Hilton - The wall: the peoples story

Mine is not a pleasant story, it does not possess the gentle harmony of invented tales; like the lives of all men who have given up trying to deceive themselves, it is a mixture of nonsense and chaos, madness and dreams.

Demian,
Hermann Hesse

Demian, Hermann Hesse (Panther Books Ltd, London, 1969).

1.The wall, cutting across central Berlin

2.The divided Germany

3.Districts surrounding Berlin

4.Bernauer Strasse

5.The Teltow Canal

6.The River Spree

7.Exits and Entrances

8.The death of Peter Fechter

9.Tunnel 57

10.The Steinstcken enclave

11.The gateways to the West

12.Checkpoint Charlie

A ny book like this, balancing political and historical background against the first-person testaments of the foreground, draws to itself a lot of people and a lot of sources of information. I pay my due tribute to them all and offer my sincere thanks.

First, Birgit Kubisch, who started off as an interpreter but became an enthusiast, an organiser, a translator, a provider, and handled some interviews herself. To her I must add my neighbour Inge Donnell who moved doggedly through translating the paragraphs of those who died at the wall even though she found the task upsetting; and to her I must add Viktoria Tischer, of Haynes, who set herself to add to the store of knowledge on Peter Fechter, the teenager whose fate he was left to bleed to death in 1962 still lives, if I may use that word, in the domain of the grotesque and the barbarous which the Berlin Wall created.

I list the others who helped in no particular order. The book is, I hope, greater than the sum total of its parts and many, many good people provided those parts, each in their own way. To people who insist that civility, courtesy and cooperation are vanished echoes of a genteel past, I say: wrong. Almost nobody I approached in so many walks of life was difficult. On the contrary, and for no reward of any kind, they went out of their way to help.

I owe a special debt to Hagen Koch, a former Border Guard who has, in his cosy East Berlin apartment, set up a museum to the wall because he feels there should be one place where people can find out about it. He has refused a great deal of money for some of the material hes gathered (including a unique set of photographs of the death strip) and I salute him for that as I thank him for maps, information, and advice. If you want to see for yourself, try http://www.berliner-mauer.de . The Rt Hon. Lord Hurd of Westwell CH, CBE , then British Foreign Secretary, sent specific memories which were gratefully received. Millie Waters, a bubbly public affairs specialist at the HQ US Army, Europe, proved to be a one-person army in finding people and arranging things.

And thanks to the interviewees: Chris Toft, British Military Police; Bernard Ledwidge, British Military Government, Berlin; the late Diana Loeser, who lived in East Berlin; Bernie Godek, Michael Raferty, Bill Bentz and Russ Anderson of the US military; former US Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Frank Cash, Dorothy Lightner (wife of Allan), the late John Ausland, George Muller, Al Hemsing, Richard Smyser and Frank Trinka of the US political and diplomatic services; Adam Kellett-Long (with particular thanks to his wife Mary who allowed me to use extracts from her diary), Peter Johnson (who also let me have his diary) and Erdmute Greis-Behrendt, of Reuters; Gnter Moll and Roland Egersdrfer of the Border Guards; Peter Schultz and Ernest Steinke of the RIAS radio station, Berlin; Peter Dick, a Canadian and briefly a West Berlin resident; Peter and Daniel Glau of the Hotel Ahorn, which became a second home; Ekkehard Gurtz, Gerda Stern, Bodo Radtke, Nora Evans, Mateus, Kurt Behrendt, Heinz Sachsenweger, Uwe Nietzold, Erhard and Brigitte Schimke, Lutz and Ute Stolz, Rdinger Hering, Klaus-Peter Grohmann, Martin Schabe, Horst Pruster, Birgit Wuthe, Jakob Burkhardt, Elli Khn, Pastor Manfred Fischer, Marina Brath, Astrid Benner, Brita Segger, Katrin Monjau, Harald Jger, Hartmut Richter, Janet and Jacqueline Burkhardt. E.L. Gordon kept watch on the US media. A friend and fellow enthusiast, John Woodcock, was a valued companion on trips to the city.

There is a Bibliography at the end, but for permission to quote I am indebted to: Edith Kohagen, Editor-in-chief of Presse- und Informationsamt des Landes Berlin for The Wall and How it Fell (1994) and the invaluable Violations of human rights, illegal acts and incidents at the sector border in Berlin since the building of the wall (13 August 196115 August 1962), published in 1962 on behalf of the government of the Federal Republic of Germany by the Federal Ministry for All-German Questions (Bonn and Berlin). She also demystified the time gap between Berlin and Washington in August 1961, something not as straightforward as one might imagine. The extracts from Berlin Twilight by Lieutenant-Colonel W. Byford-Jones (Hutchinson), Man Without a Face by Markus Wolf (Jonathan Cape), Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood (Hogarth Press) and The Ugly Frontier by David Shears (Chatto & Windus) are courtesy of the Random House Group Ltd.

I sincerely thank the following for extracts: Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin for Der Sturz by Reinhold Andert and Wolfgang Herzberg; Peter Owen publishers for the quotation from Demian by Hermann Hesse (Panther); A.M. Heath & Co. Ltd for The Ides of August by Curtis Cate (copyright Curtis Cate, 1978); the Orion Publishing Group Ltd for Willy Brandt: Portrait of a Statesman by Terence Prittie (Weidenfeld & Nicolson); Duke University Press for We Were the People: Voices from East Germanys Revolutionary Autumn of 1989 by Dirk Philipsen; Continuum for the German Democratic Republic by Mike Dennis; the History Place ( webmaster@historyplace.com ) for the full text of John F. Kennedys speech in Berlin in 1963; Rainer and Alexandra Hildebrandt for Berlin: Von der Frontstadt zur Brcke Europas and It Happened at the Wall; the University of Massachusetts Press for The Wall in My Backyard by Dinah Dodds and Pam Allen-Thompson; HarperCollins for The Siege of Berlin by Mark Arnold-Forster; Sanga Music Inc. for the lines from Where Have all the Flowers Gone? by Pete Seeger; Norman Gelb for The Berlin Wall (Michael Joseph, 1986); George Bailey for Germans: Biography of an Obsession (Free Press, New York) and Battle-ground Berlin (with David E. Murphy and Sergei A. Kondraschev, Yale University Press); the British Army HQ in Germany (and thanks to Helga Heine for smoothing the way) for the Friday 17 November 1989 issue of Berlin Bulletin, the magazine published by Education Branch, HQ Berlin Infantry Brigade for British Forces, Berlin; ITPS Ltd, on behalf of Routledge, for Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century by R.J. Crampton; Christian F. Ostermann, Director, Cold War International History Project, The Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars Project, for Khrushchev and the Berlin Crisis and Ulbricht and the Concrete Rose; the Associated Press for their reporting of escapes and escape attempts in the 1980s.

I owe special thanks to Yorkshire Television, for allowing me to quote verbatim from their emotive and emotional documentary