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A City Divided: The Berlin Wall | Sleep History with Rain Sounds · Sleepless History: Sleep Documentaries

0:00
[SPEAKER_00]: Good evening and welcome to Sleepless History.
0:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Tonight we are going to spend some time in a city that was cut in half.
0:09
[SPEAKER_00]: For 28 years, two months and 27 days, the city of Berlin was divided by a wall.
0:16
[SPEAKER_00]: That sentence is easy to say and almost impossible to actually picture, so we are going to take our time with it.
0:24
[SPEAKER_00]: We are going to walk down streets that ended abruptly in concrete.
0:29
[SPEAKER_00]: We are going to look at kitchens where families listened to television broadcasts.
0:33
[SPEAKER_00]: They were not supposed to receive.
0:36
[SPEAKER_00]: We are going to stand in line for a car that would take 15 years to arrive, and we are going to stand in a different line a few hundred metres away at a department store that sold 400 kinds of bread.
0:50
[SPEAKER_00]: We will talk about what people ate and what they watched and what they were afraid of and what they found funny.
0:57
[SPEAKER_00]: We will talk about the small daily arrangements that people make when the world has been arranged for them.
1:03
[SPEAKER_00]: because the wall was not only a matter of politics and treaties and men in overcoats signing documents.
1:11
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a matter of Tuesday afternoons.
1:14
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a matter of what you could buy and who you could visit and whether the person sitting across from you at dinner was writing a report about you afterwards.
1:24
[SPEAKER_00]: And at the very end, we will arrive at a evening in November when a tired man at a press conference looked down at a piece of paper he had not read carefully and answered a question badly and the whole thing came apart in about six hours.
1:41
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1:48
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1:56
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2:02
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2:08
[SPEAKER_00]: No network behind it, just careful research and quiet evenings.
2:13
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2:16
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2:21
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2:27
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2:31
[SPEAKER_00]: Simply commenting or following the show helps just as much.
2:35
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's begin.
2:38
[SPEAKER_00]: Chapter 1.
2:40
[SPEAKER_00]: The city they cut into pieces.
2:45
[SPEAKER_00]: Berlin in the spring of 1945 was mostly rubble.
2:50
[SPEAKER_00]: The city had been bombed for years, and then fought over street by street in the final weeks of the war in Europe.
2:58
[SPEAKER_00]: When the shooting finally stopped in early May of 1945, something close to a third of all the buildings in Berlin were damaged beyond use.
3:08
[SPEAKER_00]: The estimates of the debris vary, but the figure most often given, is somewhere around 75 million cubic meters of broken brick and stone and plaster and glass.
3:20
[SPEAKER_00]: There was no reliable water.
3:22
[SPEAKER_00]: There was no reliable power.
3:25
[SPEAKER_00]: There were bodies under the collapsed buildings that would not be recovered for months, and in some cases for years.
3:33
[SPEAKER_00]: the people who cleared it were mostly women, so many men were dead, or captured, or missing, or hiding.
3:41
[SPEAKER_00]: That the work of unbearing the city fell to women who were organized into brigades and given hammers and buckets and handcarts.
3:51
[SPEAKER_00]: They were called the rubble women.
3:53
[SPEAKER_00]: They sat in long rows in the open air, chipping the old mortar of individual bricks so that the bricks could be used again and they were paid partly in Russian cons.
4:05
[SPEAKER_00]: If you were an eight-year-old child in Berlin in 1946, this was simply what adults did.
4:13
[SPEAKER_00]: Your mother went out in the morning and cleaned bricks.
4:16
[SPEAKER_00]: Into this landscape came the victors and the victors had an arrangement.
4:22
[SPEAKER_00]: At a series of wartime conferences, the Allied powers had agreed that Germany would be divided into occupation zones.
4:30
[SPEAKER_00]: The Soviet Union would take the east.
4:33
[SPEAKER_00]: The United States and the United Kingdom would take the south and the northwest, and a zone would be carved out for France as well.
4:43
[SPEAKER_00]: Berlin, however, sat deep inside the Soviet zone.
4:48
[SPEAKER_00]: roughly 160 kilometers from the nearest western territory.
4:54
[SPEAKER_00]: It was the capital, and it was too symbolically important to hand to any one power, so Berlin received its own miniature version of the same arrangement.
5:04
[SPEAKER_00]: The city was divided into four sectors, one for each of the four powers, and it would be governed jointly by a body called the Allied Control Council.
5:14
[SPEAKER_00]: On paper, this was elegant,
5:17
[SPEAKER_00]: In practice, it meant that a small island of Western occupation now sat in the middle of a Soviet sea, connected to the west by a handful of roads, rail lines, canals, and three narrow-air corridors, each 20 miles wide.
5:36
[SPEAKER_00]: Every single one of those connections across territory controlled by a government that would soon decide it did not want the arrangement to continue.
5:46
[SPEAKER_00]: For the first two or three years, the four powers made a genuine attempt to run the city together.
5:53
[SPEAKER_00]: the seams showed almost immediately.
5:56
[SPEAKER_00]: The Soviet administration had arrived first in April, and had spent the weeks before the Western troops turned up in stalling German communists, who had spent the war in Moscow into key positions in the city government.
6:11
[SPEAKER_00]: The most famous of these men was Walter Ulbrick, a former carpenter with a thin go-t and a high rede voice from Saxony, and he is said to have given his colleagues a very clear instruction about how the new administration should look.
6:29
[SPEAKER_00]: It had to look democratic, he told them, but everything had to be in their hands.
6:35
[SPEAKER_00]: The economic difference is open next.
6:37
[SPEAKER_00]: and they opened around something as unglamorous as money.
6:41
[SPEAKER_00]: By 1948, the old currency of the German Reich was effectively worthless.
6:48
[SPEAKER_00]: There was too much of it backed by nothing and the real economy of Berlin ran on cigarettes.
6:54
[SPEAKER_00]: American cigarettes were the reserve currency of the ruins.
6:59
[SPEAKER_00]: a carton of them could get you a suit, or a set of dishes, or a month of someone's labour, coffee, chocolate, and stockings sat just below cigarettes on the informal exchange.
7:13
[SPEAKER_00]: Anyone who has ever wondered what money actually is could have learned it very quickly in a Berlin courtyard in 1947, watching a woman trade a wedding ring for four pounds of potatoes.
7:26
[SPEAKER_00]: The Western powers decided to fix this by introducing a new stable currency in their zones.
7:33
[SPEAKER_00]: On the 20th of June, 1948, the Deutsche Mark was launched.
7:39
[SPEAKER_00]: Every adult received 40 of them to start.
7:43
[SPEAKER_00]: Almost overnight, goods that had been hoarded for years appeared in shop windows, because suddenly it was worth selling them for money again.
7:54
[SPEAKER_00]: The Soviet response was immediate.
7:57
[SPEAKER_00]: They introduced their own new currency in the east, and then on the 24th of June, 1948, they closed the land routes
8:11
[SPEAKER_00]: No trucks, no barges, the electricity supplied from the eastern power plants was cut as well.
8:18
[SPEAKER_00]: Roughly 2 million people in the western half of the city were now sealed off, with an estimated 36 days of food and 45 days of coal on hand.
8:29
[SPEAKER_00]: The blockade was a reasonable bet.
8:31
[SPEAKER_00]: Berlin was indefensible.
8:34
[SPEAKER_00]: Nobody expected the western powers to fight a war over it, and nobody seriously believed a city of 2 million could be supplied by air.
8:43
[SPEAKER_00]: They supplied it by air.
8:45
[SPEAKER_00]: The Berlin air lift ran for 15 months.
8:49
[SPEAKER_00]: Aircraft landed at Tempelhoff at Gattau, and eventually at a brand new airfield at Tagle that was built in 90 days.
8:58
[SPEAKER_00]: Largely by hand, Largely by Berliners, many of them women, again, with shovels and buckets.
9:05
[SPEAKER_00]: At the peak of the operation, in the spring of 1949, planes were landing in Berlin at intervals of about one minute.
9:16
[SPEAKER_00]: Over the course of the airlift, there were roughly 277,000 flights, carrying somewhere
9:28
[SPEAKER_00]: A great deal of the rest was flour and dehydrated potato.
9:33
[SPEAKER_00]: The pilots invented small rituals.
9:37
[SPEAKER_00]: One American pilot, Gail Halverson, began tying handkerchiefs into parachutes and dropping candy to the children who gathered at the fence line at Templehof.
9:48
[SPEAKER_00]: And the practice spread until entire squadrons were doing it.
9:52
[SPEAKER_00]: An American candy manufacturers were donating supplies by the tongue.
9:57
[SPEAKER_00]: The children called him the chocolate flyer.
10:00
[SPEAKER_00]: It is a sentimental story, and it is also true.
10:03
[SPEAKER_00]: And it did more to change how Berlin has saw the men who had been bombing them three years earlier than any speech could have.
10:11
[SPEAKER_00]: The Soviet Union lifted the blockade on the 12th of May, 1949.
10:16
[SPEAKER_00]: It had failed, and it had failed expansively, and it had accomplished the opposite of its goal.
10:26
[SPEAKER_00]: into something the Western powers now felt obligated to protect.
10:30
[SPEAKER_00]: That same year, the division became formal.
10:34
[SPEAKER_00]: In May of 1949, the Federal Republic of Germany was founded in the West.
10:40
[SPEAKER_00]: In October of 1949,
10:43
[SPEAKER_00]: The German Democratic Republic was founded in the East.
10:47
[SPEAKER_00]: Two German states, each claiming to be the legitimate one, sharing a language, a history, a literature, and a great many families.
10:58
[SPEAKER_00]: And here is the crucial detail.
11:00
[SPEAKER_00]: the one that explains everything that follows.
11:03
[SPEAKER_00]: For the next 12 years, the border between them was closed, fortified, and increasingly dangerous, running for more than 1,000 kilometers through forests and fields and villages.
11:15
[SPEAKER_00]: But in Berlin, it was open.
11:18
[SPEAKER_00]: You could walk across it every day, tens of thousands of people did.
11:24
[SPEAKER_00]: There were East Berliners who worked in the West, called Border Crossers.
11:29
[SPEAKER_00]: Perhaps 50,000 of them at the peak.
11:32
[SPEAKER_00]: There were West Berliners who went east because a haircut or a theatre ticket or a meal was absurdly cheap there if you had Western money.
11:42
[SPEAKER_00]: subway and elevated train lines ran through both halves of the city.
11:48
[SPEAKER_00]: The border ran down the middle of streets and through the middle of buildings and along the middle of a canal and it was marked in places by nothing more than a painted line and a sign.
11:59
[SPEAKER_00]: which meant that if you lived in the German Democratic Republic and you decided you had had enough of the German Democratic Republic, you did not need a tunnel or a forged passport or a boat.
12:11
[SPEAKER_00]: You needed a train ticket to Berlin and the nerve to walk down an ordinary street.
12:17
[SPEAKER_00]: Between the founding of the state in 1949 and the summer of 1961,
12:25
[SPEAKER_00]: and 3 million people did exactly that.
12:29
[SPEAKER_00]: The country had a population of about 18 million.
12:33
[SPEAKER_00]: It was losing, in effect, one out of every six of its citizens, and the ones it lost were not distributed evenly.
12:42
[SPEAKER_00]: They were disproportionately young.
12:44
[SPEAKER_00]: disproportionately educated, disproportionately doctors and engineers and skilled workers.
12:52
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1961 alone, the East German Medical Association was watching physicians leave at a rate that would have emptied entire hospitals within a few years.
13:04
[SPEAKER_00]: They had already been one enormous warning.
13:07
[SPEAKER_00]: On 17th June,
13:09
[SPEAKER_00]: 1953.
13:11
[SPEAKER_00]: Construction workers on a prestigious new boulevard in East Berlin walked off the job over an increase in work quotas and within a day the protest had spread into a general uprising across hundreds of towns and cities in the German Democratic Republic.
13:31
[SPEAKER_00]: It was put down by Soviet
13:38
[SPEAKER_00]: But it had learned something unpleasant about the depth of its support, and it had learned it in public through the late 1950s, the pressure built.
13:49
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1958, the Soviet leader Nikita Krushchev issued an ultimatum demanding that the Western powers withdraw from Berlin and turn it into a demilitarized free city.
14:03
[SPEAKER_00]: the deadline passed without consequence, but the demand did not go away.
14:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Cruzchev is supposed to have described West Berlin in private as a bone stuck in his throat and on another occasion as the testicles of the West which he could squeeze whenever he wanted to make them scream.
14:24
[SPEAKER_00]: He met the new American president, John Kennedy, in Vienna, in June of 1961, and the meeting went badly.
14:33
[SPEAKER_00]: Kennedy came away shaken.
14:35
[SPEAKER_00]: He also came away having drawn a line.
14:38
[SPEAKER_00]: The United States would not accept being pushed out of West Berlin, but it had said nothing at all about what the East German government did inside its own territory.
14:54
[SPEAKER_00]: walk straight through it.
14:55
[SPEAKER_00]: The summer of 1961 was the panic.
14:59
[SPEAKER_00]: Rumours circulated constantly that the border in Berlin would be closed and every rumour accelerated the departures and every acceleration made the closure more necessary.
15:12
[SPEAKER_00]: In June at a press conference,
15:15
[SPEAKER_00]: A West German journalist asked Ulbrich directly whether a border would be erected at the Brandenburg Gate.
15:25
[SPEAKER_00]: His reply became one of the most quoted sentences in German history.
15:31
[SPEAKER_00]: Nobody, he said, has any intention of building a wall.
15:35
[SPEAKER_00]: It is worth noting that nobody had used the word wall until he did.
15:45
[SPEAKER_00]: in the first 12 days of August, more than 16,000 more.
15:50
[SPEAKER_00]: On the 11th of August, the Parliament of the German Democratic Republic authorized the Council of Ministers to take whatever measures it considered necessary.
16:00
[SPEAKER_00]: On the 12th of August, Albert held a garden party at a government guesthouse outside the city, kept his ministers their late, and at some point after midnight had them sign the order.
16:13
[SPEAKER_00]: The operation had been planned for weeks under conditions of real secrecy.
16:19
[SPEAKER_00]: and its planner was a party official named Eric Honaker, a man who would run the country 25 years later.
16:28
[SPEAKER_00]: Materials had been stockpiled quietly, barbed wire, concrete posts, paving stones.
16:35
[SPEAKER_00]: Troops had been positioned without being told why.
16:38
[SPEAKER_00]: At around 1 o'clock in the morning
16:45
[SPEAKER_00]: The lights went out along the border streets and the work began.
16:50
[SPEAKER_00]: Sunday was chosen deliberately.
16:54
[SPEAKER_00]: Fewer commuters, fewer witnesses, a slower reaction from governments on holiday, soldiers, police, and factory militia units strung barbed wire along the entire perimeter between the eastern sector and the western sectors.
17:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Roughly 43 kilometers of it inside the city, and another 112 kilometers around the outside edge of West Berlin, sealing it off from the surrounding countryside as well.
17:27
[SPEAKER_00]: Streets were torn up.
17:29
[SPEAKER_00]: Rail lines were cut.
17:31
[SPEAKER_00]: Trains stopped, where the wire began.
17:35
[SPEAKER_00]: Berliners woke to it.
17:37
[SPEAKER_00]: People came out of their buildings on Sunday morning in their ordinary
17:42
[SPEAKER_00]: on their way to visit a sister, or start a shift, or go to church, and found young soldiers standing behind a coil of wire in a street they had crossed 10,000 times.
17:55
[SPEAKER_00]: There is film of that morning, and what is striking is how normal everyone looks, men in short sleeves, women holding handbags, a crowd standing at a curb, staring, arguing with soldiers who mostly do not answer.
18:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Some of the soldiers looking about 19 years old and deeply unhappy.
18:18
[SPEAKER_00]: Within two days, the wire began to be replaced with concrete blocks.
18:24
[SPEAKER_00]: Within weeks, buildings that sat directly on the boundary line had their doors and ground floor windows bricked up.
18:32
[SPEAKER_00]: Within a year, entire streets of those buildings would be emptied of residents and eventually demolish.
18:39
[SPEAKER_00]: The reaction from the Western powers was, in the moment, almost nothing.
18:44
[SPEAKER_00]: There were protests on paper.
18:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Troops were reinforced.
18:48
[SPEAKER_00]: Kennedy, informed on Sunday while sailing, is reported to have said that a wall is a hell of a lot better than a wall.
18:57
[SPEAKER_00]: And that assessment was correct, and also cold comfort, to a woman standing in burn-hour stress, watching her mother wave from a window, she was no longer allowed to walk through.
19:08
[SPEAKER_00]: The most important thing to understand about the 13th of August, 1961, is what it did to time.
19:17
[SPEAKER_00]: Before that morning, leaving was a decision you could make on any given Tuesday.
19:22
[SPEAKER_00]: After that morning, leaving became a project that could cost you your life and staying became not a choice but a condition.
19:30
[SPEAKER_00]: Everything that happened next for 28 years happened inside that condition and it is to the inside of it that we are going now.
19:41
[SPEAKER_00]: To the apartment blocks and the queues and the television sets and the summer holidays of a country that had
19:52
[SPEAKER_00]: chapter 2, the other side of the house.
19:57
[SPEAKER_00]: If you were an ordinary family in East Berlin in say 1978, there was a reasonable chance you lived in a building made of concrete slabs that had been cast in a factory, truck to the site and cramed into place.
20:14
[SPEAKER_00]: The German word for this construction method translates roughly as slab building, and the buildings are still standing all over the eastern half of the country.
20:25
[SPEAKER_00]: Whole districts were built this way.
20:28
[SPEAKER_00]: The largest of them in Berlin was a district in the northeast called Maazan, which went up through the late 1970s and 80s on what had been fields and sewage farms,
20:42
[SPEAKER_00]: and which eventually housed something like 160,000 people.
20:48
[SPEAKER_00]: It is fashionable now to sneer at these buildings, and they are undeniably grey and repetitive and hard on the eye.
20:57
[SPEAKER_00]: But it is important to understand what they replaced and what they offered.
21:02
[SPEAKER_00]: They replaced coal stoves, shared toilets on the landing, damp walls,
21:12
[SPEAKER_00]: a new slab apartment had central heating that came on whether you could afford it or not.
21:19
[SPEAKER_00]: It had hot water.
21:21
[SPEAKER_00]: It had a private bathroom, an elevator if the building was tall enough and a balcony.
21:27
[SPEAKER_00]: For a couple who had grown up hauling coal buckets up four flights of stairs in a 19th-century tenement with a toilet shared between three families.
21:37
[SPEAKER_00]: Moving into one of these apartments was not a humiliation.
21:40
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a triumph, people through parties.
21:44
[SPEAKER_00]: The rent was almost nothing.
21:47
[SPEAKER_00]: Housing was heavily subsidized, and the rent on a family apartment might be somewhere between three and five percent of a household income, which is a figure that sounds like a misprint to modern years.
22:00
[SPEAKER_00]: Bread was cheap, basic food was cheap.
22:04
[SPEAKER_00]: Public transport was cheap.
22:06
[SPEAKER_00]: Childcare was widely available and effectively free and it needed to be because the overwhelming majority of women in the German Democratic Republic worked at a rate far higher than in the West.
22:22
[SPEAKER_00]: The catch and there was always a catch was that you did not choose the apartment.
22:28
[SPEAKER_00]: you applied for one, and you waited, and you were assigned.
22:33
[SPEAKER_00]: If you wanted a different one, you might advertise a swap, and the waiting was the shape of the entire economy.
22:41
[SPEAKER_00]: Consider the car.
22:43
[SPEAKER_00]: The standard automobile of the German Democratic Republic was a small vehicle called the Traband, which most people simply called the Trabby.
22:53
[SPEAKER_00]: It had a two-stroke engine,
22:54
[SPEAKER_00]: of about 600 cubic centimeters produced somewhere between 23 and 26 horsepower, depending on the model year, and had a body made of a material called duroplast, which was a resin
23:10
[SPEAKER_00]: reinforced with cotton fibers left over from Soviet textile production.
23:15
[SPEAKER_00]: It smoked, it was loud.
23:18
[SPEAKER_00]: It had no fuel gauge for much of its life, so you check the tank with a dipstick, and you mix the oil into the petrol yourself at the pump.
23:27
[SPEAKER_00]: To buy one, you put your name on a list.
23:31
[SPEAKER_00]: The weight was commonly between 10 and 15 years.
23:40
[SPEAKER_00]: And because the weight was so long, a used triband frequently sold for more than a new one, since a used one existed now, and a new one existed in 1992.
23:53
[SPEAKER_00]: That pattern repeated across the entire consumer economy.
23:57
[SPEAKER_00]: The planned economy,
23:59
[SPEAKER_00]: was extremely good at producing certain things in quantity, an extremely bad at producing variety, or at responding to what people actually wanted, or at fixing shortages once they appeared.
24:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Basic goods were reliable and dull.
24:15
[SPEAKER_00]: Anything beyond basic was a hunt.
24:18
[SPEAKER_00]: Oranges appeared in December and vanished.
24:21
[SPEAKER_00]: Bananas were a running national joke that never quite stopped being funny, and never quite stopped being sad.
24:29
[SPEAKER_00]: spare parts of any kind were treasure and entire informal culture developed around knowing somebody a network of favours and swaps and quietly retained items and the East German word for organising something in this way did not mean stealing exactly but it did not entirely mean not stealing
24:55
[SPEAKER_00]: you carried a string bag at all times, because you never knew when a queue would form.
25:02
[SPEAKER_00]: And a queue was information.
25:05
[SPEAKER_00]: If people were lining up, something had arrived.
25:09
[SPEAKER_00]: You joined first and asked what it was second.
25:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Housewives, pensioners and shift workers built up a genuine expertise in supply patterns.
25:20
[SPEAKER_00]: and this expertise was a form of social capital.
25:24
[SPEAKER_00]: There were escape valves in the system and they were revealing.
25:28
[SPEAKER_00]: There were higher priced state shops that sold better quality goods for East German marks.
25:35
[SPEAKER_00]: and then there was the inter-shock, inter-shocks sold Western goods for Western currency.
25:42
[SPEAKER_00]: Coffee, chocolate, cigarettes, spirits, jeans, stockings, cosmetics, smaller electronics.
25:51
[SPEAKER_00]: If you had Deutsche Marx, you could walk in and buy things that were otherwise unobtainable.
25:58
[SPEAKER_00]: in a shop that smelled overpoweringly of real coffee and soap.
26:02
[SPEAKER_00]: If you had only East German marks, you could not buy anything at all.
26:08
[SPEAKER_00]: And in fact, for a long stretch, it was technically illegal for ordinary citizens to hold Western currency, which meant that the state was simultaneously forbidding the money and running the shops that required it.
26:22
[SPEAKER_00]: Where did the Western money come from?
26:25
[SPEAKER_00]: From relatives?
26:26
[SPEAKER_00]: from a grandmother in Hamburg, who sent a 20-deutcha mark note, folded inside a birthday card.
26:33
[SPEAKER_00]: This produced one of the sharper inequalities in a society that was officially without clothes.
26:40
[SPEAKER_00]: the families who had Western relations and the families who did not.
26:45
[SPEAKER_00]: There was also a male order company, run by the state through a Swiss intermediary, through which those Western relatives could order goods to be delivered to an address in the East, including if the relative was rich enough, a car with a shortened waiting list.
27:03
[SPEAKER_00]: food, then.
27:05
[SPEAKER_00]: The daily food was solid and repetitive and heavy on potatoes, cabbage, pork, and rye bread, which was very good bread.
27:16
[SPEAKER_00]: There was a chain of state restaurants and a set of distinctly East German fast foods.
27:22
[SPEAKER_00]: Rose chicken was sold under a name borrowed from English, the broiler, and the shops that sold them were extremely popular.
27:30
[SPEAKER_00]: There was a sausage served inside a hollowed out bread roll rather than a split bun, and there was a state-designed hamburger.
27:38
[SPEAKER_00]: There was a domestic cola with a slightly citrus flavour and a domestic sparkling wine and beer that varied enormously
27:49
[SPEAKER_00]: and was generally taken seriously, and there was the summer holiday, which was organised largely through your workplace.
27:57
[SPEAKER_00]: Trade unions and enterprises ran holiday homes on the Baltic coast and in the wooded hills of Therinja and Saxony.
28:06
[SPEAKER_00]: and you applied for a place, and if you got one, you and several other families from your factory went to the same place at the same time.
28:16
[SPEAKER_00]: If you did not get one, you camped.
28:19
[SPEAKER_00]: Camping was enormous.
28:21
[SPEAKER_00]: and this is where one of the most frequently mentioned features of East German life appears, which is the widespread and entirely ordinary practice of nude bathing.
28:32
[SPEAKER_00]: Whole beaches were given over to it.
28:35
[SPEAKER_00]: It was uncontroversial, it was intergenerational, and Westerners found it startling, which suggests something about which society was more relaxed on that particular front.
28:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, the state, the German Democratic Republic, was governed by the socialist unity party, which held power through a formal arrangement in which several smaller parties existed but never opposed anything.
29:01
[SPEAKER_00]: Party membership was not compulsory, but it was extremely helpful.
29:07
[SPEAKER_00]: Roughly one adult in five was a member by the 1980s.
29:11
[SPEAKER_00]: A citizen's life was accompanied by the state from
29:16
[SPEAKER_00]: Small children went to nursery.
29:19
[SPEAKER_00]: School children joined the young pioneers at six in a blue neck ache, later a red one, with songs and camps and collective activity.
29:30
[SPEAKER_00]: At 14 came a secular coming of age ceremony that had been designed to replace religious confirmation with a suit or a good dress, a formal pledge, a party and gifts, refusing it was possible.
29:44
[SPEAKER_00]: It was also a mark placed on your file that could quietly close the door to university years later.
29:51
[SPEAKER_00]: At 14
29:53
[SPEAKER_00]: Most young people then joined the free German youth, whose blue shirt was the uniform of every official occasion for the next decade.
30:02
[SPEAKER_00]: Military service was compulsory for young men, and for those who refused on grounds of conscience, there was an unusual alternative unique in the eastern block, a unit of unarmed construction soldiers.
30:17
[SPEAKER_00]: Choosing it was legal.
30:19
[SPEAKER_00]: It was also, like, refusing the coming of age ceremony, permanently noted.
30:24
[SPEAKER_00]: And behind all of this stood the Ministry for State Security, which everyone called by it's short and name, the Starsie.
30:32
[SPEAKER_00]: The numbers are still difficult to absorb.
30:36
[SPEAKER_00]: By 1989, the Ministry had somewhere around 91,000 full-time employees in a country of 16 and a half million people, more significant, with the unofficial collaborators, ordinary citizens who reported on their neighbors, colleagues, friends, congregations, students, and in a substantial number of documented cases, their own spouses.
31:03
[SPEAKER_00]: estimates of active informants at the end run to around 170,000 with far more having passed through the roll at some point across four decades.
31:15
[SPEAKER_00]: The files that survived, laid end to end, run to well over 100 kilometers of shelving.
31:22
[SPEAKER_00]: What did all of this surveillance produce, occasionally arrests?
31:28
[SPEAKER_00]: More often something subtler.
31:30
[SPEAKER_00]: In the 1970s and 80s, the ministry increasingly favored a technique it described in its own paperwork, with a word that translates as decomposition.
31:45
[SPEAKER_00]: and create a martyr, you would quietly dismantle their life.
31:50
[SPEAKER_00]: Rumors would reach their employer.
31:52
[SPEAKER_00]: Their child's university application would fail for unstated reasons.
31:58
[SPEAKER_00]: Their marriage would be seeded with suspicions.
32:02
[SPEAKER_00]: Small appointments would be missed because letters did not arrive.
32:07
[SPEAKER_00]: objects in their apartment would be moved very slightly so that they would begin to doubt themselves and know at the same time that they were not imagining it.
32:17
[SPEAKER_00]: It is difficult to overstate how corrosive this was.
32:22
[SPEAKER_00]: And it is equally important not to imagine that every East German spent every day in terror.
32:29
[SPEAKER_00]: Most people did not.
32:31
[SPEAKER_00]: Most people went to work, complained privately, told jokes, and got on with a life that was in many respects, secure and predictable.
32:42
[SPEAKER_00]: But everyone knew where the line was, and everyone had a mental list of the subjects you did not raise in front of certain people.
32:50
[SPEAKER_00]: and that habit of internal editing is its own kind of weight carried for years without being set down, which brings us to the television.
33:01
[SPEAKER_00]: Here is one of the great strange facts of the divided country.
33:06
[SPEAKER_00]: Most East Germans watched West German television.
33:11
[SPEAKER_00]: The signal came over the air and did not respect the border.
33:16
[SPEAKER_00]: West German broadcasts reached a large majority of East German households.
33:23
[SPEAKER_00]: And by the late 1970s, the authorities had essentially given up on stopping it.
33:28
[SPEAKER_00]: There were two regions where the terrain blocked the signal.
33:33
[SPEAKER_00]: one around Dresden in the southeast and one in the far northeast, and these were nicknamed with typical dryness, the valley of the clueless.
33:44
[SPEAKER_00]: So a family might watch the official East German news at 730 and then switch over and watch the West German news at 8 and compare.
33:53
[SPEAKER_00]: Children were sometimes warned at home, not to mention at school what they had seen the night before and teachers sometimes knew perfectly well and did not ask.
34:04
[SPEAKER_00]: There is a small and revealing detail about the children's bedtime program.
34:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Both German states produced a Sandman figure who appeared each evening before bed and East German children could watch either and many watched both.
34:20
[SPEAKER_00]: The culture inside the country was strictly managed but not empty.
34:25
[SPEAKER_00]: There was a large and heavily subsidized theater scene, a serious literary tradition, and a film studio that produced everything from serious drama to a long series of well-made westerns in which the Native American characters were the heroes.
34:45
[SPEAKER_00]: popular music was regulated by a rule, requiring that a substantial majority.
34:51
[SPEAKER_00]: of what was played at dances be from the eastern block, which produced a domestic rock scene of real quality, operating under constant negotiation with the sensors.
35:03
[SPEAKER_00]: And in the shadow of that, in the early 1980s, a punk scene appeared, which the state hated with an intensity that seems disproportionate until you realise that the punks were rejecting
35:19
[SPEAKER_00]: but the entire idea of a productive, collective future.
35:23
[SPEAKER_00]: Punks were harassed, arrested and conscripted.
35:29
[SPEAKER_00]: and they found shelter in the one institution that government could not fully control, which was the Protestant Church.
35:38
[SPEAKER_00]: Church basements and parish halls in East Berlin became the meeting places for punks, environmental campaigners, peace activists.
35:50
[SPEAKER_00]: and people who simply wanted to talk about something honestly.
35:54
[SPEAKER_00]: The stated signed international agreements it could not entirely ignore, and the church had a protected position it used cautiously, and in the end, decisively.
36:06
[SPEAKER_00]: One more thing about the east.
36:08
[SPEAKER_00]: and it is the thing that surprises people most, which is that it was funny.
36:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Political jokes were a national craft.
36:16
[SPEAKER_00]: They circulated constantly, told in kitchens, and on smoke breaks, and carefully, in workplaces, and telling them was a small calculated risk that most people took anyway.
36:28
[SPEAKER_00]: Their targets were the leadership, the shortages, the propaganda, and above all the gap between the official language and the visible world.
36:38
[SPEAKER_00]: There is one about a man who orders a car and is told that the delivery date is the 12th of the month, 12 years from now.
36:47
[SPEAKER_00]: And who asks whether that will be in the morning or the afternoon because the plumber is coming in the morning.
36:54
[SPEAKER_00]: There is another in which the state announces that it has achieved a shortage of shortages.
37:00
[SPEAKER_00]: The state took this seriously enough to collect the jokes which is itself the funniest fact in the whole archive.
37:07
[SPEAKER_00]: Ministry files contain compiled reports of jokes circulating in particular factories and districts, analyzed for what they revealed about the mood of the population.
37:19
[SPEAKER_00]: Somewhere in a filing cabinet, there was a man whose job was to write down what people were laughing at.
37:26
[SPEAKER_00]: Work was where most of this happened because the workplace was the basic social unit.
37:32
[SPEAKER_00]: you were assigned to a brigade or a collective.
37:36
[SPEAKER_00]: The collective held meetings went on outings, competed in production drives, celebrated birthdays, and sometimes involved itself in the private lives of its members in a way that could be either warm or suffocating, depending on who you asked.
37:54
[SPEAKER_00]: This missile was extremely rare since full employment was a founding principle and the practical result was a working culture that was secure, slow, socially dense and often visibly overstaffed.
38:10
[SPEAKER_00]: Three people did a job that needed one and all three had a place to be in the morning and the argument about whether that is a failure of economics or a success of something else has not finished yet.
38:21
[SPEAKER_00]: The last piece of the Eastern picture is the one that people underestimate, and it is the emotional one.
38:28
[SPEAKER_00]: Millions of people in the German Democratic Republic were not opponents of it.
38:33
[SPEAKER_00]: They had built the housing blocks and staffed the hospitals and taught in the schools.
38:39
[SPEAKER_00]: They believed or half believed or had stopped asking
38:44
[SPEAKER_00]: or had decided that this was simply the country they lived in, the way you live in a family with difficult rules.
38:51
[SPEAKER_00]: There was a real solidarity in daily life, born partly of shared scarcity, neighbors who fixed each other's plumbing, colleagues who covered for each other, a slower and less transactional way of relating to people that many easterners genuinely missed afterward.
39:14
[SPEAKER_00]: If you decided you wanted to leave legally, you could file for permission to emigrate.
39:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Doing so was not a crime, exactly, but it marked you immediately.
39:26
[SPEAKER_00]: You could be demoted, expelled from university, watched and pressured.
39:31
[SPEAKER_00]: The application might be refused for years and then abruptly granted with 48 hours to pack.
39:37
[SPEAKER_00]: At tens of thousands of people lived in this suspended state through the 1980s, employed below their qualifications, waiting for a letter in a country they had formally announced they wished to leave.
39:51
[SPEAKER_00]: 50 kilometres away at the western end of the same subway lines was a very different city with very different problems and we will spend the next chapter there.
40:09
[SPEAKER_00]: West Berlin was not a normal city and West Berlin is new and after a while they became rather fond of the fact.
40:17
[SPEAKER_00]: Begin with the geography because the geography is the whole personality.
40:23
[SPEAKER_00]: West Berlin was an on-clave of roughly 480 square kilometers containing about 2 million people sitting inside another country entirely surrounded by a fortified border.
40:37
[SPEAKER_00]: It was not
40:38
[SPEAKER_00]: legally speaking, part of the Federal Republic of Germany at all.
40:43
[SPEAKER_00]: It was an occupied territory under the joint authority of the American, British and French forces, with its own elected government whose decisions were technically subject to Allied approval.
40:56
[SPEAKER_00]: It's representatives in the West German Parliament could speak and serve on committees, but could not vote on legislation
41:06
[SPEAKER_00]: West German laws did not automatically apply until the city adopted them.
41:11
[SPEAKER_00]: The practical consequences were constant and peculiar.
41:16
[SPEAKER_00]: If you wanted to fly to West Berlin, you flew on an American, British or French airline because those were the only carriers permitted in the three air corridors.
41:27
[SPEAKER_00]: West German airlines were excluded from their own country's former capital for the entire
41:34
[SPEAKER_00]: If you wanted to drive to West Germany, you used one of the designated transit motorways across East German territory and you did not stop and you did not leave the road and you were watched.
41:48
[SPEAKER_00]: The border crossing at the western end of that route was a place where a family
41:58
[SPEAKER_00]: while officials examined the trunk with a mirror on a pole and asked why the children's schoolbooks were in a bag.
42:07
[SPEAKER_00]: If you were a young West German man of military age, the situation offered a remarkable loophole.
42:14
[SPEAKER_00]: Because West Berlin was not formally part of the federal republic, conscription did not apply there.
42:21
[SPEAKER_00]: Register as a resident of West Berlin
42:27
[SPEAKER_00]: now imagine what that does to a city over 25 years.
42:32
[SPEAKER_00]: It fills it with young men who did not want to be soldiers, artists, students, musicians, anarchists, drifters, pacifists and people who simply like the idea of a city where the rent was low and nobody would tell them what to do, combine that
42:52
[SPEAKER_00]: Because the federal government was terrified that the population and the economy would drain away from an isolated city with no hinterland, it subsidized West Berlin lavishly.
43:05
[SPEAKER_00]: Businesses received tax advantages.
43:08
[SPEAKER_00]: workers received a supplementary payment on their wages, enormous sums flowed in every year to keep the place viable.
43:17
[SPEAKER_00]: At certain points, subsidies from Bonne accounted for something close to half of the city budget.
43:24
[SPEAKER_00]: The result was an odd and productive imbalance.
43:28
[SPEAKER_00]: West Berlin had cheap housing, a large young population that was not going to be drafted, a heavily subsidized cultural sector and no closing time.
43:39
[SPEAKER_00]: West German licensing law required bars to close, but West Berlin, with its separate legal status, did not adopt the restriction.
43:49
[SPEAKER_00]: Bars could stay open all night and did, and this single administrative quirk did more to shape the reputation of the city than any policy ever intended to.
44:01
[SPEAKER_00]: The neighborhood where all of this concentrated most intensely was Croytsburg.
44:07
[SPEAKER_00]: Croytsburg sat right against the wall on three sides, a bulge of the city pushed up into the border, which made it a dead end.
44:15
[SPEAKER_00]: traffic did not pass through it because there was nowhere to pass through to.
44:21
[SPEAKER_00]: It contained a great deal of 19th-century tenement housing that had survived the war in poor condition.
44:28
[SPEAKER_00]: Was cheap, was scheduled in places for demolition, and was therefore left half maintained for years.
44:35
[SPEAKER_00]: Two groups moved into that space.
44:38
[SPEAKER_00]: The first were guest workers and their families.
44:41
[SPEAKER_00]: Beginning with a recruitment agreement signed with Turkey in 1961.
44:46
[SPEAKER_00]: the same year the wall went up.
44:48
[SPEAKER_00]: West Germany brought in hundreds of thousands of workers and a great many of them came to Berlin and a great many of those settled in Kreuzberg.
44:58
[SPEAKER_00]: Over the following decades, a Turkish German community established itself with its own shops, mosques, bakeries, green grocers, newspapers and eventually
45:13
[SPEAKER_00]: a second and third generation who were Berliners in every way that mattered while spending years fighting a legal system that was slow to say so.
45:23
[SPEAKER_00]: The food culture of modern Berlin is unimaginable without them.
45:28
[SPEAKER_00]: and the sandwich that most tourists now think of as the definitive Berlin street food was by most accounts invented in the city in the early 1970s by Turkish vendors adapting a dish for local tastes.
45:45
[SPEAKER_00]: The second group were the squatters.
45:48
[SPEAKER_00]: By the late 1970s a housing policy
45:54
[SPEAKER_00]: while people needed homes had produced a large stock of vacant flats in a city full of young people with no money.
46:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Activists began occupying them, repairing them and living in them.
46:09
[SPEAKER_00]: At the peak, in 1981, there were roughly 160 occupied buildings in West Berlin.
46:17
[SPEAKER_00]: Someone negotiated into legality and became housing cooperatives that still exist.
46:23
[SPEAKER_00]: Others were cleared by police in operations that produced running street battles, burning barricades, and a tradition of confrontation every first of May that outlasted the wall by decades.
46:37
[SPEAKER_00]: Out of that milieu came the music.
46:41
[SPEAKER_00]: There was a legendary club in Kreuzberg named after the postal code of the district, and it was loud, filthy, and important.
46:50
[SPEAKER_00]: And in 1976, into this strange half empty city, became David Bowie.
46:58
[SPEAKER_00]: Bowie arrived exhausted, chemically damaged, and looking for somewhere he could be anonymous,
47:08
[SPEAKER_00]: He moved into an apartment in Shunabug, above a car part's shop, shared for a while with Iggy Pop and started recording at a studio called Hanzer in a large hall that had been a Nazi-era ballroom close enough to the wall that from the control room windows you could see the death strip and the guards in their tower.
47:34
[SPEAKER_00]: and the middle one contains a song about two lovers standing by the wall, kissing as if nothing could fall.
47:42
[SPEAKER_00]: He said later that he heard the story of a couple meeting by the wall and built the song around it.
47:48
[SPEAKER_00]: Whatever the origin, it became the definitive musical statement about the divided city.
47:55
[SPEAKER_00]: and when he played it in West Berlin in 1987, at a concert staged close enough to the border that the speakers were pointed east.
48:05
[SPEAKER_00]: Thousands of young East Berliners gathered on their side of the wall to listen and were dispersed by police.
48:12
[SPEAKER_00]: He is said to have wept on stage.
48:15
[SPEAKER_00]: When he died in 2016, the German Foreign Ministry publicly thanked him for helping to bring down the wall, which is an extraordinary sentence for a government to write about a pop musician and which was not entirely wrong.
48:30
[SPEAKER_00]: Alongside all this, West Berlin was also an ordinary bourgeois city that went to work.
48:37
[SPEAKER_00]: Its main shopping street was the Curf-Uur stand-down, a broad boulevard of shops and cinemas and cafes, and at one end of it stood the ruined tower of a 19th-century church, deliberately left broken as a memorial with a modern chapel built beside it.
48:55
[SPEAKER_00]: Berliners, who nicknamed everything, called the ensemble, the hollow tooth and the powder compact, and the lipstick.
49:04
[SPEAKER_00]: Nearby stood the great department store of the West, an enormous Emporium whose food hall on the sixth floor was a deliberate statement of abundance.
49:14
[SPEAKER_00]: Hundreds of varieties of bread, more than a thousand cheeses, counters of fish and game and chocolate.
49:22
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a genuinely good shop and it was also propaganda and it was very effective propaganda.
49:29
[SPEAKER_00]: because East German visitors permitted to travel west in later years, frequently described walking into that food hall as the moment when the argument ended in their heads.
49:42
[SPEAKER_00]: transport system carried the strangeness underground.
49:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Several subway and elevated rail lines that had been built before the war ran from one part of West Berlin under East Berlin and back out again.
49:55
[SPEAKER_00]: After 1961, the trains kept running, but they did not stop.
50:01
[SPEAKER_00]: The stations underneath East Berlin were sealed.
50:04
[SPEAKER_00]: The entrances at street level bricked up or disguised, the platform's left in dim emergency lighting and patrolled by armed border troops.
50:15
[SPEAKER_00]: Passengers would feel the trains slow and look out at an empty-tiled platform with old advertisements from 1961 still on the walls and then accelerate away.
50:29
[SPEAKER_00]: West Berliners called them ghost stations.
50:33
[SPEAKER_00]: They existed for 28 years, a set of preserved rooms passing below a city that could not enter them.
50:40
[SPEAKER_00]: Above ground, there was a related oddity.
50:44
[SPEAKER_00]: The elevated railway network throughout the whole of Berlin, including the Western sectors, was operated by the East German state railway under older
50:55
[SPEAKER_00]: So the trains running through West Berlin were staffed and run by the Eastern government and the fairs West Berlin as paid went east.
51:05
[SPEAKER_00]: In response, many West Berliners boycotted it for decades.
51:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Ridership collapsed.
51:11
[SPEAKER_00]: stations decayed.
51:13
[SPEAKER_00]: After a strike by the Western employees of the Eastern Railway in 1980, most of the network in the West shut down entirely, and it was finally handed over to the West Berlin Transport Authority in January of 1984.
51:30
[SPEAKER_00]: There is one more feature of daily life in the
51:39
[SPEAKER_00]: roughly 12,000 American, British and French troops were permanently stationed in West Berlin with their families, their schools, their shops, their radio stations and their sports fields.
51:54
[SPEAKER_00]: They were not there in any serious military sense.
51:58
[SPEAKER_00]: Everyone involved understood that if a real attack came, a garrison of 12,000 men in a city surrounded by several hundred thousand Warsaw packed troops would last a matter of hours.
52:13
[SPEAKER_00]: They were there as a promise.
52:15
[SPEAKER_00]: Their presence meant that any assault on West Berlin would kill American British and French soldiers and would therefore be a war with those countries and that
52:28
[SPEAKER_00]: In the meantime, they were part of the furniture.
52:31
[SPEAKER_00]: British military bands played in the parks.
52:34
[SPEAKER_00]: The Americans ran an English language radio station that had a great many West Berlin teenagers listened to for the music.
52:41
[SPEAKER_00]: There were annual Allied parades down a broad avenue in the tear garden.
52:47
[SPEAKER_00]: Children grew up used to the site of soldiers of three nationalities
52:56
[SPEAKER_00]: having arrived as conquerors in 1945, were by 1975, regarded by most West Berliners with something close to affection.
53:06
[SPEAKER_00]: The universities also tell the story.
53:09
[SPEAKER_00]: The city's ancient university founded in the early 19th century, sat in the eastern sector.
53:16
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1948, after students and academics found themselves under increasing political pressure there,
53:23
[SPEAKER_00]: A new institution was founded in the Western sectors with American support, and it was named plainly and pointyly, the free university.
53:33
[SPEAKER_00]: It became 20 years later, one of the centers of the West German student movement, which is a fine irony.
53:41
[SPEAKER_00]: A university created to be a bull walk against the east, produced the most vigorous left-wing protest culture in the federal republic.
53:51
[SPEAKER_00]: That movement had its own dark landmarks.
53:54
[SPEAKER_00]: In June of 1967, during a protest against a visiting Iranian head of state, a student named Beno Onosorg was shot dead by a plain cloths West Berlin policeman.
54:07
[SPEAKER_00]: the killing radicalised generation, and one of the militant groups that grew out of that radicalization took the date as part of its name.
54:17
[SPEAKER_00]: In April of 1968, the movement's most prominent figure, Rudy Duchka, was shot in the head on a Berlin street by a young man who had absorbed the relentlessly hostile coverage of the student left in the popular press.
54:34
[SPEAKER_00]: Duchka survived with severe brain injuries and died 11 years later of complications from the wound.
54:42
[SPEAKER_00]: The years that followed brought bombings, kidnappings and killings by leftwing terrorist groups across West Germany and a corresponding hardening of the state and Berlin was at the center of a great deal of it.
54:57
[SPEAKER_00]: Underneath the politics ran a demographic problem that the city could never quite
55:03
[SPEAKER_00]: West Berlin was aging, young people who wanted conventional careers tended to leave for Hamburg or Munich or Frankfurt, where the head offices were.
55:14
[SPEAKER_00]: the people who stayed or arrived skewed toward the very old and the deliberately unconventional and the middle thinned out.
55:23
[SPEAKER_00]: By the 1980s West Berlin had one of the oldest populations of any large city in Europe and it was also simultaneously the most reliably countercultural place in the German-speaking world.
55:38
[SPEAKER_00]: Both things were true on the same street.
55:41
[SPEAKER_00]: and there was the constant low hum of the abnormal.
55:45
[SPEAKER_00]: Aircraft on the approach to Templehof came in low over apartment buildings.
55:51
[SPEAKER_00]: Streets ended in concrete.
55:53
[SPEAKER_00]: Bus routes looped back on themselves.
55:56
[SPEAKER_00]: Maps of the city published in the west showed the eastern half in full detail.
56:02
[SPEAKER_00]: Maps published in the East frequently showed West Berlin as a blank shape, a white void with no streets drawn in it at all, which was perhaps the most honest cartographic statement either side ever made.
56:17
[SPEAKER_00]: Politically, the city was a permanent stage set for the Cold War, and two speeches from it are still quoted.
56:25
[SPEAKER_00]: In June of 1963, John Kennedy came to West Berlin less than two years after the war went up and spoke to an enormous crowd outside the town hall in Shunabirk.
56:38
[SPEAKER_00]: He told them that all free people, wherever they lived, were citizens of Berlin and he said the phrase in German, the crowd, estimated in the hundreds of thousands, responded in a way that visibly startled him.
56:52
[SPEAKER_00]: There is a persistent joke that his grammar accidentally described a jam donut.
56:58
[SPEAKER_00]: The joke is not true, the grammar was fine, and Berlin as at the time did not laugh.
57:04
[SPEAKER_00]: In June of 1987, Ronald Reagan stood at the Brandenburg Gate, with the war behind him and bulletproof glass in front of him, and addressed the Soviet leader, Meheil Gorbachev directly, calling on him to open the gate and tear down the war.
57:23
[SPEAKER_00]: Several of his own advisors had tried repeatedly to cut the line as needlessly provocative.
57:30
[SPEAKER_00]: It stayed in, at the time,
57:32
[SPEAKER_00]: It was reported as a fairly routine visit.
57:35
[SPEAKER_00]: Two and a half years later, it read differently.
57:38
[SPEAKER_00]: Meanwhile, the wall itself had become on the western side, a surface.
57:44
[SPEAKER_00]: Because the actual boundary line lay a little in front of the western face of the concrete in many places, the west Berlin authorities did not police it, and anyone could walk up and touch it.
57:56
[SPEAKER_00]: Artists painted it.
57:58
[SPEAKER_00]: Tourists photographed it.
58:00
[SPEAKER_00]: There were wooden viewing platforms where you could climb a few steps and look across the death strip into the east, and school groups did exactly that, and so did visiting politicians.
58:13
[SPEAKER_00]: Crosses were fixed to the western face where people had died on the other side, and this is the paradox that West Berlin is lived with.
58:24
[SPEAKER_00]: For them the wall was day-to-day, a boundary and a backdrop and eventually a piece of urban furniture spray painted and leaned against.
58:35
[SPEAKER_00]: On the eastern side, 30 centimeters away, the same structure was a clean grey surface that no civilian was permitted within 100 meters of, watched by men with orders to shoot.
58:49
[SPEAKER_00]: That eastern face and the ground behind it is where we are going next.
58:55
[SPEAKER_00]: It is the most unpleasant part of the story, and I will tell it gently, but it needs telling, because it is the reason the rest of it mattered.
59:05
[SPEAKER_00]: chapter 4, the ground between.
59:10
[SPEAKER_00]: People say the Berlin war as though it were a single object, a long grey ribbon of concrete with graffiti on it.
59:19
[SPEAKER_00]: That object existed, but it was only the last few centimeters of a system and the system was the point.
59:27
[SPEAKER_00]: start with what it actually was in space.
59:31
[SPEAKER_00]: The barrier around West Berlin ran for roughly 155 kilometers in total.
59:38
[SPEAKER_00]: Of that, about 43 kilometers cut through the built-up city itself, dividing streets and squares and neighborhoods, and the remaining 112 kilometers ran around the outer edge of West Berlin
59:57
[SPEAKER_00]: Separating the western sectors from the surrounding countryside of the German Democratic Republic, that outer stretch is the part most people forget and it explains something important.
1:00:10
[SPEAKER_00]: West Berliners could not simply walk out into the countryside for a picnic.
1:00:15
[SPEAKER_00]: They had lakes and woods inside the on-clave and beyond them wire.
1:00:21
[SPEAKER_00]: The barrier evolved through four broad generations.
1:00:25
[SPEAKER_00]: The first was the barbed wire of August 1961, strung on posts, backed by soldiers.
1:00:33
[SPEAKER_00]: It was crude, and it leaked badly.
1:00:36
[SPEAKER_00]: The second laid down within weeks and months, was hollow concrete blocks stacked and mortored, topped with wire.
1:00:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Better, but still climable.
1:00:49
[SPEAKER_00]: and still prone to collapse when a truck was driven into it.
1:00:54
[SPEAKER_00]: The third, from the middle of the 1960s, was made of pre-fabricated concrete slabs held in place by upright supports, more uniform and considerably harder to breach.
1:01:06
[SPEAKER_00]: The fourth was the one most people picture.
1:01:10
[SPEAKER_00]: Beginning in the middle of the 1970s, and continuing almost to the end, the border was rebuilt with an L-shaped concrete segment, about 3.5 meters high, with a smooth rounded pipe running along the top.
1:01:27
[SPEAKER_00]: That pipe was a small piece of very cold design thinking, a hand cannot grip it.
1:01:34
[SPEAKER_00]: Someone hauling themselves up finds nothing to hold.
1:01:38
[SPEAKER_00]: Roughly 45,000 of these segments were installed.
1:01:42
[SPEAKER_00]: Each weighing something in the region of two and a half tons.
1:01:47
[SPEAKER_00]: But the wall you could see from the west was the outer wall.
1:01:52
[SPEAKER_00]: Behind it, going east, lay the system.
1:01:55
[SPEAKER_00]: Immediately behind the outer wall was the strip itself, which the border troops referred to in their own documents as the protective strip, and which everyone else called the death strip.
1:02:09
[SPEAKER_00]: It's width varied enormously with the terrain, from a few meters in the tightest urban sections to something like 90 meters or more where space allowed.
1:02:21
[SPEAKER_00]: The ground was raked sand or fine gravel, maintained flat and clean so that footprints would show, and it was lit at night by tall lamps that gave the whole corridor a sodium orange glow that West Berliners could see from their upper windows.
1:02:39
[SPEAKER_00]: Crossing the strip meant crossing a sequence of obstacles.
1:02:43
[SPEAKER_00]: There were anti-vehicle barriers, either concrete blocks or the welded steel obstacles that had been designed to stop tanks in the war.
1:02:53
[SPEAKER_00]: There was a patrol road of perforated concrete slabs for the guard vehicles.
1:02:59
[SPEAKER_00]: There were in many sections.
1:03:01
[SPEAKER_00]: runs where guard dogs were tethered to a long wire, able to move up and down a section of the corridor.
1:03:08
[SPEAKER_00]: There were watchtowers, roughly 300 of them at the end.
1:03:13
[SPEAKER_00]: Most of them are slim round tower, with a glassed observation room at the top and a search light, and there was the signal fence, which was the part that mattered most, and which almost nobody outside knows about.
1:03:26
[SPEAKER_00]: along the inner edge of the strip run a metal mesh fence carrying a low current, touching it, cutting it or climbing it, triggered an alarm and a light in the nearest tower indicating the section.
1:03:41
[SPEAKER_00]: the signal fence was the first line, not the last, which meant that most escape attempts were detected at the very beginning of the crossing, while the person still had the entire open corridor ahead of them.
1:03:55
[SPEAKER_00]: Behind all of it, on the eastern side, was the inner wall and behind that in the city.
1:04:02
[SPEAKER_00]: an ordinary street.
1:04:04
[SPEAKER_00]: Residents of buildings in the border area needed a special stamp in their identity papers to go home.
1:04:11
[SPEAKER_00]: Windows facing the strip were, in many buildings, bricked up.
1:04:16
[SPEAKER_00]: Some buildings were simply demolished.
1:04:19
[SPEAKER_00]: A church that stood in the death strip on Bernouur Strauss, its congregation cut off from its since 1961, was dynamited by the
1:04:31
[SPEAKER_00]: because it obstructed the sightlines.
1:04:34
[SPEAKER_00]: Manning this system were the border troops of the German Democratic Republic, numbering somewhere around 11,000 men in the Berlin sector, and about 50,000 across the whole country.
1:04:48
[SPEAKER_00]: They were young conscripts and career soldiers, and they were subject to a set of rules that has been argued about in German courts ever since.
1:04:57
[SPEAKER_00]: Standing orders required them to prevent border breaches by all means, and included the use of firearms.
1:05:04
[SPEAKER_00]: Guards always patrolled in pairs, and the pairs were rotated frequently and deliberately, so that two men who might agree with each other were rarely together twice.
1:05:16
[SPEAKER_00]: Each was aware that the other might report him.
1:05:19
[SPEAKER_00]: A guard who prevented an escape could receive a commendation and a bonus and extra leave.
1:05:26
[SPEAKER_00]: A guard who let one through could face a court martial and the guards themselves defected.
1:05:33
[SPEAKER_00]: Over the years, somewhere near 2,000 border soldiers went across.
1:05:39
[SPEAKER_00]: The most famous did it on the third day of the war's existence on the 15th of August, 1961, when a 19-year-old sergeant named Conrad Schumann.
1:05:52
[SPEAKER_00]: standing at a low coil of barbed wire on burn-hour strass, threw down his cigarette, ran and jumped, and a young West German photographer who had been waiting nearby for over an hour, caught him in midair with his rifle slung and his knees up.
1:06:12
[SPEAKER_00]: It became one of the defining photographs of the 20th century.
1:06:17
[SPEAKER_00]: Schumann lived out his life in Bavaria.
1:06:20
[SPEAKER_00]: He said that he did not feel truly free until the 9th of November 1989, and he died by his own hand in 1998.
1:06:32
[SPEAKER_00]: not all of the border was concrete, because not all of it was land.
1:06:38
[SPEAKER_00]: Berlin is a city of water.
1:06:41
[SPEAKER_00]: The river spree runs through the middle of it.
1:06:45
[SPEAKER_00]: The Havel widens into a chain of lakes in the south west.
1:06:49
[SPEAKER_00]: and a network of canals threads the whole thing together.
1:06:54
[SPEAKER_00]: In several places the boundary between east and west ran along or through the water and in those places the barrier had to be built differently.
1:07:04
[SPEAKER_00]: Under water obstacles were installed, patrol boats worked the surface.
1:07:09
[SPEAKER_00]: In some sections walls were built along the
1:07:18
[SPEAKER_00]: which meant that the water itself was the killing ground.
1:07:21
[SPEAKER_00]: This produced one of the most difficult situations of the entire border because in certain stretches, the whole of the river belonged to the east, right up to the western bank.
1:07:33
[SPEAKER_00]: A person who fell into the water from the western side had technically fallen into the German Democratic Republic.
1:07:41
[SPEAKER_00]: and West Berlin rescue services were not permitted to enter it.
1:07:45
[SPEAKER_00]: There were several drownings under these circumstances.
1:07:49
[SPEAKER_00]: Some of them children who had been playing at the water's edge and the resulting disputes over who was allowed to save a life in which meters of a river are among the coldest arguments in the entire archive of the Cold War.
1:08:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Out on the ring, beyond the built-up city, the border took yet another form.
1:08:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Here it ran through pine forest and open field and small villages, and the east German authorities established a restricted zone, five kilometers deep, along its entire length.
1:08:23
[SPEAKER_00]: Living inside that zone required a permit stamped in your papers.
1:08:28
[SPEAKER_00]: Visiting a relative there required an application submitted well in advance.
1:08:38
[SPEAKER_00]: and a population that was quietly screened for reliability.
1:08:42
[SPEAKER_00]: In the early years and again in the middle of the 1960s, families considered politically unreliable were forcibly resettled away from the border area in operations given deliberately bland code names.
1:08:57
[SPEAKER_00]: Put on trucks with a few hours of notice and moved inland.
1:09:02
[SPEAKER_00]: For the soldiers, the ring was a posting of extraordinary tedium.
1:09:07
[SPEAKER_00]: A guard might spend eight hours in a tower in the dark in February, looking at an empty sand corridor, then sleep in a barracks, then do it again.
1:09:17
[SPEAKER_00]: For 18 months, the overwhelming majority of them never saw an escape attempt at all.
1:09:23
[SPEAKER_00]: Their war was against Borden, and against the knowledge that the man beside them was expected to report anything they said.
1:09:30
[SPEAKER_00]: now the deaths which I will handle plainly and without dwelling.
1:09:35
[SPEAKER_00]: Research by the historians who have gone through the records most carefully has identified at least 140 people who died at the Berlin Wall between 1961 and 1989.
1:09:44
[SPEAKER_00]: That figure includes those shot, those who fell,
1:09:57
[SPEAKER_00]: and those who died of heart failure during forced checks at the crossing points.
1:10:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Other counts, using wider definitions, run higher.
1:10:08
[SPEAKER_00]: Along the entire inner German border, the total number of deaths runs to several hundred more.
1:10:15
[SPEAKER_00]: The first was not shot.
1:10:18
[SPEAKER_00]: On the 22nd of August, 1961, nine days in, a 58-year-old woman named Eda Seekman,
1:10:26
[SPEAKER_00]: who lived in a building on Burnour Strasse, where the front door opened west and the building itself stood east through her bedding out of a third floor window and jumped after it.
1:10:40
[SPEAKER_00]: She died of her injuries.
1:10:42
[SPEAKER_00]: That street produced many such attempts in the first weeks with West Berlin firemen holding jump sheets below until the authorities emptied the buildings entirely and bricked them shut.
1:10:55
[SPEAKER_00]: Two days later on the 24th of August, a 24-year-old Taylor named Guenta Littfin, who had worked in West Berlin and had an apartment waiting for him there, tried to swim a canal near the main railway station and was shot in the head.
1:11:14
[SPEAKER_00]: He was the first person killed by gunfire at the wall.
1:11:18
[SPEAKER_00]: the death that changed the temperature of the whole thing happened almost exactly a year later.
1:11:25
[SPEAKER_00]: On the 17th of August 1962, two 18-year-old bricklayers made a run for the war near checkpoint Charlie, one got over.
1:11:35
[SPEAKER_00]: The other Peter Fector was shot in the pelvis at the top and fell back into the death strip on the eastern side in full view of a crowd of West Berliners, journalists and American soldiers perhaps 50 meters away.
1:11:54
[SPEAKER_00]: He lay there calling for help for something close to an hour.
1:12:04
[SPEAKER_00]: The Americans did not cross the borderline to reach him, because to do so would have been an armed incursion into another state, and they had no authorization.
1:12:15
[SPEAKER_00]: West Berlin police through bandages over the wall, which could not be reached.
1:12:21
[SPEAKER_00]: Eventually East German guards carried his body away.
1:12:25
[SPEAKER_00]: He had blood to death.
1:12:27
[SPEAKER_00]: The photographs and film of that hour went around the world, and the anger in West Berlin was directed almost as much at the western powers for standing there as at the men who had fired.
1:12:39
[SPEAKER_00]: It is one of the hardest episodes in the entire history of the war.
1:12:44
[SPEAKER_00]: because everybody present behaved according to their instructions, and a teenager died on a patch of sand in the middle of a European capital, while several hundred people watched, set against these are the escapes, and the escapes are at times magnificent.
1:13:04
[SPEAKER_00]: Roughly 5,000 people are estimated to have made it across the Berlin border successfully over the 28 years.
1:13:14
[SPEAKER_00]: By every method, the human mind can produce.
1:13:18
[SPEAKER_00]: They went under it.
1:13:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Tunnel digging became a small industry, mostly organized from the western side by students,
1:13:29
[SPEAKER_00]: The most successful was dug in 1964 from a disused bakery on the western side, running about 145 meters to an outhouse in a courtyard in the east.
1:13:43
[SPEAKER_00]: It took six months of work by more than 30 diggers, over two nights in October, 57 people came through it, which gave the tunnel its name.
1:13:54
[SPEAKER_00]: On the second night, the operation was discovered, there was a confused exchange of shots in the courtyard, and an East German border guard named Egon Schultz was killed.
1:14:06
[SPEAKER_00]: He was made a martyr by the state, with schools named after him, and it emerged only decades later from ballistic evidence in the files that most of the bullets that hit him had come from a fellow guard.
1:14:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Two years earlier, in September of 1962,
1:14:24
[SPEAKER_00]: Another tunnel brought 29 people out, and its construction had been partly financed by an American television network in exchange for filming rides, which produced a documentary that the American government tried unsuccessfully to suppress.
1:14:41
[SPEAKER_00]: They went over it.
1:14:43
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1979, two families in Thuringia,
1:14:54
[SPEAKER_00]: out of scraps of fabric, bought in small quantities from different shops so as not to attract attention, sewn on a domestic sewing machine, and on a night in September, eight people including four children.
1:15:10
[SPEAKER_00]: flew over the border and landed in a field in Bavaria.
1:15:14
[SPEAKER_00]: They had not known whether they had made it until they were told.
1:15:18
[SPEAKER_00]: They went through it.
1:15:20
[SPEAKER_00]: People hid in the modified fuel tanks and hollowed seats of cars.
1:15:25
[SPEAKER_00]: One Austrian man drove a low, slung sports car under the barrier pole at a checkpoint, having measured it beforehand and removed the windscreen.
1:15:36
[SPEAKER_00]: A group used a homemade steel cable and a pulley to slide from the roof of a building over the strip.
1:15:44
[SPEAKER_00]: A man drove a stolen armoured personnel carrier straight through the war in 1963, and they used documents and impersonation and nerve.
1:15:55
[SPEAKER_00]: A West German man named Hartmut Richter, who had swam a canal to freedom in 1966, spent years after withdrawing back into the east on the transit routes and carrying people out in the trunk of his car.
1:16:14
[SPEAKER_00]: until he was caught in 1975 and imprisoned, which brings us to the crossings because the wall was not only a barrier, it was also a set of doors and the doors were used constantly.
1:16:28
[SPEAKER_00]: There were a handful of official crossing points.
1:16:31
[SPEAKER_00]: The one at Friedrich Stras station was the main pedestrian and rail crossing, and it acquired a nickname that tells you everything, the Palace of Tears.
1:16:43
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a low modern building of steel and glass, where western visitors, leaving the east, said goodbye to the eastern relatives who could not go with them, and it was designed so that the goodbye happened before the checks.
1:16:58
[SPEAKER_00]: in a hall where people wept openly every day for 28 years.
1:17:04
[SPEAKER_00]: There was the crossing on Friedrich Straß for foreigners and Allied personnel that the Americans designated with the third letter of their phonetic alphabet, which is why the world knows it as checkpoint Charlie.
1:17:18
[SPEAKER_00]: In October of 1961, a dispute over whether East German guards could check the papers of American diplomats, escalated until American and Soviet tanks were parked facing each other at that intersection, roughly 100 metres apart, with live ammunition for 16 hours.
1:17:39
[SPEAKER_00]: It ended through quiet back-channel contact between Kennedy and cruise ship, with both sides withdrawing one tank at a time in alternation, so that neither appeared to retreat first.
1:17:53
[SPEAKER_00]: Over time, the border became in a limited way, permeable by agreement.
1:17:59
[SPEAKER_00]: West Berliners were allowed short visits to the East underpasses negotiated in the 1960s.
1:18:06
[SPEAKER_00]: Agreement signed in the early 1970s regularized travel further.
1:18:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Western visitors had to change a fixed minimum amount of money at an artificial exchange rate for every day of their visit.
1:18:20
[SPEAKER_00]: a mandatory exchange that functioned as an entry fee and a hard currency income stream.
1:18:27
[SPEAKER_00]: East German pensioners were allowed to travel west with relative freedom, on the logic that if they did not come back, the state saved a pension.
1:18:38
[SPEAKER_00]: And then there was the arrangement that almost nobody discussed at the time.
1:18:42
[SPEAKER_00]: Beginning in the middle of the 1960s and continuing until the end,
1:18:47
[SPEAKER_00]: The West German government secretly bought political prisoners out of East German jails.
1:18:53
[SPEAKER_00]: Lists were negotiated through lawyers and church intermediaries.
1:18:58
[SPEAKER_00]: Payment was made in hard currency and more often in goods.
1:19:04
[SPEAKER_00]: Coffee, citrus fruit, industrial equipment, medical supplies.
1:19:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Over about 25 years, roughly 33,000 prisoners were ransomed.
1:19:14
[SPEAKER_00]: along with tens of thousands of family members permitted to leave with them.
1:19:18
[SPEAKER_00]: The total value transferred was in the billions of Deutsche Marx.
1:19:23
[SPEAKER_00]: A state that described itself as the German workers and peasants' state was in the end, selling its own citizens to the class enemy at an average price of around 95,000 Marx per head.
1:19:38
[SPEAKER_00]: The last deaths came almost within sight of the end.
1:19:43
[SPEAKER_00]: On the 5th of February, 1989, a 20-year-old waiter named Chris Gufroy, who believed that the shooting orders had been quietly suspended, tried to cross with a friend near a canal in the south of the city and was shot in the chest.
1:20:01
[SPEAKER_00]: He was the last person shot dead at the wall.
1:20:05
[SPEAKER_00]: A month later on the 8th of March, an electrical engineer named Winfried Freud and Berg lifted off from a garden plot in a balloon he had filled from a natural gas main, drifted for hours, lost control, and fell in a garden in West Berlin.
1:20:25
[SPEAKER_00]: He was the last person to die, attempting to cross.
1:20:29
[SPEAKER_00]: Both of them died in the year the wall came down.
1:20:32
[SPEAKER_00]: Chris Gufroy was killed nine months before the border opened.
1:20:37
[SPEAKER_00]: There is no lesson in that.
1:20:39
[SPEAKER_00]: Only the flat and unbearable arithmetic of timing.
1:20:43
[SPEAKER_00]: And the fact that in the autumn, when it all collapsed in a single evening, none of the people who died had any way of knowing how close they had been.
1:20:57
[SPEAKER_00]: chapter five, the evening it ended.
1:21:02
[SPEAKER_00]: The wall did not fall because it was pushed.
1:21:06
[SPEAKER_00]: It fell because the ground underneath it had been quietly removed over four years and then on one November evening a man misread a piece of paper out loud.
1:21:19
[SPEAKER_00]: The removal of the ground began in Moscow
1:21:25
[SPEAKER_00]: became general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party.
1:21:29
[SPEAKER_00]: Gorbachev believed the Soviet system could be saved by being reformed, and he introduced two policies whose names entered every language, a restructuring of the economy and an opening up of public discussion.
1:21:44
[SPEAKER_00]: He also made a decision, gradually, and never in a single announcement.
1:21:49
[SPEAKER_00]: that the Soviet Union would no longer use its army to keep the governments of eastern Europe in power.
1:21:55
[SPEAKER_00]: For 40 years, every calculation made by every dissident and every party boss from Warsaw to Sofia had rested on the certainty that Soviet tanks would arrive.
1:22:07
[SPEAKER_00]: They had arrived in East
1:22:19
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, without ceremony, that certainty was withdrawn.
1:22:24
[SPEAKER_00]: The East German leadership reacted to this, with something close to horror.
1:22:30
[SPEAKER_00]: Eric Honaker had run the country since 1971.
1:22:33
[SPEAKER_00]: He was 77 years old in 1989, a man who had been imprisoned by the Nazis for a decade.
1:22:42
[SPEAKER_00]: and who had organized the building of the wall as a young party official, and he regarded Gorbachev's reforms as a catastrophic loss of nerve.
1:22:53
[SPEAKER_00]: His government took an extraordinary step for a Soviet block state.
1:22:58
[SPEAKER_00]: It began censoring Soviet publications in November of 1988, the German language edition
1:23:11
[SPEAKER_00]: because it was printing material about Stalin's crimes that the East German leadership considered dangerous.
1:23:19
[SPEAKER_00]: Party members found themselves in the surreal position of being forbidden to read Moscow.
1:23:26
[SPEAKER_00]: Meanwhile,
1:23:27
[SPEAKER_00]: the country's economic position was deteriorating in ways that were concealed from almost everyone, foreign debt to Western creditors had grown to a level that senior economists inside the government privately described as unmanageable.
1:23:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Infrastructure was worn out.
1:23:54
[SPEAKER_00]: while resources went to new housing blocks, were visibly rotting, whole streets of 19th century buildings, with crumbling facades and cold smoke staining and scaffolding that had been up for years.
1:24:08
[SPEAKER_00]: And the population had stopped believing quietly.
1:24:12
[SPEAKER_00]: and without announcement.
1:24:14
[SPEAKER_00]: The first open crack came in May of 1989, over local elections.
1:24:20
[SPEAKER_00]: These elections were a formality, with a single list of approved candidates and results announced at around 98% approval.
1:24:29
[SPEAKER_00]: That year, church-based opposition groups organized something new.
1:24:35
[SPEAKER_00]: They sent observers to the public vote counts, which were technically legally open.
1:24:41
[SPEAKER_00]: They counted.
1:24:42
[SPEAKER_00]: They compared their tally's with the official results, and they published the discrepancy.
1:24:49
[SPEAKER_00]: It was by the standards of what would follow a small thing, but for the first time, the state had been caught in a specific, documented, arithmetical lie by its own citizens, and the number of people willing to say so out loud began to grow, then Hungary opened a gate.
1:25:10
[SPEAKER_00]: On the 2nd of May 1989, Hungarian border guards began dismantling the electrified fence along their frontier with Austria.
1:25:21
[SPEAKER_00]: The stated reasons were technical and financial.
1:25:25
[SPEAKER_00]: The fence was obsolete and expensive.
1:25:28
[SPEAKER_00]: The implications were enormous, and East Germans understood them almost immediately.
1:25:33
[SPEAKER_00]: East German citizens could travel to Hungary relatively freely, because it was a fellow socialist state.
1:25:41
[SPEAKER_00]: If the Hungarian border with Austria was no longer sealed, then the route to the West ran east.
1:25:48
[SPEAKER_00]: Through the summer East German families began driving their small cars to Hungary for holidays and simply not coming back.
1:25:56
[SPEAKER_00]: They camped near the border, they probed.
1:26:00
[SPEAKER_00]: On the 19th of August, at a ceremonial gathering near the town of Sopron organized by reform-minded Hungarians and Austrians, a border gate was opened for a symbolic crossing and several hundred East Germans
1:26:17
[SPEAKER_00]: the guards did not shoot.
1:26:20
[SPEAKER_00]: In September, the Hungarian government formally suspended its agreement with East Germany and opened the border.
1:26:29
[SPEAKER_00]: tens of thousands crossed within weeks, where the roots were still closed, people climbed fences into embassies.
1:26:38
[SPEAKER_00]: The West German embassy in Prague filled with East Germans who had scaled the walls and were camping in the gardens in the rain, thousands of them with sanitation collapsing and children sleeping in tents on the lawn.
1:26:52
[SPEAKER_00]: On the evening of the 30th of September, the West German Foreign Minister hands Dietrich Genscher, himself born in what had become East Germany, stepped on to a balcony above that crowd.
1:27:07
[SPEAKER_00]: and began to tell them that their departure had been agreed.
1:27:10
[SPEAKER_00]: He never finished the sentence.
1:27:13
[SPEAKER_00]: The roar of several thousand people drowned him out.
1:27:16
[SPEAKER_00]: And the recording of that unfinished sentence is still played in Germany every year.
1:27:21
[SPEAKER_00]: The East German government insisted as a condition.
1:27:26
[SPEAKER_00]: that the trains carrying these people to the west travel through East German territory so that it could formally expel them and preserve the fiction that it had made the decision.
1:27:40
[SPEAKER_00]: This was a serious error, as the sealed trains passed through Dresden in the first days of October.
1:27:48
[SPEAKER_00]: Thousands of people gathered at the main station, trying to force their way aboard, and the resulting confrontations with police were the most violent scenes the country had seen in decades.
1:28:03
[SPEAKER_00]: And at the same time, every Monday evening, in Lypezig, people
1:28:09
[SPEAKER_00]: The Nicolai Kircher in the centre of Leipzig had been holding prayers for peace on Monday evenings since 1982, for years the attendance was small, a few dozen people watched attentively by the ministry, through the summer of 1989 the numbers grew and afterward people began walking out of the church and around the ring road in the middle of the city
1:28:40
[SPEAKER_00]: one to hold and one to shield the flame, which meant that a person carrying a candle was visibly carrying nothing else.
1:28:49
[SPEAKER_00]: The demonstrators chanted a phrase that took the state's own language and turned it inside out.
1:28:56
[SPEAKER_00]: The Constitution described the country as
1:28:58
[SPEAKER_00]: belonging to the people.
1:29:00
[SPEAKER_00]: So they chanted, we are the people.
1:29:03
[SPEAKER_00]: By the end of September the Monday march is numbered in the thousands and arrests were being made and the mood in the city was frightening.
1:29:11
[SPEAKER_00]: Everyone knew what had happened in Beijing in June, when the Chinese government had cleared Tiananmen square with the army, an action that senior East German officials had publicly praised.
1:29:23
[SPEAKER_00]: The 7th of October was the 40th anniversary of the founding of the German Democratic Republic, and Gorbachev came to Berlin for the ceremonies.
1:29:32
[SPEAKER_00]: There were torchlight parades of the state youth organization.
1:29:37
[SPEAKER_00]: and along the route, some of the marching young people began chanting Gorbachev's name at their own leadership, which was not in the script.
1:29:46
[SPEAKER_00]: In his conversations with the East German leadership, Gorbachev delivered a warning that has come down in various forms, as the observation that life punishes those who arrived too late.
1:29:59
[SPEAKER_00]: That evening,
1:30:01
[SPEAKER_00]: Demonstrations in Berlin and other cities were broken up with considerable force and hundreds were detained.
1:30:10
[SPEAKER_00]: Two days later came the 9th of October and Leipzig and the hinge of the whole story.
1:30:17
[SPEAKER_00]: Everyone expected violence.
1:30:19
[SPEAKER_00]: Hospitals in Leipzig had been told to prepare extra blood supplies and to clear beds.
1:30:25
[SPEAKER_00]: Additional police and militia units have been brought in.
1:30:28
[SPEAKER_00]: Live ammunition had been issued.
1:30:31
[SPEAKER_00]: Parents in the city urged their adult children not to go.
1:30:35
[SPEAKER_00]: Some people wrote their names and addresses on slips of paper and put them in their pockets.
1:30:41
[SPEAKER_00]: Around 70,000 people came out and walked the ring road.
1:30:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Six local figures, including the conductor of the city orchestra, Kurt Mazur, had hurriedly recorded an appeal for restraint that was broadcast over the city's loud speakers and read aloud in the churches, calling for peaceful dialogue.
1:31:03
[SPEAKER_00]: In the absence of any clear order from Berlin, and facing a crowd that vastly exceeded anything that could be dispersed without a massacre, the local commanders held their men back.
1:31:16
[SPEAKER_00]: Nothing happened, which is to say, everything happened.
1:31:21
[SPEAKER_00]: 70,000 people walked through a city centre lined with armed police.
1:31:26
[SPEAKER_00]: and went home unharmed.
1:31:28
[SPEAKER_00]: And by the following Monday there were 120,000 and the Monday after that, 300,000.
1:31:32
[SPEAKER_00]: Once it was established,
1:31:38
[SPEAKER_00]: that the state would not shoot, the fear that had held the whole structure together simply evaporated, and it evaporated in about a fortnight.
1:31:48
[SPEAKER_00]: On the 18th of October, Honaker was removed by his own Politburo, and replaced by Egon Crenz, his long groomed successor, who was 52, and who went on television to promise a change of direction.
1:32:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Nobody believed him.
1:32:05
[SPEAKER_00]: He had publicly congratulated the Chinese leadership after Tiananmen.
1:32:10
[SPEAKER_00]: There is a widely repeated joke from those weeks in which someone asks what the difference is between Crenz and Honiker.
1:32:17
[SPEAKER_00]: And the answer is that Crenz still has his own teeth.
1:32:21
[SPEAKER_00]: On the 4th of November, the largest demonstration in the history of the country filled Alexander Platz in the center of East Berlin.
1:32:31
[SPEAKER_00]: Estimates run to half a million people.
1:32:34
[SPEAKER_00]: and it was legally permitted, and it was broadcast live on East German television.
1:32:40
[SPEAKER_00]: Riders, actors, and reform-minded party members spoke from a platform.
1:32:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Some were cheered.
1:32:48
[SPEAKER_00]: A former head of foreign intelligence was booed so thoroughly that he could not finish.
1:32:54
[SPEAKER_00]: The demands from the stage were still at that point, mostly for reform of the country, rather than for its abolition.
1:33:02
[SPEAKER_00]: free elections, free press, freedom to travel.
1:33:06
[SPEAKER_00]: Freedom to travel was the pressure point, because the country was hemorrhaging.
1:33:11
[SPEAKER_00]: Czechoslovakia had reopened its border to East German travellers on the first of November.
1:33:18
[SPEAKER_00]: And by early November, people were leaving at a rate of several thousand a day through Prague.
1:33:25
[SPEAKER_00]: Entire hospital departments were losing staff.
1:33:29
[SPEAKER_00]: The government was watching its workforce walk out of the building.
1:33:33
[SPEAKER_00]: So, on the 6th of November, it published a draft travel law.
1:33:38
[SPEAKER_00]: The draft still required applications and permits and allowed refusals.
1:33:43
[SPEAKER_00]: and it was so cautious that it was greeted with open ridicule, including in the state's own newspapers, which was itself a sign of how far things had slipped.
1:33:55
[SPEAKER_00]: On the 7th of November, the entire council of ministers resigned.
1:34:00
[SPEAKER_00]: On the 8th, the Politburo resigned and reconstituted itself.
1:34:06
[SPEAKER_00]: And in the middle of all this, a small group of interior ministry officials was told to rewrite the travel rules quickly over a couple of days to relieve the pressure.
1:34:17
[SPEAKER_00]: What they produced, some time on the 9th of November, was a temporary regulation allowing private travel abroad to be applied for
1:34:28
[SPEAKER_00]: and allowing permanent emigration through any border crossing point, including those between East Berlin and West Berlin.
1:34:37
[SPEAKER_00]: It was intended as a valve, not a door.
1:34:40
[SPEAKER_00]: Applications would still be processed.
1:34:43
[SPEAKER_00]: visas would still be issued.
1:34:46
[SPEAKER_00]: the plan was to announce it the following morning, so that the border troops and the passport control units could be properly briefed first.
1:34:55
[SPEAKER_00]: That afternoon, the draft was read aloud at the end of a long central committee session in the middle of a great deal of other business to an exhausted room.
1:35:06
[SPEAKER_00]: Copies were handed out.
1:35:08
[SPEAKER_00]: Among the people who received one was a
1:35:14
[SPEAKER_00]: who had been made the government's press spokesman and who was at that moment doing something else.
1:35:21
[SPEAKER_00]: He had not been in the room for the discussion of the regulation.
1:35:25
[SPEAKER_00]: He took the paper and he went to give the daily press conference in a building on Morenstrasse.
1:35:31
[SPEAKER_00]: And Egon Crenz handed him the sheet as he left, with an instruction along the lines of, this will be a bombshell.
1:35:38
[SPEAKER_00]: Announce it.
1:35:40
[SPEAKER_00]: The press conference began at six o'clock in the evening.
1:35:43
[SPEAKER_00]: and was broadcast live.
1:35:45
[SPEAKER_00]: It was, for most of its length, extremely boring, which is a detail I appreciate and which you may find soothing.
1:35:53
[SPEAKER_00]: Shabowski went through personnel matters and party procedure for the better part of an hour in a flat administrative monotone.
1:36:02
[SPEAKER_00]: Then,
1:36:09
[SPEAKER_00]: asked about the travel law, Shabowski, who had not read the paper properly, put on his glasses, shuffled through his notes, and began reading the regulation aloud, half to himself.
1:36:23
[SPEAKER_00]: In the manner of a man discovering the contents of a document in public, private trips abroad could be applied for without preconditions.
1:36:32
[SPEAKER_00]: Permanent departures were possible through all border crossing
1:36:38
[SPEAKER_00]: which had been half asleep, came awake.
1:36:41
[SPEAKER_00]: A reporter asked when this took effect.
1:36:44
[SPEAKER_00]: Shabowski looked at his papers.
1:36:46
[SPEAKER_00]: He looked up, he looked back down, and then he said, as far as he knew, immediately, without delay.
1:36:53
[SPEAKER_00]: The regulation on the page said that it would come into force on the 10th of November.
1:36:59
[SPEAKER_00]: He had missed the line, or the line was on a page he did not have.
1:37:04
[SPEAKER_00]: He was asked whether it applied to West Berlin as well, and he read out the clause about crossing points to West Berlin, and it did.
1:37:15
[SPEAKER_00]: What followed over the next four hours is one of the finest examples in modern history of an institution being defeated by its own information systems.
1:37:25
[SPEAKER_00]: The wire services moved the story within minutes.
1:37:30
[SPEAKER_00]: West German television.
1:37:32
[SPEAKER_00]: watched by most of East Germany, led its main evening use at 8 o'clock with the flat statement that the German Democratic Republic was opening its border and that the gates in the wall stood wide open.
1:37:47
[SPEAKER_00]: this was not at that moment true.
1:37:51
[SPEAKER_00]: Nobody had told the border troops anything at all.
1:37:54
[SPEAKER_00]: The men on duty at the crossing points learned that the border was open in the same way that everybody else did, which is to say from the television and then from the people arriving at their gates.
1:38:09
[SPEAKER_00]: The people began arriving at around half past eight.
1:38:12
[SPEAKER_00]: At first, there were a few dozen at each crossing, mostly asking questions.
1:38:18
[SPEAKER_00]: The guards had no orders, no briefing, and no idea.
1:38:22
[SPEAKER_00]: Their standing instructions were the ones they had always had.
1:38:26
[SPEAKER_00]: Officers telephoned their superiors and got nothing useful.
1:38:31
[SPEAKER_00]: The crowds grew.
1:38:32
[SPEAKER_00]: by ten o'clock at the crossing on Bourne-Horma Strasse in the north of the city.
1:38:39
[SPEAKER_00]: There were thousands of people packed into the approach road, standing in the cold, in a good humid but relentless mass, chanting for the gate to be opened.
1:38:50
[SPEAKER_00]: The officer in charge at Bourne-Horma Strasse was a passport control lieutenant colonel named Harold Yeager.
1:38:58
[SPEAKER_00]: He had worked the border for 25 years.
1:39:01
[SPEAKER_00]: He had watched the press conference on a small television in the guard house canteen, while eating his dinner and had assumed at first that Shabowski had mis-spoken.
1:39:13
[SPEAKER_00]: He spent the next several hours on the telephone to his superiors, describing an increasingly impossible situation and asking repeatedly for instructions.
1:39:25
[SPEAKER_00]: He was told at one point to open the gate and let a few of the loudest agitators through after stamping their papers in a way that invalidated them so that they could not come back.
1:39:38
[SPEAKER_00]: That was tried.
1:39:39
[SPEAKER_00]: It made things worse.
1:39:41
[SPEAKER_00]: because the crowd saw people going through and pressed harder and it also meant that a number of East Berliners who had come out to look were now permanently expelled from their own country without having intended to be.
1:39:56
[SPEAKER_00]: By about half past eleven, Yager had several thousand people compressed against the barrier, a handful of men with rifles, and no order that made any sense.
1:40:08
[SPEAKER_00]: He later described concluding that if he did not open the gate, someone was going to be crushed, or someone was going to fire, and that either would be a catastrophe.
1:40:19
[SPEAKER_00]: He put down the phone and gave the order to raise the barrier and stop checking papers.
1:40:25
[SPEAKER_00]: The crowd went through.
1:40:28
[SPEAKER_00]: Within the next hour, the other crossings opened in sequence, some on similar local initiative, some simply overwhelmed by the small hours of the morning.
1:40:38
[SPEAKER_00]: tens of thousands of East Berliners were walking into West Berlin, and West Berliners had come out into the streets to meet them, and complete strangers were embracing on the curfew eastern dam at two in the morning.
1:40:51
[SPEAKER_00]: Bars gave away drinks.
1:40:54
[SPEAKER_00]: People banged on the roofs of the little tribals coming through as they crawled past, and the sound of those two stroke engines,
1:41:02
[SPEAKER_00]: and the smell of their exhaust is the thing that older Berliners on both sides say they remember first when asked about that night.
1:41:11
[SPEAKER_00]: A West Berlin bank announced that any East German arriving could collect a welcome payment of 100 Deutsche Marx, and the cues for it snaked around blocks for days.
1:41:24
[SPEAKER_00]: At the Brandenburg Gate, where there was no crossing point, people simply climbed onto the top of the wall, which was broad and flat at that section, and sat there, and danced on it.
1:41:37
[SPEAKER_00]: and were photographed against the floodlights, while East German water cannon crews below tried half-heartedly to hose them off and then gave up.
1:41:47
[SPEAKER_00]: That image of young people standing on the wall with the gate behind them went around the world on the 10th of November and is now the
1:42:02
[SPEAKER_00]: not one shot was fired that night.
1:42:05
[SPEAKER_00]: Given the number of armed men present and the number of civilians and the complete absence of orders, that outcome was not inevitable and it deserves to be said out loud.
1:42:19
[SPEAKER_00]: The days that followed had a particular quality that people who lived through them described as dreamlike.
1:42:27
[SPEAKER_00]: East Germans crossed for a day and went home again because their apartments and jobs and lives were still there.
1:42:36
[SPEAKER_00]: Families who had not seen each other in decades met in kitchens, the sound of the city in those weeks was quite literally tapping.
1:42:45
[SPEAKER_00]: Thousands of people, with hammers and chisels, chipping souvenirs off the wall, working away at it day after day, until the concrete was pitted and hold, and the steel reinforcing showed through.
1:43:00
[SPEAKER_00]: The Berliners called them wallwood peckers.
1:43:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Officially, the wall was not opened at the Brandenburg Gate until the 22nd of December, when the two heads of government walked through it in the rain.
1:43:13
[SPEAKER_00]: Formal demolition by border troops with heavy machinery began in the summer of 1990 and continued into 1991.
1:43:22
[SPEAKER_00]: The state itself lasted less than a year longer.
1:43:26
[SPEAKER_00]: Free elections were held in March of 1990 and were won decisively by the party's promising rapid unification.
1:43:35
[SPEAKER_00]: A currency union on the 1st of July 1990 replaced the East German Mark with the Deutsche Mark.
1:43:44
[SPEAKER_00]: And on that day, the shops in the east filled overnight with western goods, and a great many East German products vanished from the shelves within weeks, and a great many East German factories suddenly required to compete at a currency rate that made their exports unaffordable did not survive the following two years.
1:44:08
[SPEAKER_00]: On the third of October,
1:44:10
[SPEAKER_00]: 1990, the German Democratic Republic ceased to exist, and its territory joined the federal Republic.
1:44:19
[SPEAKER_00]: That date, rather than the 9th of November, became the National holiday, and the reason is worth knowing.
1:44:27
[SPEAKER_00]: The 9th of November is a crowded date in German history.
1:44:32
[SPEAKER_00]: It is the date of the
1:44:36
[SPEAKER_00]: It is the date of Hitler's failed putch in Munich in 1923, and it is the date in 1938 of the nationwide pogrom against Jewish citizens.
1:44:49
[SPEAKER_00]: A country deciding which anniversary to celebrate looked at that list and chose a different day.
1:44:56
[SPEAKER_00]: What followed was harder than the pictures from that November night suggest.
1:45:01
[SPEAKER_00]: The Eastern economy contracted violently.
1:45:04
[SPEAKER_00]: Unemployment.
1:45:05
[SPEAKER_00]: a thing that had officially not existed arrived at once.
1:45:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Millions of people found that their qualifications, their work histories, and in some cases their entire professions, were now assessed by people from the West and found wanting.
1:45:20
[SPEAKER_00]: The population of the eastern states fell by well over a million through the 1990s, as young people moved West for work, and many towns are still shaped by that departure.
1:45:32
[SPEAKER_00]: A word was coined for the complicated affection that grew up afterward.
1:45:38
[SPEAKER_00]: for the objects and habits of the vanished country, an affection that was not usually a wish for the return of the starsy, but was very often a wish to be told that one's own life had not been worthless.
1:45:52
[SPEAKER_00]: The files were opened, which was a decision of enormous courage and enormous pain.
1:45:59
[SPEAKER_00]: Citizens gained the right to read their own Stasi records, and hundreds of thousands did, and found in them the reports of colleagues, friends, and in a number of well-documented cases, husbands and wives.
1:46:13
[SPEAKER_00]: Marriage is ended over those folders.
1:46:16
[SPEAKER_00]: Some people chose never to look, and the war, which everyone had wanted gone as fast as possible, was gone so thoroughly
1:46:29
[SPEAKER_00]: Today, a double row of cobblestones is set into the streets along much of the former course.
1:46:36
[SPEAKER_00]: A stretch beside the river was given to artists and became an open air gallery.
1:46:42
[SPEAKER_00]: At Burnour Strasse, where Eda Seekman jumped and where the church was demolished, there is a memorial that preserves one short section of the full border system
1:46:57
[SPEAKER_00]: and the inner wall and a watchtower so that visitors can see the depth of it rather than just the face.
1:47:05
[SPEAKER_00]: Berlin today is a single city of about three and a half million people and it's two halves have grown together unevenly and a person who knows what to look for can still read the border in the shape of the streetlights.
1:47:21
[SPEAKER_00]: the design of the pedestrian signals, the age of the trees, and the way certain roads still do not quite line up where they were rejoined.
1:47:32
[SPEAKER_00]: 28 years, two months, and 27 days.
1:47:36
[SPEAKER_00]: Built in a single night in August, opened in a single evening in November by an official who read the wrong line from a piece of paper he had been handed on his way out the door.
1:47:50
[SPEAKER_00]: if you are still awake.
1:47:51
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for staying.
1:47:53
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to leave you with one small thing before we go.
1:47:56
[SPEAKER_00]: When people tell the story of the Berlin Wall, they usually tell the ends of it.
1:48:02
[SPEAKER_00]: The night it went up and the night it came down.
1:48:05
[SPEAKER_00]: The soldier jumping the wire.
1:48:07
[SPEAKER_00]: and the crowd dancing on the concrete.
1:48:10
[SPEAKER_00]: Those are the two photographs and they are both real and between them there are 10,000 and some days that nobody photographs.
1:48:21
[SPEAKER_00]: Those are the days I hope you will take with you.
1:48:24
[SPEAKER_00]: A woman in a slab apartment in Marzan hanging, washing on a balcony, watching the lights of the western half of her own city in the distance.
1:48:34
[SPEAKER_00]: A student in Kreuzberg walking home at five in the morning passed a wall covered in other people's paint.
1:48:42
[SPEAKER_00]: A grandmother permitted to travel west for the first time in 20 years, standing in a department store food hall on the sixth floor, looking at the cheese.
1:48:53
[SPEAKER_00]: A conscript in a tower in the cold, counting the hours, two brothers who did not see each other between 1961 and 1989, and who then sat in a kitchen in November, and found, as people usually do, that they did not entirely know what to say.
1:49:12
[SPEAKER_00]: History mostly happens at that level, it is made of Tuesdays, and the thing that finally
1:49:24
[SPEAKER_00]: but several hundred thousand ordinary people walking around a ring road in limesig with candles in their hands, having decided all at once and separately that they had had enough of being careful.
1:49:39
[SPEAKER_00]: That is the end of tonight's episode of Sleepless History.
1:49:44
[SPEAKER_00]: If you found this useful then you can follow or subscribe wherever you are listening and you would
1:49:52
[SPEAKER_00]: new episodes arrive twice a week.
1:49:55
[SPEAKER_00]: There are many hundreds of hours in the archive.
1:49:59
[SPEAKER_00]: All of them equally is interesting.
1:50:01
[SPEAKER_00]: Sleep well.
1:50:02
[SPEAKER_00]: Good night.