dramas such as For Eyes Only (1963) which tried to convince eastern viewers that NATO had been planning a pre-emptive strike on East Germany. Few were convinced. When US President Kennedy visited the Wall that year he was visibly shocked, changing parts of his famous “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech at the last minute to underline the west’s bleak view of the ‘Wall of shame’. How long was the Berlin Wall? All told, the border installations around West Berlin zig-zagged for 163 kilometres, or just over 100 miles. Around 100km of this was covered by an actual wall, mainly at the inner-city interface, with another 50 or more kilometres made up of heavy wire mesh around West Berlin’s green border with the Brandenburg countryside. Mines were sown in the ground or strung along certain sections of fencing, not removed until the 1980s. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2019/10/GettyImages-50580781-c28ae1a.jpg" width="670" height="1024" alt="Two young boys watching East German civilian construction crew reinforcing concrete blocks on newly constructed Berlin wall as armed East German soldiers stand guard. (Photo by Robert Lackenbach/The LIFE Images Collection via Getty Images/Getty Images)" title="Two young boys watching East German civi" /> The remainder of the border was made up of existing cemetery walls or house facades, including the sinister bricked-up windows along the Bernauer Straße. In the mid-1960s the structure was modernised, and received an anti-grip tube along its top, before becoming the final ‘Border Wall 75’ in the mid-1970s, when a series of L-shaped, pre-fabricated monoliths regularised its appearance. At 3.6 metres tall, it had been scientifically demonstrated by a troop of East German army athletes to be unscalable and unvaultable without artificial assistance. Listen| Hester Vaizey explores how the fall of the Berlin Wall affected East Germans How many people were killed trying to cross the Wall? The Berlin Wall claimed the lives of at least 140 people. The first was 58-year old Ida Siekmann, who died on 22 August 1961 after jumping from a third-storey window in the famous Bernauer Straße, whose house-fronts constituted the border. Two days later, 24-year old Günter Litfin was machine-gunned in the waters of the inner-city docks now overlooked by Berlin’s main railway station. The most public incident occurred on 17 August 1962 when two teenage East Berlin boys sprinted across no-man’s land near a border crossing-point nicknamed Checkpoint Charlie. One made it over, but 18-year old Peter Fechter was shot in the back and collapsed. Western photographers leaned over, calling on guards to rescue the unfortunate teen, but he was left to bleed out at the foot of the Wall, the guards apparently afraid of retaliatory fire from the west. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2019/10/GettyImages-515450556-041e758.jpg" width="714" height="1024" alt="(Original Caption) 9/17/1962-Berlin, Germany- Some 25,500 persons have escaped from East Berlin since the erection of the infamous wall dividing East and West Berlin early Sept. 11, 1961. There has also been some unlucky ones, about 133 who tried but failed. Here East German policemen lift the body of 18-year-old Peter Fechter, one of the unfortunates, across the barbed wire fence after he was felled by a hail of Communist bullets while trying to escape to the West, Sept. 17, 1962." title="East German Police Carry Youth's Body" /> Yet not all escapes were such clear-cut tragedies. One would-be escaper had been a part-time Stasi informer who missed his good times in the west. Failing a consolation entrance exam into the secret police, Werner Probst then decided to leave once and for all. Slipping into the River Spree one night in October 1961, close to the iconic Oberbaum Bridge, he was picked out in the water by a searchlight and shot just short of the far bank. Another nocturnal fire-fight three years later involved a tunnel that had been dug from West Berlin into a back yard on the far side. (Visitors to the Berlin Wall Memorial today can trace its path marked in the former no-man’s land.) Tunnellers had emerged inside an outside lavatory which offered convenient cover: 57 escapers ‘went’ but never returned. But their luck could not hold forever. Alerted by Stasi informants, armed border troops arrived, and in the ensuing confrontation one guard, Egon Schultz, was caught in the crossfire, hit in the shoulder by a West Berlin escape helper’s pistol and in the chest by a comrade’s Kalashnikov rifle. Only after the Cold War did it emerge that he had been killed by friendly fire. Indeed, over half of the 25 border guards killed at the border were shot by their own side. The cost of unity: Ian Kershaw on the fall of the Berlin Wall The last people killed trying to cross the Berlin Wall were Chris Gueffroy, shot in February 1989, and Winfried Freudenberg, whose homemade hot-air balloon came to grief a month later. Yet far more persons escaped than were killed at the Berlin Wall. In the early sixties, escapers jumped from rooftops, abseiled from windows, burst through the Wall in improvised armoured trucks and steam locomotives, and hijacked ferries. But the numbers escaping dwindled from the thousands in the early 1960s to a handful each year by the 1980s. Yet, even in 1988 there were still around half a dozen escape attempts each month, more than half of which were successful, usually involving guards defecting, building workers exploiting repairs on the ‘front line’, or civilians using ingenious collapsible ladders to defeat the wall. What does the graffiti on the Berlin Wall mean? The Berlin Wall’s smooth surface became beloved of western graffiti artists who fought running battles with border guards’ whitewashings. New York hip hop-inspired artist Keith Haring became a coveted spray artist; Frenchman Thierry Noir specialised in colourful, primitivist Wall art. For some former East German dissidents, however, such graffiti trivialised or aestheticised the Wall, leading one group of masked vigilantes to paint a white ‘delete’ line through the DayGlo, until they were seized by a border guard snatch squad through one of the secret doors built into the Wall. (Many forgot to their cost that the five metres on the western side of the Wall also belonged to East Berlin!) Other artists employed elaborate trompe l’oeil effects to camouflage the concrete behind, and countless thousands of tourists signed and dated their presence at the Wall or declared their undying love to their significant other in felt-tip pen. What brought a thaw in the Cold War? What was life like on either side of the Wall? Enclosed West Berlin became something of a mad, bad playground, attracting drop-outs and avant-gardists, who could enjoy a frisson of Cold War danger (but with little actual danger). “We can be heroes”, sang David Bowie, in a song composed at the Hansa recording studio overlooking the Wall in Kreuzberg, where Bowie was neighbours with his partner-in-crime, Iggy Pop, but “just for one day”. Uli Edel’s semi-documentary Christiane F. (1981) gives a good sense of the seedy urban chic of 1970s West Berlin around its drug scene at the Bahnhof Zoo, or Ian Walker’s Zoo Station (1987) documents one journalist’s frenetic travels back and forth through the Cold War looking-glass. 1945: The race for Berlin The Wall maintained its lure to the alienated as some late Cold War westerners no longer thought that the west was necessarily the best. Punk band the Sex Pistols found their nihilistic match in it. In ‘Holidays in the Sun’, John Lydon engaged the eastern guards in an existential staring competition, threatening, in an act of paranoid Cold War paradox, to go “over the Berlin Wall, before they come over the Berlin Wall”. On the eastern side of the Wall, East Berlin punks were complaining of “too much future”. The communist state still claimed to be exercising tough love for the common good. Living standards had risen by the mid-1960s, as the GDR was able to stabilise its workforce. East Berliners could be visited for the first time by West Berlin relatives at Christmas in 1963, but the eastern authorities were taking no chances and tailed incomers with mass surveillance teams. Yet, western visitors noticed a certain defensive pride among East Germans, who did not want to be patronised by ‘Besser-Wessis’ from the so-called ‘Golden West’. Freedom of travel remained an issue, however. Holiday destinations within the eastern bloc began to shrink in the 1980s, when Poland became a no-go destination as the Solidarity movement blossomed there [a social movement that embodied the struggle against communism and Soviet domination, and ultimately helped lead to the fall of communism in Eastern Europe], followed by Russia under glasnost [Soviet policy of open discussion of political and social issues instituted by Mikhail Gorbachev which began the democratisation of the Soviet Union]. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2019/10/GettyImages-138531768-616f268.jpg" width="1024" height="722" alt="Mikhail Gorbachev, Russian President, gestures as he speaks during his new conference following the weekend summit with U.S. President Ronald Reagan in Reykjavik, Iceland, on Sunday, October 12, 1986. (Photo by Bryn Colton/Getty Images)" title="Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev Speaking In Iceland" /> Many of the ambitious thirty-somethings, who back in the 1950s would have moved out and up in West Germany, felt blocked within the rigid hierarchies of “real existing socialism” behind walls. Certain goods such as cars and telephones always remained in short supply with waiting lists of up to 10 years – unimaginable in the instant-gratification west. Exotic fruits such as tangerines were reserved for Christmas only, and jokes circulated about why the banana was curved (because for 28 years it had to make a detour around the GDR…). What events led to the Berlin Wall being torn down? Things deteriorated in the 1980s. An energy crisis was about to engulf the eastern bloc, as Russia insisted on payment for its oil in hard currency. The advent of Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985 also posed a political reform challenge to the hard-line leadership under Erich Honecker. When Politburo member Kurt Hager pronounced that if a neighbour changed their wallpaper one did not need to follow suit, it became clear how out of touch the party leadership were becoming. Listen | Iain MacGregor revisits some of the most dramatic events associated with the history of the Cold War barrier, the Berlin Wall What really accelerated the unravelling of the GDR, however, was the dismantling of the Iron Curtain elsewhere, on the border between Hungary and Austria in the late spring of 1989. A loophole was created which led to a renewed exodus, that was then hastily blocked again. But the genie was out of the bottle. Hopeful East German emigrants began to camp out in West German embassies across the eastern bloc. Demonstrations by would-be leavers also started inside the country, focused on the city of Leipzig, where regular Monday prayer meetings at the Nikolaikirche church took on an increasingly dissident hue. Even more dangerous to the GDR were the Hierbleiber, those determined to “stay here” and change the Workers’-and-Peasants’-State from within. Crunch-time occurred on 9 October 1989, when Leipzig’s security forces held back from a physical confrontation with the 70,000 demonstrators. East Germans had lost their fear. The GDR’s 40th birthday celebrations that month continued to be disrupted by mass counter-demonstrations wishing to see not the flourishing, but the end of state socialism. On 9 November 1989, however, upheaval degenerated into farce. A rudderless East German regime was about to commit one of history’s greatest miscommunications. Battered by mass demonstrations, the party Central Committee had resigned en masse that day, but attempted one final act of damage limitation: citizens would be allowed to apply for passports for travel to the west for the first time in 28 years. But what had been designed as a delaying tactic, tying up citizens in red tape, turned into a stampede for the exit. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2019/10/GettyImages-527012832-d136792.jpg" width="1024" height="672" alt="Thousands of people rushed to the Berlin Wall in the first few days after the opening of the Wall on November 9th, 1989. (Photo by robert wallis/Corbis via Getty Images)" title="Thousands of people rushed to the Berlin Wall in the first few days after the opening of the Wall on November 9th, 1989" /> At a now famous press conference, the party’s press spokesman, Günter Schabowski, who had not been fully briefed, read out the new dispensation, but when asked by foreign correspondents when this came into effect he looked uncertain, then shrugged: “immediately?” West German early evening news bulletins, all avidly consumed by East German viewers, announced that the Wall was open; by midnight tens of thousands of East Berliners had swamped the border checkpoints whose Stasi guards realised that the game was up. The Berlin Wall had fallen. What happened after the fall of the Berlin Wall? What remains of the Berlin Wall today? What does it look like? The Wall disappeared with unseemly haste. It was dismantled by the border troops who had built it, with the help of heavy-lifting equipment from Britain’s Royal Engineers garrisoned in West Berlin. Initially, small sections were lifted out to create makeshift checkpoints. Some monoliths with particularly eye-catching Wall art were even auctioned at Monte Carlo in June 1990 in order to raise cash for a new East Berlin mayoralty seeking new revenue streams. Much was ground up for aggregate. Today, visitors can see a long section of the eastern Wall at East Side Gallery, where international artists were invited in 1990 to decorate it with a series of frescoes. The most authentic section is to be found at Bernauer Straße, where the official monument to the Wall is located. Visitors can peep through the hinterland wall at the rear to see the so-called ‘death strip’ of raked sand and the paraphernalia of total control, including a guard tower and fluorescent lighting which could allegedly be seen from space as a halo around the western half of the city. But there is also the hustle and bustle of Checkpoint Charlie where tourists can visit the slightly eccentric Haus am Checkpoint Charlie, filled with escape memorabilia, including even the white line jack-hammered out of the roadway at the famous intersection between two worlds, at which US tanks in 1961 had played chicken with their Soviet counterparts. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2019/10/GettyImages-1172610444-7122772.jpg" width="1024" height="683" alt="Checkpoint Charlie memorial site in Berlin, Germany on 26th September, 2019. Checkpoint Charlie was the best-known Berlin Wall crossing point between East Berlin and West Berlin during the Cold War. (Photo by Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto via Getty Images)" title="Tourist Attractions In Berlin" /> Yet, as with much of the Cold War, all is not what it seems. The military checkpoint hut is not real, but a replica of the one from 1961. And for a Euro or two you can be photographed next to an actor in period uniform. The Cold War, in these uncertain times, seems to be making a come-back. What is the significance of the Berlin Wall today? The Berlin Wall was almost unique in that it was designed to keep people in. Conversely, the so-called ‘peace walls’ built in Belfast after 1969 were made to keep sectarian communities apart for fear of rioting; the Israeli separation barrier was built to keep out a terrorist threat; and Donald Trump’s Mexican wall (or is it a fence?) is supposed to keep out illegal economic migrants from south of the border. Walls that keep in their own populations, however, soon fall foul of the human rights enshrined in the United Nations, including, crucially, freedom of movement. A brief history of border walls – from 2,000 BC to Trump’s Mexico wall Already in the 1960s the East German regime had realised that it was now dealing with a captive audience, with no safety-valve of exit to the west, and so had to make some concessions for co-existence with its citizenry. In 1973, when the GDR was admitted to the UN, it found itself trapped into a liberalisation which had already created many humanitarian ‘holes’ in the Wall before 1989. In the longer perspective, the history of the Berlin Wall shows that walls do not work. In the age of electronic media, East Germans were still connected to an outside world – including by the BBC whose radio broadcasts and mountains of listeners’ letters from East Germans are preserved at Reading-Caversham. The Wall itself simply became a lightning conductor of discontent. The physical separation of two Germanies for a generation certainly left its mark: speech patterns and even body language were different. East German teens’ use of the intensifier ‘urst’ – meaning ‘mega’ – completely mystified westerners, as well as a party jargon which described flags as Winkelemente or ‘wave elements’. Western brashness was seen by easterners as symptomatic of the Ellenbogengesellschaft or ‘elbow-ahead society’, which could not quite get the hang of queuing. It was former mayor of West Berlin, then chancellor of the Federal Republic, Willy Brandt, who maintained nonetheless that “what belongs together will grow together”. This claim has perhaps proved the most optimistic since 1989. 10 facts about the Great Wall of China It is noticeable that the alt-right Alternative für Deutschland has in 2019 been polling best in the eastern states of the former East Germany, areas which still feel left behind since unification in 1990 and fear what they see as Islamist inundation. But the European Union’s steadfast defence of the principles of freedom of movement in the face of Brexit is certainly also a legacy of the Cold War. Angela Merkel herself grew up and worked behind the Berlin Wall and the view from her office window must remind her every day where it once stood, just yards away. Patrick Major is professor of modern history at the University of Reading and author of Behind the Berlin Wall: East Germany and the Frontiers of Power (OUP, 2009) and ‘Listening behind the Curtain: BBC Broadcasting to East Germany and its Cold War Echo’, Cold War History (2013)
Thirty years ago this month, Checkpoint Charlie – the most famous crossing-point between East and West Berlin – was dismantled. Patrick Major shares a guide to the Berlin Wall spot that became a global symbol of Cold War division
On 22 June 1990 – thirty years ago this month – a last piece of Cold War theatre played out at the now-defunct Berlin Wall, at its most famous crossing-point, Checkpoint Charlie. Foreign ministers from the US, Britain, France, the Soviet Union and East and West Germany, accompanied by the city’s three western military commandants and two mayors, watched a crane hoist away the portacabin which had guarded what had been the easternmost point of the western world for nearly three decades. This was where ‘East’ met ‘West’ on the Cold War frontline, at the downtown borderline between the district of Kreuzberg in West Berlin (home to a bohemian counterculture) and the more regimented government district of East Germany’s demi-capital. This crossing was for non-Germans only – tourists mostly – and Allied and Soviet military and diplomatic personnel. Why was it called ‘Checkpoint Charlie’? But why ‘Charlie’? This was a military call-sign and letter from the NATO phonetic alphabet: ‘C’ for Charlie. Under the division of Germany into zones and Berlin into sectors, Allied troops travelling from West Germany to Berlin first encountered Checkpoint Alpha at the German-German border. One hundred miles further east, along a 1930s-vintage autobahn, came Checkpoint Bravo which funnelled them into the south-western tip of the US sector of Berlin. Charlie was the final stopping-point in the city centre before East Berlin. Listen | Author and editor Iain MacGregor revisits some of the most dramatic events associated with the history of the Cold War barrier, from its construction in 1961 to its modern afterlife On its eastern side – which was in fact its northern side, due to the city’s convoluted topography – it was simply known as ‘Border Crossing-Point Friedrichstraße’. A series of vehicle chicanes with swing-barriers waited behind a sign which, in the 1960s, informed visitors that they were entering the ‘Democratic Sector’ of East Berlin (but this was ‘people’s democracy’). Such was the topsy-turvy logic of the Cold War propaganda battles that played out on the hoardings and banners along its interface. When was Checkpoint Charlie built? For the first 16 years of Cold War Berlin’s existence, the sector boundary was an invisible border marked only by the occasional painted line. It was only with the building of the Berlin Wall in August 1961 that it became a militarised border. The new checkpoint drew world attention in October 1961, when a series of symbolic gestures escalated into a high-tension military stand-off. East German People’s Police, or ‘Vopos’ – part of a state the West refused to recognise – had started demanding ID from western officials, including the US deputy head of mission in Berlin, Allan Lightner. He sat tight in his VW Beetle with its military government plates, steadfastly refusing. The car was then ‘frog-marched’ into East Berlin, just to assert its rights, under close US military police escort. Escape from East Berlin: an audacious bid to tunnel under the Berlin Wall To underscore their message, the Americans had also deployed tanks nearby, some provocatively mounted with bulldozer blades capable of demolishing the still fragile Wall – all part of a calculated policy of brinkmanship by John F Kennedy’s maverick special envoy in Berlin, General Lucius D Clay, hero of the Berlin airlift. Clay was now urging a showdown with the Soviets to prove that only they, and not the East Germans, were in charge. After a series of ‘test runs’ of more US civilian personnel escorted into East Berlin by military police jeeps, and 10 US tanks drawn up across Checkpoint Charlie, Moscow’s patience finally ran out. On 27 October the Russians deployed 10 of their own main battle tanks at point-blank range across the checkpoint. In White House crisis talks, President Kennedy privately disowned Clay’s gung-ho tactics. The incident was only de-escalated following secret back-channel diplomacy between JFK's brother Bobby and Soviet military intelligence’s man in Washington, Georgi Bolshakov. But not before the world had held its breath for 17 hours at the sight of tanks toe-to-toe at the world’s most dangerous hotspot. (And yes, their guns were locked and loaded!) Tensions mounted again in August 1962, soon after the Wall’s first anniversary, when a notorious shooting occurred during an escape attempt within a stone’s throw of Checkpoint Charlie. Teenage East Berlin building worker Peter Fechter had almost scrambled over the breeze-block barrier when hit in the pelvis by border guard fire. The secret history of the Berlin Wall He lay for almost an hour bleeding out, as neither side dared enter no-man’s land. Yet western onlookers soon turned on the impotent American military police at nearby Checkpoint Charlie, as well as stoning passing Soviet military buses; so much so that the West Berlin police had to impose a temporary no-go area at the border. Two years later, on a September night in 1964, Hans W Puhl, the US military policeman on duty at Checkpoint Charlie, and his Berlin police partner, heard nearby shots. Racing to the scene, Puhl showed none of the reticence seen in 1962. As he saw would-be escaper Michael Meyer being dragged back across no-man’s land by two GDR border guards, he tossed a teargas grenade over the wall. The guards took cover. Puhl began removing barbed wire from the wall, shouting encouragement and throwing a rope, while East German border guards and West Berlin police engaged in a 15-minute firefight. Meyer was eventually dragged over the Wall with bullet wounds to hand, arm, leg and thigh. All told the West had fired 64 rounds, the East 100, so that the ‘Wild East’ frontier may have felt at times like the Wild West. Who escaped through Checkpoint Charlie, and how? Escapes directly through Checkpoint Charlie were not impossible but required ingenuity. In May 1963 Heinz Meixner, an Austrian working in Berlin who had fallen for an East German woman on his visits to the other half of the city, hatched a daring plan to smuggle her out through the crossing-point where he had detected a weak spot. Meixner acquired a British Austin-Healey Sprite sports car and calculated that, minus its windscreen and with tyres deflated, the low-slung vehicle might just pass under the swing-barriers. So, he loaded his girlfriend in the back and her mother in the boot, memorised the ‘S’ of the chicane, and then drove through crouched and at speed before East German guards could react. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2020/06/GettyImages-162868126-581e60e.jpg" width="1024" height="740" alt="Heinz Meixner showing how he drove his Sprite car, with the windscreen cut so that it would be low enough to run under frontier posts in Berlin, Germany, c1961. (Photo by Express/Archive Photos/Getty Images)" title="Heinz Meixner showing how he drove his Sprite car, with the windscreen cut so that it would be low enough to run under frontier posts in Berlin, Germany, c1961. (Photo by Express/Archive Photos/Getty Images)" /> In the early 1970s an intrepid trio of East Berlin young men even managed to build a tunnel underneath the border close by the checkpoint. Working from a disused cellar on the eastern side which had to be carefully resealed between each digging session, in January 1972 they managed to dig their way through the frozen, sandy soil and emerged just beyond the Wall. Escape from East Berlin: an audacious bid to tunnel under the Berlin Wall Other, more direct, escape attempts were not so fortunate. On 5 January 1974, 23-year old Burkhard Niering, an East German paramilitary policeman disenchanted with national service, went AWOL from his barracks and appeared armed and dangerous at Checkpoint Charlie. Taking a Stasi passport controller hostage and firing warning bursts of automatic fire into the night, Niering edged towards the final barrier before being gunned down by border guard snipers almost within touching distance of the borderline. He died an hour later in East Berlin’s police hospital. Such incidents had already become the stuff of western spy legend. Ian Fleming’s last 007 story, The Living Daylights, features a jaded James Bond posted on sniper duty overlooking the wasteland close by what was to become Checkpoint Charlie. Len Deighton’s Bernard Samson keeps vigil there, awaiting agents coming back from the cold. It also became a site of Cold War tourism. Rainer Hildebrandt, an anti-communist activist, set up the Haus am Checkpoint Charlie, a museum to the border and its escapes, which, despite its cramped quarters, became West Berlin’s most-visited destination. In pictures: remembering the Berlin Wall 30 years on From a peephole on its stairs, visitors could look down on the eastern side at a growing complex of interlocking portacabins, all furnished in the same mock-wood Formica. Visitors had to exchange 25 West German deutschmarks for east marks for the privilege of entering East Berlin. As an exchange student visiting in the 1980s, I discovered that besides firearms and explosives (which seemed reasonable), used stamps were considered contraband, and neither towels nor babies’ nappies could be exported from the ‘Hauptstadt der DDR’. On 9 November 1989, the day the Wall fell, Checkpoint Charlie and other crossing-points such as Bornholmer Straße in the north of the city were to face not tanks from the West but ‘people power’ from the East. After a botched Communist Party press conference announcing the opening of the border, but in a process designed to take weeks not hours, thousands of East Berliners decided to assert their new freedom of movement through a collective act of direct action. At around midnight Stasi border personnel at Checkpoint Charlie, like their comrades elsewhere, were unable to get any directions from a collapsing centre and so yielded to the throng and opened the gates. Just as the Berlin Wall had been born, so it perished: literally overnight. Can you visit Checkpoint Charlie today? The site now feels more like a Cold War theme park. An original “You are now leaving the American sector” sign stands guard, and for a while was faced by an ironic piece of wall art on a gable end announcing “You are entering the non-profit sector”. A facsimile of the military police cabin c1961 has been installed. Re-enactors in period costume as Allied or Soviet personnel parade before it, demanding money for selfies (until this practice was recently banned for over-commercialisation of an historic site). The Haus am Checkpoint Charlie sells t-shirts and mugs with slogans from the Cold War past. A nearby 360° panorama, hand-painted in photorealistic verisimilitude and enclosed in what looks like a wall of death rotunda, shows the area as it may have looked in 1984. A photo installation by the German photographer Frank Thiel, raised high on a pole, depicts US Sergeant Jeff Harper on one side, looking east, and a Russian counterpart on the reverse. Originally a complementary pair of British and French soldiers had hung here too, but Cold War memory at Checkpoint Charlie is an increasingly Americanised affair now, flanked instead by a McDonald’s fast-food outlet. Sitting somewhat forlornly nearby, a ‘Black Box’ information centre marks the site of a possible Cold War Museum, but remains in limbo while a property dispute over the former no-man’s land rumbles on. There could be no better place for it – Checkpoint Charlie truly was the epicentre of the Cold War. Patrick Major is professor of modern history at the University of Reading and author of Behind the Berlin Wall: East Germany and the Frontiers of Power (OUP, 2009) and ‘Listening behind the Curtain: BBC Broadcasting to East Germany and its Cold War Echo’, Cold War History (2013)
Escape from East Berlin: an audacious bid to tunnel under the Berlin Wall
The building of the Berlin Wall in August 1961 triggered a rush of escape bids – none more ambitious than one masterminded by a student named Joachim Rudolph. Helena Merriman, producer and presenter of new podcast Tunnel 29, tells a story of flooded tunnels, Stasi spies and families reunited – filmed live for American TV
It’s the middle of the night and Joachim Rudolph is wading through a river. There’s a watchtower above him with border guards inside; he knows they’ll kill him if they see him. He clambers up a bank, crawls through a field, and as the sun begins to rise, he realises he’s made it. He’s escaped to West Berlin. This was September 1961, a little less than two months after the Berlin Wall had gone up. It was built by the East German government to stop the flood of people leaving the communist dictatorship for a better life in the west. What made this wall so extraordinary was the speed at which it was built. Ten thousand East German soldiers had gone into the streets in the dead of night, stringing barbed wire from posts and making concrete barricades. When people woke up on 13 August 1961, they suddenly found themselves on one side of the wall: wives were cut off from their husbands; brothers from their sisters. There were even stories of newborn babies in the west now separated from their mothers. What happened after the fall of the Berlin Wall? In pictures: remembering the Berlin Wall 30 years on The secret history of the Berlin Wall That very day, the escapes had begun. Some just jumped over the barbed wire; others were more inventive, like the couple who swam across the river Spree, pushing their three-year-old daughter in front of them in a bathtub. Joachim had spent weeks planning his escape, and now he’d done it. He enrolled in an engineering course at a West Berlin university and was beginning his new life, when one morning there was a knock at the door. It was two students. They had a plan to build a tunnel to get some friends out of the East and they wanted Joachim to help dig it. A nest of spies There’s an old East German joke: why do Stasi officers make such good taxi drivers? Because you get in the car, and they already know your name and where you live. The Ministry for State Security (otherwise known as the Stasi) was the most powerful part of the East German government. It combined the secret police and the government’s intelligence services, and its mission was to know everything. While they got some of their information from hidden microphones, their greatest assets were their informants. They had hundreds of thousands of them, a higher proportion than most other secret police in history. On 28 September 1961, they were just about to recruit one: a hairdresser called Siegfried Uhse. They’d caught him carrying smuggled cigarettes for a “homosexual orgy” and told him he could avoid prison if he became a Stasi agent. Much of what follows comes from the files connected to him, which are kept in the Stasi Archives, a huge underground vault in East Berlin, in what used to be the Stasi headquarters. There are 2,735 documents about him, recording everything from his favourite books (he hated cheap romance novels, loved Tolstoy) as well as his first assignment: to look for fluchthelfers – the German word for escape helpers. These were people in the West who helped people in the East escape. In other words, he was now on the hunt for people just like Joachim. As Siegfried began his secret assignment, Joachim and the others were getting to work on the tunnel. They stole spades and pickaxes from a cemetery, recruited more diggers from the university and persuaded a factory owner to let them start digging from his cellar. Then on 9 May 1962, just before midnight, the group drove to the factory, went into the cellar and began digging. “We had no idea where to start,” Joachim told me when I interviewed him for the Radio 4 series Tunnel 29. “We’d never seen a real tunnel. But we’d seen footage of tunnels on TV, ones that had failed, and that gave us ideas about how to dig one.” They hacked into the concrete and dug out the screed and clay until they had a small hole. They made it deep enough so they wouldn’t run into the city’s water table and then started digging horizontally towards the East. After a few weeks, they were exhausted, but they hadn’t even reached the border yet. They needed two things: people and money. The Berlin Wall: everything you need to know Cold War summits: David Reynolds and Kristina Spohr explain Thousands of miles away in New York, Reuven Frank, a hot-shot TV executive at the American network NBC, was thinking about how to tell the story of Berlin. He had an idea: what if he were to tell an escape story? And what if he could film it as it was happening? It could revolutionise television news. He took his idea to the NBC correspondent in Berlin, Piers Anderton, who began the search. At the same time, the diggers were asking around in media circles whether anyone might stump up some money. Eventually, they met Piers Anderton and brought him to see the tunnel. He was impressed and went straight back to his boss, Reuven Frank, to ask if he’d agree to fund them. Reuven said yes: NBC would give the diggers money for tools and materials (limited to $7,500) and in return, NBC would have the right to film everything. And with that, Reuven Frank had just made one of the most controversial decisions in the history of TV news: a top American news network had agreed to fund a group of students building an escape tunnel under the Berlin Wall. By the end of June 1962, thanks to the NBC money, the group of student diggers (now around 12 of them) had dug almost all the way to the border between East and West Berlin. The tunnel was now looking very hi-tech, with Joachim its chief inventor. In the NBC footage you see the electric lights that he strung up, as well as the motorised cart that whizzed along the rails. Soon the tunnellers were under the death strip, a section of land next to the wall patrolled by guards on the look-out for tunnels. “They had special listening devices that they’d put on the ground,” says Joachim. “If they heard something, they’d dig a hole and fire a gun into it or throw in dynamite.” Double trouble But it wasn’t the guards that did the first bit of major damage to the tunnel: it was a leak from a burst pipe. They bucketed out gallons of water, and eventually managed to get the pipe fixed, but it would take months for the tunnel to dry out. They were now stuck: tunnellers without a tunnel. Then they heard about another tunnel which had been dug into the East, but had been abandoned by its crew. Though the diggers had left, the students organising the escape were still around. They asked Joachim and the others if they’d be up for helping. They could combine their lists of escapees and get them all through at the same time. “It seemed too perfect an opportunity to pass up,” says Joachim. “We were a group of diggers without a tunnel, and here was a tunnel that needed diggers.” On 7 August 1962, they were ready to go. They’d dug the final few metres right up to a cottage in the East and they’d been sending out messengers to tell the escapees that the tunnel was ready. One of these messengers was a hairdresser. His name? Siegfried Uhse. Remember, he’d been asked to look for escape-helpers in the West, and he’d found some. In other words, the escape operation that Joachim was now part of was being watched by the Stasi. A Stasi file records how Siegfried Uhse told his handler the details: “The breakthrough would happen between 4pm and 7pm,” he said. “One hundred people were expected.” The Stasi were now onto the biggest escape operation so far from West Berlin. They sent “soldiers, an armoured personnel carrier and a water cannon” to a base near the cottage, as well as plainclothes Stasi agents. The trap was set. Back at the tunnel, Joachim and two of the other diggers were preparing to break into the cottage. They crawled to the end of the tunnel, carrying axes, hammers, pistols and an old Second World War machine gun. As they started hacking into the cottage, escapees were arriving, ready to crawl through the tunnel. They had no idea they were surrounded by Stasi agents. One by one they were bundled into cars and driven away. Joachim and the other two diggers were now climbing into the living room, unaware that soldiers were standing just outside the door. Stasi files from that day reveal how the soldiers were just about to burst in when they heard one of the tunnellers mention “a machine gun”. They waited for back-up: their Kalashnikovs were no match for machine guns from West Germany. Then Joachim and the others heard a message over their radio, telling them the operation had been blown. They jumped down into the tunnel and started crawling back into the West. A few minutes later, the soldiers’ back-up arrived and they rushed into the room, jumping down into the tunnel. It was empty; they were too late. But they weren’t empty handed; they had dozens of prisoners to interrogate. Prisoners of the Stasi That night, everyone arrested at the tunnel was taken to Hohenschönhausen prison, a former Soviet jail now run by the Stasi. Prisoners weren’t allowed to talk to each other and in their cells, they had no control over anything: the light switch was on the outside, as was the button to flush the loo. Everything was designed to make the inmates feel powerless. The transcripts of their interrogations show they were long: running more than 12 hours at a time with no food or breaks. Most of them eventually confessed, giving up the details of their part in the escape tunnel. After their show trials, many of them were sent to prison, which could mean years of hard labour as well as time in solitary confinement. Back in West Berlin, the diggers had decided to try again. By early September, the first tunnel they’d dug had dried out and so they set an escape date: 14 September 1962. That afternoon, Joachim and Hasso, one of the other diggers, crawled to the end of the tunnel and hacked a hole into the cellar of No 7 Schonholzer Strasse. Meanwhile one of the girlfriends of the diggers, a 21-year-old called Ellen Schau, had volunteered to go into the East to give out the final signals to the escapees. As a West German passport holder, she could go in and out of the East when she liked. When she got there, she had to go to three different pubs to give the signals to the escapees waiting there. In the first one, she ordered matches, in the second, she ordered water. In the third pub, she was meant to order coffee but it had run out. “It was a terrible moment,” she says. “How could I give the signal if the pub didn’t have any coffee?” Instead, she complained loudly about the coffee, and then ordered a cognac (at least they both begin with the same letter.) She just had to hope that the escapees all understood her signals: that the tunnel was ready. 5 myths of the Second World War's Great Escape The not-so Great Escape Gripping their guns As Ellen returned to West Berlin, groups of people walked towards the apartment with the tunnel underneath it. Joachim and Hasso were waiting for them in the cellar, guns in their hands. Just after 6pm, they heard footsteps. “We stood there, hardly breathing, gripping our guns tightly,” says Joachim. The door opened and there was a woman, Eveline Schmidt. She was with her husband and their two-year-old daughter. “It was dark,” remembers Eveline. “There was just one lamp by the entrance. One of the tunnellers took my baby and then I started crawling.” At the other end, in the West, the two-man NBC film crew were standing at the top of the shaft that led to the tunnel. When you look at the footage, for a long time you see nothing: and then a white handbag appears. Then there’s a hand, and then, finally, you see Eveline. She’s covered in mud and barefoot. She’s lost her shoes in the tunnel. It’s taken her 12 minutes to crawl through. As she reaches the top of the ladder, she collapses. One of the NBC cameramen helps her to a bench and then a tunneller brings her child to her. She bundles her into her arms, nuzzling the nape of her neck. Over the next hour, more people come through the tunnel: the diggers’ friends and family. One of them, Claus, a butcher who’d escaped from the East, helps a woman through, only to realise it’s his wife, Inge. He hasn’t seen her since they were separated while escaping a year ago. She was caught by border guards and imprisoned while pregnant with his child. Then Claus hears a noise from the tunnel: it’s a baby, dressed in white, carried by one of the tunnellers. He’s only five months old. It’s his son, born in a communist prison camp. Claus takes him in his arms, holding him for the first time. Back at the other end of the tunnel, Joachim is still in the cellar. He’s stayed there, at the most dangerous point of the tunnel till the very end. Twenty-nine people have made it through and he knows it’s time to go. “So many things went through my head,” he says. “All the things we’d gone through digging it. The leaks, the electric shocks, the mud, the blisters on our hands. Seeing all those refugees come through, I felt the most incredible happiness.” There’s one final bit of footage from that night: the escapees walk, one by one, to the door. They push it open and disappear into West Berlin. Listen | Taylor Downing discusses the Able Archer scare, which nearly witnessed global Armageddon But that’s not the end of the story. A few months later, the documentary aired on NBC. Although President Kennedy’s White House tried to block it (fearing a diplomatic incident with the US), Reuven Frank persuaded the network to run it and 18 million people tuned in. It was described as “without parallel” in television history. The tunnellers heard that Kennedy himself watched it and that he was moved to tears. Some of the diggers then went on to build other tunnels (including the Channel Tunnel), and in the East, Siegfried Uhse was given one of the Stasi’s top medals for infiltrating the tunnel. What, then, about Joachim? A few years after the escape, he fell in love with Eveline, the first woman who came through the tunnel. Her marriage had broken up and they fell for each other. Ten years after he rescued her, he married her. On the wall of their apartment today, there’s a pair of shoes that he found in the tunnel after everyone had gone home. They belonged to Annett, Eveline’s daughter. And so the tunnel that Joachim built, which brought 29 refugees from the East, also brought him a family. Before it was pulled down 30 years ago – on 9 November 1989 – at least 140 people were killed or died at the Berlin Wall. But while the wall has gone, the idea hasn’t. Right now, all over the world, walls are being built, not just in the United States, but in India, Turkey, Morocco, Norway. The reasons for building them are different. But Joachim says there’s one thing they have in common. “Wherever there’s a wall, people will try to get over it – or under it.” Great escapes: 5 other audacious bids to flee East Germany High-wire act Horst Klein was a trapeze artist living in East Berlin. He’d been banned from performing (for being anti-communist) and in 1962, he told a local newspaper that “he couldn’t live any longer without the smell of a circus”. In December 1962, he climbed an electricity pole near the wall and made his way onto a cable, hanging on it from both arms. Steadily, he inched his way into the West, moving one hand over the other. Just as he made it over the border, his arms gave way and he fell from the cable, breaking both his arms. But he recovered and performed again. Booze cruise On 7 June 1962, 13 young East Berliners boarded an excursion boat. They’d brought alcohol with them for a “party”, and they plied the captain and mechanic with it until they passed out. The group then locked them in a cabin and hijacked the boat. They steered it towards West Berlin, under machine gun fire from East German border guards. When it reached the riverbank, West Berlin policemen fired shots back into the East to protect the group, and under that cover, the escapees jumped ashore. Armoured breakout On 17 April 1963, 19-year old Wolfgang Engels climbed into a stolen Soviet armoured personnel carrier and drove it to the border between East and West Berlin. He tried to smash it through the wall, but the vehicle got stuck in the barbed wire. As he lay there, trapped, an East German border guard approached him. Wolfgang pleaded “don’t shoot!” but the border guard shot him anyway. “The bullet went in through my back and out the front,” he said. Incredibly, Wolfgang Engels managed to climb out of the car, over the bonnet and into the West. He was severely injured, but he’d escaped. Runaway train Harry Deterling was a train engineer. He lived in East Berlin with his wife, Ingrid, and their four sons and he’d wanted to escape ever since the wall went up. He’d heard that there were some train lines that still connected to the West but that they were soon to be dismantled, so he knew he had to act fast. In December 1961, he told his bosses he wanted to run an extra train to improve his engineering skills. They said yes, and at 7.33pm on 5 December (his birthday), he, his family and some friends boarded locomotive 234 and Harry then steered it onto a disused track. There were 32 passengers – not all of them would-be escapees. At 8:50pm, he drove the train past Albrechtshof, the last station in East Berlin, without stopping, then disconnected the safety brake. A few minutes later, the train and its passengers crossed the border into the West. The next day that railway line was cut off. Up, up and away One night, Hans Strelczyk, a former aircraft mechanic, was watching a TV programme about the history of ballooning. It gave him an idea. He’d long wanted to escape East Germany: perhaps this could be the way? With his friend Gunter Wetzel, he built a hot-air balloon engine from four old propane cylinders. Their wives stitched the balloon together out of pieces of old canvas and bedsheets. On 16 September 1979 the two couples and their four children floated over the border at 2,400 metres. They landed in Bavaria in a blackberry thicket. Helena Merriman is a journalist and broadcaster. She is the presenter of the 10-part BBC Radio 4 series Tunnel 29, which airs from Monday 21 October. This article was first published in the November 2019 edition of BBC History Magazine
Iain MacGregor revisits some of the most dramatic events associated with the history of the Cold War barrier
On the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, author and editor Iain MacGregor revisits some of the most dramatic events associated with the history of the Cold War barrier, from its construction in 1961 to its modern afterlife.
What happened after the fall of the Berlin Wall?
What happened after the fall of the Berlin Wall? The end of decades of physical division in Berlin sparked diverse reactions in the two Germanies. Writing for BBC World Histories, Hester Vaizey explores the context and contemporary reactions to this seismic change...
Thirty years ago, on 9 November 1989, the barrier between communist East and capitalist West Germany was breached. In a series of articles for BBC World Histories magazine – on sale from Thursday 9 November, three experts revisit that pivotal moment and explore its global legacy. Here, historian Hester Vaizey offers her take on the events and what happened after the Wall came down... Arguably the most seismic changes in European geopolitics – certainly in the second half of the 20th century – stemmed from events that unfolded in Berlin on 9 November 1989. In the aftermath of its defeat in the Second World War, Germany had been divided into two countries: the German Democratic Republic (GDR), or East Germany, comprising the Soviet zone of occupation, and the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany), which evolved from the combined occupation zones of the British, French and US allies. Over the following years, in the competitive climate of the Cold War, it was troubling to East German leaders that the equivalent of a town’s worth of people were electing to move each year from the communist state to capitalist West Germany in search of jobs and higher living standards. So the GDR decided to erect a physical barrier between East and West Berlin to stem the flow of this tide. The Wall was constructed rapidly and without public warning, and the first barrier was largely completed in just a few days beginning on 13 August 1961. The Berlin Wall: everything you need to know In pictures: remembering the Berlin Wall 30 years on During the 1980s, the communist Eastern Bloc countries faced increasing economic challenges, and the socialist dictatorships in Poland and Hungary lost their stranglehold on power, a situation that raised questions about the future of the GDR. The East German Politburo was keen to avoid similar upheavals; one member commented: “Just because one of your neighbours changes the wallpaper in his house, does that mean you have to follow suit?” Yet many East Germans were hopeful of reform, buoyed by what they had seen in neighbouring countries. Peaceful protests later known as the Montagsdemonstrationen (Monday demonstrations), beginning in Leipzig on 4 September 1989 and spreading to other East German cities, called for democratic reform and freedom to travel. The huge demonstration in Leipzig on 9 October, which was not suppressed with violence, is often cited as marking a turning point for the GDR. The critical moment came at a press conference on 9 November 1989, when Communist Party spokesman Günter Schabowski announced that travel restrictions to West Germany were to be eased. Asked when the new travel arrangements would come into effect, Schabowski responded: “immediately”. Schabowski later admitted that he had “only read the damn press release once, and diagonally at that!” – but after that declaration, there was no going back. As news of Schabowski’s pronouncement spread, thousands of East Germans flocked to the six border crossing points in the Wall. Faced by overwhelming numbers of East Berliners demanding to be let through to the West, late that night border guards opened the gates. Politically and psychologically, if not yet physically, the Wall had fallen. Strange new world The opening of gates in the Wall was met with euphoria across both Germanies. East Berliners were greeted with glasses of champagne as they crossed the border, many of them for the first time in their lives. Strangers embraced in excitement, overwhelmed by the enormity of what they were witnessing. The party atmosphere reigned all night in downtown Berlin. Did the Cold War ever really end? Escape from East Berlin: an audacious bid to tunnel under the Berlin Wall The secret history of the Berlin Wall Within six weeks of the Wall’s fall, some 2.5 million East Germans had visited the West. They were understandably amazed by the broad range of items piled on shelves in supermarkets there after the more limited choice in the GDR, and were excited to sink their teeth into a bona fide Big Mac – a potent symbol of capitalism – for the first time, and to taste ‘real’ chocolate. Once the initial excitement had subsided, East Germans faced a serious decision about their future. In the first free elections in the GDR for 40 years, they voted in favour of a speedy reunification with West Germany, which promised huge benefits: free elections, freedom of speech, freedom of travel. But stitching the two Germanies back together would involve overcoming tremendous logistical challenges. Each of the two countries had its own flag, national anthem, armed forces, legal code, educational system, approach to health care and method of taxation. What followed was essentially a takeover of the East by West Germany. Perhaps the biggest challenges for East Germans were economic. Food prices and rent were no longer subsidised by the state, and employment was no longer guaranteed but individually determined and, therefore, markedly more competitive. As the cost of living skyrocketed in East Germany, so too did unemployment, which rose from 0% to 16% three years after reunification. So, although the end of the GDR brought new freedoms, the downsides of the transformation came to be uppermost in the minds of many who struggled to put bread on the table. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2019/11/GettyImages-71303529-ba53291.jpg" width="5075" height="3362" alt="A group of five Germans celebrates with champagne as a section of the Berlin Wall is breached" title="Champagne erupts at the Checkpoint Charlie border crossing between East and West Berlin on the night that the Wall is breached. (Photo by Tom Stoddart/Getty Images)" /> Each day in the reunited Germany revealed new areas of ignorance for East Germans feeling their way in unfamiliar territory – ignorance that they were keen, but understandably ill-equipped, to hide. Confronted with new street names, new money and new shops, to name but a few changes, many felt overwhelmed. No one took East Germans by the hand and guided them as they attempted to get to grips with the new system. Many felt shame that they didn’t know all the answers automatically: that they didn’t know how to pronounce the food they wanted to order in McDonald’s, that they didn’t know how the supermarket trolleys worked in the West, that they didn’t know what to wear to blend in with West Germans. The WW2 obsession: why the world can't move on from 1945 Hitler's millionaire backers: how Germany's elite facilitated the rise of the Nazis Articulating the sense of uncertainty felt by many East Germans, one woman noted in her diary in December 1989: “Everywhere is becoming like a foreign land. I have long wished to travel to foreign parts, but I have always wanted to be able to come home again.” The range of choices available to East Germans after unification was certainly advantageous, but the transition period – as they learned to navigate and fit in with the new modus operandi – was profoundly unsettling. After 40 years living in societies with very different values, it is hardly surprising that in 1990 both East and West Germans said that “their clocks tick differently”. A similar sentiment was reflected in a joke popular that year: an East German says to a West German, “Wir sind ein Volk” (We are one people); the West German replies, “Wir auch” (Us too). Because they shared the same language and the same long-term history, it was widely expected – as Willy Brandt, former chancellor of West Germany, said on 10 November 1989 – that the two countries would “grow together” seamlessly. Yet this ‘growing together’ has taken much longer than anticipated, perhaps because after such a long time divided, each group of people found the others quite foreign. The concrete wall had been the physical barrier, but in many ways the result of that division was brought into sharper relief when it was gone, and East and West Germans stood side by side. When the states were divided, West Germans supported Eastern friends and relatives, sending some 25 million parcels across the border each year. Yet these friendships commonly dwindled to nothing once the Iron Curtain had been drawn back. To West Germans – indeed, to any outsider schooled in the virtues of democracy – it might seem counter-intuitive to think that the new opportunities presented to East Germans by reunification could be anything other than positive. They now had far greater choice: about what they said, what they did, where they went and what they ate. Nonetheless, not all East Germans embraced the changes with open arms. Many in the West felt that East Germans were both ungracious and ungrateful after 1990, given that the West German taxpayer footed the bill for the effective incorporation of East within West – to the tune of 140 billion Deutsche Marks per year during the 1990s – and many in the former Federal Republic dubbed their new compatriots Jammerossis – ‘moaning Easterners’. To some West Germans it seemed to defy logic that former GDR citizens might experience nostalgia for their former life in a world barricaded with barbed wire. It seemed to suggest that East Germans had been infected or brainwashed by the propaganda to which they had so long been exposed. East Germans, for their part, felt hurt and disappointed that West Germans did not seem to acknowledge the hugely disorientating upheaval to their lives caused by the fall of the Wall. Their nostalgia was not for the machinations of the GDR’s political system but, rather, for a familiar culture in which they felt comfortable and at home. West Germans – who seemed overly confident, quick to criticise the GDR or to extol to the East the superiority of Western ways – earned a reputation as Besserwessis’(‘know-it-all Westerners’). Voicing the resentment of many others, an East German bishop wrote a letter to the former West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt, saying: “It is constantly suggested that we are not capable of anything, and that everything we have done was wrong. We are the only ones who have to learn something, because, it is said, all of our experiences belong on the trash pile of history... But we can no longer take this permanent know-all manner and our degrading treatment as disenfranchised failures.” Such feelings exacerbated the cultural disconnect between Germans from either side of the border, and the notion of a persistent ‘Mauer im Kopf’ (‘Wall in the head’) became an accepted phenomenon. Reactions to the fall TV and newspaper images suggested that euphoria reigned in both halves of Berlin – yet those affected by the sudden changes experienced a diverse range of emotions RELIEF: Katharina, Protestant vicar, Golzow, East Germany On the night of 9 November, Katharina, her husband Gilbert and their newborn baby were at an isolated cottage in the forested countryside east of Berlin, and didn’t hear about the fall of the Wall till they turned on the radio the following morning. “We couldn’t believe it,” recalls Katharina. They travelled directly to Berlin, where thousands like them were pouring across the border, collecting the Begrüßungsgeld (‘welcome money’) that all East German visitors were promised, and spending it in department stores. Convinced that the border opening was only temporary, Katharina stocked up on vitamins, then she and Gilbert sat in a café drinking fresh coffee, which was not easily available in the GDR. She had been subjected to persecution her whole life because of her Christian faith, and Gilbert had spent two years in prison for disseminating leaflets critical of the communist regime. So she felt a sense of freedom: “I knew that no one was going to lock us up anymore.” DISBELIEF: Petra, communist-leaning student, East Berlin Petra was a member of the Communist Party but was keen to see reforms, and had joined in demonstrations against the government in the preceding days. At around 6pm on 9 November, she switched on her television and caught the start of the momentous press conference. But before the crucial moment – when Schabowski confirmed that travel restrictions would be lifted immediately – Petra left her home to go to the theatre with her mother and friends. Before the performance, the group discussed the rumour that the East-West border would be opened, but no one took it seriously. When they left the theatre at around 9.30pm, Petra remembers saying: “Something’s up. I can feel it in the air.” Once home, Petra turned on the radio and heard the news. Though her impulse was to get out on to the streets, her mother was staying overnight. Petra instead hung out of the window and saw the road below thick with traffic as East Berliners drove to the nearby border crossing. EXCITEMENT: Lisa, student, East Berlin On the evening of 9 November, Lisa’s boyfriend rushed in and told her that he was about to drive across the border and join a street party on the Kurfürstendamm, West Berlin’s most famous shopping street. Lisa was confused: how was he going to cross to West Berlin? He replied: “Everyone’s going. I heard it on the radio!” He was eager to cross quickly for fear that the Wall would be closed again. Lisa agreed to join him on the trip. Initially they sat in a massive traffic jam among people buzzing with excitement as they thronged the streets leading to West Berlin. Once across the border, they went to look at the Brandenburg Gate from the western side for the first time. Lisa saw people with little hammers chipping pieces off the Wall to take as souvenirs. She drank in the details of West Berlin’s streets, which were much more colourful than their counterparts to the east, with graffiti and brightly coloured advertising. “The West had been a white speck on the horizon when we were living divided by a wall,” Lisa recalls. Now that white speck became a real place. WORRY: Peggy, schoolgirl, Prenzlau, East Germany When 10-year-old Peggy woke up on the morning of 10 November 1989, she knew that something was amiss. She found her mother sitting at the kitchen table, hands wrapped around a cup of coffee and staring into space. “Why didn’t you wake me?” Peggy asked. “The Wall has fallen,” her mother replied. Various thoughts passed through Peggy’s head, but it was fear, more than hope, that dominated. She’d heard about high unemployment and homelessness in West Germany, and mused: “I hope we get to keep our flat, and that my parents don’t lose their jobs.” FEAR: Mario, former political prisoner, West Berlin On 9 November, Mario worked a long shift at a bar before speaking to his father, who phoned from East Berlin to tell him what had happened. “Young man, the Wall has fallen,” his father said. “Shall we come over?” Mario’s initial reaction was that it was a sick joke. “I’d had a hard day of work behind me, and I said: ‘Are you drunk? What kind of joke is this?’ then hung up.” Unlike many who were jubilant, Mario’s first reaction was fear. While the Wall had been up, he was safe from the Stasi (officially the Ministry for State Security, the East German secret police) who had ruthlessly pursued him. He had been incarcerated in Hohenschönhausen Stasi prison, on the north-east outskirts of Berlin, for attempting to flee the GDR illegally, before being released in 1987 and crossing to West Berlin. Now he could no longer be sure of that safety, and was afraid of running into the Stasi. Those like Mario, who had battled to escape the GDR prior to November 1989, also felt a sense of resentment that all East Germans could now simply walk over the border without any personal risk. Hester Vaizey is a historian and author of books including Born in the GDR: Living in the Shadow of the Wall (Oxford University Press, 2014) This article was taken from issue 19 of BBC World Histories magazine, published in November 2019