The Berlin Wall

Khrushchev Divides Europe

August 13, 1961, was a Sunday. People were able to sleep in, and most shops and workplaces were closed. That probably explains the choice of this day, or rather the nighttime hours starting around midnight Saturday, to launch construction on the Wall that would divide Berlin for 28 years. And not just Berlin, but Germany: the stretch of wall confined to Berlin was 43 kilometers long, but in total it extended 155. When you get right down to it, the Wall divided not just Germany, but the entire world.

What was the point? Why was so much manpower, money, and material expended on a project that flew in the face of the policy of “peaceful coexistence” that had been announced just five years earlier? In a way, this was classic Khrushchev: none of his endeavors – from the 20th Party Congress, to the campaign to boost agriculture, to plans to reduce international tensions – were carried out systematically. Nikita Sergeyevich, of course, deserves a degree of gratitude, first and foremost, for releasing millions from the camps, for giving the country at least a taste of freedom that set off a flourishing of culture, for sincerely caring (I feel certain) about ordinary people, and for constructing thousands upon thousands of inexpensive residential buildings, enabling people to escape communal apartments.  He also deserves thanks for opening the Iron Curtain just a chink and letting us get at least a peek at foreign films, books, and even the real-live foreigners who attended the 1957 World Festival of Youth and Students in Moscow.

On a personal level, I certainly appreciate all these new-and-improved policies, but as a historian – alas! – I see how short they fell. The impression is that Khrushchev put great enthusiasm into applying a fresh coat of paint to a rusty, dilapidated, old fence. He really needed to tear it down and build a new one, but he could not bring himself to go so far. The red blood of Soviet communism ran through his veins.

As a result, he released people from the camps, but put new people in (albeit in much smaller numbers), he unleashed a despicable campaign against Boris Pasternak, lashed out against a number of young cultural figures who were essentially realizing the promises implicit in his denunciations of Stalinism at the 20th Party Congress.  And he may have sympathized with the people’s suffering, but that did not compensate for the fact that he drove agriculture to the point of collapse. And while he may have promoted the slogan of “peaceful coexistence,” he did little to ease tensions or slow the arms race. The Iron Curtain remained firmly in place.

The World Festival of Youth and Students that took place just a few years before the Wall was built brought a sense of euphoria to Moscow, as visitors poured in from across the globe and ordinary Russians had a chance to interact with them. For many, this represented their first contact with the West. Two years later, Khrushchev became the first Soviet leader to visit the United States. The hopes raised by these gestures toward international cooperation were short-lived. Now we had to “catch up to and overtake the West.” Of course the communist German Democratic Republic had to come up with its own version of that slogan: “We will catch up to a overtake the FRG,” as in the Federal Republic of Germany or West Germany. The hunt for Western spies continued. Khrushchev proclaimed Berlin to be the capital of the GDR and maneuvered to have Western powers expelled from their Berlin foothold deep inside East German territory (“a malignant tumor,” he called it). If the West was the source of the East’s problems, then building a wall made perfect sense.

On the surface, nothing had fundamentally changed – the Iron Curtain* had been in place for many years. But this monstrous construction project, which used up ton upon ton of concrete and metal mesh and installed searchlights, guard towers, barbed wire, and antitank barriers and ditches, became a symbol of divided Europe and a disturbing physical embodiment of the Cold War.

Over the decades, as tensions with the West ebbed and flowed, the Wall continued to be “improved”: nearby homes, which sometimes served as jumping off points for escapes to the free world, were demolished, people were resettled, surveillance by the guards became more effective, and the system of boom gates was changed to make it harder to sneak under them. And of course there was the apotheosis of inhumanity: the command to shoot-to-kill anyone caught trying to circumvent all these measures.

The clever approaches East Berliners devised to get past the Wall never cease to amaze, astound, and alarm. What amazed was the ingenuity applied in the search for paths to freedom: one person (back when there were still houses next to the wall) tossed a cable over to the other side and walked across it like an acrobat; another dug out a huge tunnel; yet another built a car low enough to scoot under the gate arms. If only that inventiveness, energy, and imagination could have been used more productively than on the need to escape! And how sorry I feel for the young man who was the first to be shot, on August 24, 1961, and the one who lay bleeding in the no-man’s-land (known as “the death strip”), and, most tragically, the final victim, who died on February 6, 1989, unable to wait just a few more months for the Wall to come down.

I often think about this final victim of the Wall, Chris Gueffroy. In the Soviet Union, perestroika was going full-steam and changes were coming in quick succession. What compelled Gueffroy to make this desperate attempt? Probably he simply could not imagine that by the end of that year, overwhelmed by the force of events, the authorities would announce the lifting of restrictions over free movement between East and West Germany, and that thousands of people would come – by foot, by car, by train, by plane, from across Europe – to tear down the Wall, both figuratively and literally. But back in February 1989, it must have still seemed that the Wall was there to stay, that that gloomy and depressing structure would cut through the city for all eternity.

Indeed, the landscape that we see every day has a strong effect on our psychology. If you live amid beautiful hills, fields, and meadows, it is somehow easier on the psyche than growing up surrounded by ugly and dirty buildings. How were the people who grew up seeing the Wall, the guard towers, the barriers supposed to feel? As if they were in prison. And that prison mentality can take hold very quickly.

The fact that a large proportion of those currently promoting far-right and even neofascist views grew up in East Germany may have nothing to do with the Berlin Wall. But I tend to think there is a connection. The air was filled with proclamations of “friendship among peoples” and antifascism, but at the same time people were living in a prison, in an atmosphere where word and deed were misaligned, where maliciousness and hatred toward “the other” were promoted and the idea that violence was the way to solve problems held sway – an idea embodied in the Wall, the very incarnation of violence and hatred.

And the Wall, like any prison wall, was associated with its own variety of Stockholm Syndrome. When I was in Berlin in 2015, the city had changed dramatically since 1989 and was actively working to overcome its totalitarian past – both Nazi and communist. The Wall had by then been transformed into a memory, a museum exhibit. And there, standing before a memorial to those who died trying to cross to the other side, my intelligent and nice young tour guide told us that he could not understand why people risked their lives to cross. “I myself lived not far from here, and we had a normal life.”

I realize that he was just a boy at the time, so his memories were of playing with his school friends rather than of oppression and control, but for me, this thriving Berliner of today is, nevertheless, a victim of the Wall. I am also a victim of the Wall, even though I never laid eyes on it, beyond remaining fragments. But I come from a generation of people deprived of the ability to travel and see the world, to freely interact, to hold conversations and exchange ideas. The school I attended had an International Friendship Club, although, naturally, in the 1970s, we had no interactions with the outside world. We could learn something about other countries, but we had little hope of ever seeing them. My grandmother, weighed down by the experience of life in the Soviet Union, advised me to stay away from that club, “since interacting with foreigners is dangerous.”

That fear of all that is foreign, distant, alien is a sort of figurative Wall, obscuring our view and limiting our lives. The intolerance toward migrants and attacks against them, the xenophobia, the conspiracy theories about the coronavirus vaccine coming with chips devised by Bill Gates to forward his goal of world domination – they are all the Wall.

Am I far off? The Wall has long since been covered in graffiti and smashed to bits that have been repurposed as souvenirs. However, today’s increasingly disunited world has fractured into hostile camps bombarded with hateful propaganda, giving me the uncomfortable feeling that the Berlin Wall is still with us, stretching across Berlin, across Germany, and across the entire world.

More wall-dismantling work lies ahead...