bout de papier, Vol. 31, No. 1 (2020), pp. 6–11
Prologue
FOLLOWING WORLD WAR II, the occupying forces — Britain, France, the United States and the Soviet Union (“The Four Powers”) — divided a defeated Germany into two states. The western zones became the Federal German Republic, or West Germany, and the Eastern zone became, ironically, the German Democratic Republic (GDR), or East Germany. The former capital, divided by a Four Power Agreement into West and Soviet-controlled East Berlin, was originally ruled side-by-side in Zones of Occupation, or spheres of influence.
In many ways, the War did not end in 1945. Post-war inter-Allied challenges over currency and large flows of refugees from the east created a combustible situation that burst into flames in the spring of 1948 when the western sectors of Berlin were isolated by a 15-month Soviet Blockade. Disagreement on what to do with Germany to ensure no further large-scale conflict resulted in a protracted Cold War with the Soviet Union.
The East German military was prone to repress any dissent or workers’ strikes in the Soviet Zone. However, as disaffection by the population grew over time it resulted in a continual exodus. To stem the flow of refugees, construction on the Wall began in August 1961. Originally designed to keep people out. the Berlin Wall ultimately kept people in. During October 1961. US and Soviet tanks faced each other across a 100-metre divide at Checkpoint Charlie, a crossing for the military, and one of the Cold War’s riskiest flash points.
Twenty-cight years later, following a period of similar disaffection due to slow economic growth and the doctrinal collapse of communism, a psychological wall began to crumble. Starting in the summer of 1989, some East Germans used Socialist Hungary’s relaxed travel restrictions, and the removal of a barbed wire fence with Austria, to escape to West Germany. On 9 November, 1989, with travel restrictions lifted, thousands of Germans made their way to and through the physical barrier. By Sunday the 12th, the population of West Berlin had doubled with the arrival of more than two million East Germans.
History in the making
Berlin and Germany had held a certain fascination for me since adolescence and remained somewhere in the back of my imagination. Having Germanic roots on both sides of the family, my relationship with Germany had always been complex – due in part to the Kaiser and the Führer, and an English grandfather and father both wounded on the battlefields of Europe. In addition, my brother in the British Army would also serve in Germany during the Cold War, as did many other Canadians.
By the late 70s and early 80s, West Berlin had become the artistic capital of Europe, due in part to inexpensive real estate, with both Iggy Pop and David Bowie living and producing albums there. While to me Berlin brought to mind Dietrich, Mann, Isherwood and Fassbinder – cultural figures I had come to appreciate – in 1989 it also was where Cold War communism bumped up against capitalism, and East confronted West in a potentially deadly standoff.
From Kuwait where I was serving my first posting, I watched the news reports with a certain fascination.
it possible? Berlin and its Wall symbolized a heady mix of intrigue and geopolitics for any student of international relations at the time. (As an undergraduate at Queen’s, I recalled a visiting German Herr Doktor Professor who concluded a lecture to our first-year class with the measured baritone and confident intonation of Kissinger: “…And Germany will never be reunited in our lifetime. ..”)
Clearly, history was in the making and a visit to Berlin in November 1989, cameras in hand, would prove irresistible. As I made my plan to travel from Kuwait, reports indicated that thousands of military conscripts were already working in East German factories and mines to fill abandoned jobs due to a mass exodus to the West.
Night train to Berlin
A fan of rail journeys, I flew to neighbouring Baghdad hoping to travel to Berlin on the historic Baghdad to Berlin route. Due to transit problems with Turkey at the border, I then flew on to Istanbul to catch a train there. I booked a night train that, if memory serves, travelled via Sofia, Belgrade, Budapest and on to Berlin.
Although we departed from Istanbul’s “orientalist” Sirkeci station on the European side of the Bosporus, where the iconic 19th century Orient Express ended its run from Paris, this was no Orient Express. Ahmet, a Turkish guest worker en route to Berlin, kindly shared his olives and garlic cloves with me in a chilly economy compartment on the journey through Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Hungary.
The train journey is a bit of a blur. I have no photographs, due in part to security concerns that did not permit taking pictures. However, I recall standing on a drafty platform in Sofia with the hands of the station clock unmoving, except for an occasional twitch. Little did I know that the Bulgarians had just ousted Communist Party Leader Todor Zhivkov who had ruled the country for 35 years. The new leaders were already in the process of disbanding the feared secret police that used to spy on dissidents and foreign travellers alike.
As we passed through the Slavonian plains of Yugoslavia, with their dense forests and farms, we caught glimpses of cabbages in frost-covered fields and peasants carrying bundles of kindling as soldiers with drab uniforms and high-browed peaked caps — common throughout the East Bloc — boarded the train at several points to check our papers and prod our luggage for contraband.
When we crossed the Danube at Budapest, Hungary’s Socialist Party had already convened its last congress the month before, adopted legislation providing for multi-party parliamentary elections, and proclaimed itself a Republic. These events, along with the earlier opening of Hungary’s border with Austria, had helped spark events in Berlin.
The end of history?
On arrival in West Berlin, I bid good-bye to Ahmet. Four flags were still flying after 44 years and the Wall was still standing, but the inter-German border was by then a fiction.
A copy of The Berlin-American Reporter, left in my hotel room, referred to Berlin as “the most peaceful occupied city in the world.” It led with a blazing headline: THE WALL FALLS! The air was blue from an influx of two-cycle East German cars and the atmosphere was festive but subdued. The Cold War was not over just yet, as there were no assurances of the irreversibility of a nascent move to democratize.
From a viewing platform at Checkpoint Charlie, I can still see in my mind’s eye a man dressed all in black with his fedora, small Leica and red notebook in hand, as if frozen in time, staring at the Wall that had defined life in Berlin for a generation. The Checkpoint, with French, British and American military policemen on duty, was frequently mistaken as a border crossing point by visitors en route to East Berlin. Until days before, they had been there primarily to oversee the movement of active duty military personnel travelling to the Soviet Sector, but no longer.
The photographs I took turned my lens on Berliners and their “watchers” who observed, listened and spied relentlessly on their compatriots. A small boy with his toy-like jeweller’s hammer who, seemingly having broken through the Wall, reveals an observation tower with guards still in place. But, as a graffiti artist made clear, “Charlie’s Retired 10 Nov. 1989.” Citizens went about their lives almost as if nothing had happened with East German polizei simply standing idle, as if this might indeed have been the “end of history.”
Epilogue
The fall of the Berlin Wall and lifting of the Iron Curtain coincided with the collapse of the Soviet Union. US President George H.W. Bush and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev held a Summit aboard a ship off Malta on 2-3 December, 1989 where they would officially declare an end to the Cold War. The tsunami of revolutions that occurred through the Eastern Bloc in 1989-90 would change the map of Eastern Europe and the geopolitics of the world.
In June 1990, the East German military began to dismantle the Wall, and the GDR adopted the West German currency the following month. Less than a year after the first opening of the Wall, German reunification took place on 3 October 1990. In 1991, the Soviet Union dissolved into 15 new or reconstituted independent states. The Yugoslavia I had travelled through by train soon disintegrated into various warring ethnic factions. The Yugoslav Wars that followed resulted in horrific war crimes being committed, the deaths of thousands and, ultimately, the independence of Serbia-Montenegro, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia Herzegovina and Macedonia.
Marxist scholars thought that society would reach its pinnacle when the workers finally triumphed against Capitalism. In a social sense, history would end. As if to anticipate the opposite scenario, in 1989 Francis Fukuyama published an influential essay called “The End of History,” which suggested the events described in this article were not the end of an era, but in fact heralded the ascendency of Western liberal democracy. He expanded his thesis in a 1992 bestselling book The End of History and the Last Man. The future rarely works quite as planned.
Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 31, No. 1 (2020), pp. 6–11. Read the rest of this issue →
