In June of 1972, enroute to a summer job at the Polish National Academy of Sciences on the Baltic Sea, I stopped for a week in Berlin.
The Berlin Wall was unavoidable. Indeed, I was not interested in avoiding it. I did everything I possibly could to collide with it. It seemed at the time as the most singular and bizarre entity in the world on the face of the planet — a fantastic hybrid concocted by the nightmares of Franz Kafka and George Orwell.
The rise
The Second World War in Europe came to a literal and metaphorical end with the Russian, British, and American armies meeting in Berlin. The division of the city into sectors occupied by the respective powers (the French joined the other three countries in the Four Power Agreement) was an unsustainable arrangement, particularly given Stalin’s determination to keep Germany as a weak and divided political unit, unable to threaten the Soviet Union in the future. The political details of this are myriad and complicated and included the massive airlift of 1948 to break the Berlin Blockade, fabricated by Stalin to try and induce the western powers to leave the city (which failed), and the subsequent establishment of the German Democratic Republic (Deutsche Demokratische Republik, or DDR) in 1949.
All during the 1950s the continued “Sovietization” of the DDR caused a hemorrhage of people into the German Federal Republic (Bundesrepublik Deutschland, or BRD). Over that decade some 3.5 million Germans upped sticks from their homes in the eastern portions of the country and fled west. The Cold War prevented any resolution of this issue. Berlin, administered by all four occupying powers, and hence easier to defect to the west through, became a major portal through which this internal emigration drained. So, on Saturday August 12, 1961, Communist Party First Secretary Walter Ulbricht, secretly signed an agreement to create a wall between East and West Berlin. At midnight East German military and police swung into action, ripping up streets that spanned the Russian zone and those of the three other powers and stringing barbed wire along the 42 kilometres that separated the two sections of the city. So was born the Berlin Wall.
The Wall: The West
As soon as I arrived in Berlin, I gravitated to The Wall, as if drawn by some unseen magnet. I climbed up the parapets at viewing stations in West Berlin and gazed across the expanse of cement walls, mined no-man’s land, anti-tank traps, and watchtowers manned by machine-gun totting Stasi (Staatssicherheit) in grey-green uniforms and helmets looking singularly severe and grim. The so-called “death strip” on the east side of the barrier radiated a kind of silent menace — enter here and you die. It ran silent and arid as an empty vein through the city.
Former plazas crumbled in neglect, weeds growing between the cobblestones. Places that in the past had echoed with footfalls, shouted greetings, and newspaper boys hawking the day’s edition now stood eerily silent. No wrappers blew across the empty streets; no cigarette butts lay in the gutters. Even the pigeons, sparrows, and crows that happily flew from East to West Berlin — and then astonishingly back — seemed to avoid the empty expanses of the Berlin Wall, an alien and threatening environment even to the avian mind. Only an occasional butterfly fluttered in the no-man’s land, looking for an errant flower to nectar at.
Brandenburg Gate — at the very centre of the Berlin Wall — a place that begged for throngs of people surging through it — was one of the most eerie memorials to this bizarre political standoff — an evocative plaza replete with long history that stood mute and empty day after day. In baking in heat, in downpours, in the dead of night, in snowfalls … no one disturbed its utter emptiness and desolation.
And not just the wall itself, constructed to rend this city — and humanity — in twain. It was only some 11 years old when I was there. Walls of former buildings, facades still pockmarked with bullets, the gateways now blocked off, barred the way into no-man’s land. Near the wall there were entranceways that ran below the plazas into U-Bahn stations located underneath the wall. They had metal grills across them padlocked into place. I could still descend a few steps and peer into an unlit emptiness that had not echoed to a footstep for more than a decade.
And, indeed, when I rode the U-Bahn through the severed heart of Berlin, there were places where the subway from one station in West Berlin looped under the wall running through the east of the city. The train slowed as it entered stations now underneath East Berlin, but did not stop, nor did the doors open. I gazed at a dimly lit abandoned subway station, posters from 1961 still hanging, or peeling from the walls. The only people on the quays were a couple of Stasi guards carrying AK-47 machine guns. In the compartments we gazed out, slack-jawed with mute astonishment at this spectacle, while the guards ominously gazed in — a passing bubble of West Berlin speeding through the bowels of the East. A few minutes later we emerged in the West again, the doors opened, muzak played, people poured in and out. It was as if we had passed through a space and time warp for the span of ten minutes, entering another land and time, which, indeed we had.
At one point, in order to get a transit visa to pass through East Germany to Poland, I went to the Eastern German Consulate. This was located in East Berlin at Bahnhof Friedrichstraße. To get there, I again took the U-Bahn, which ran to the single East German subway station where one could get off. The doors opened and I emerged underneath the train station that housed a whole suite of East German offices that dealt with east-west matters, including the issuance of transit visas. I rode some escalators to the appropriate office in this building, which was hermetically sealed off from the rest of East Berlin. None of us who had exited the train could do more than talk with bureaucrats sitting, rather like bank tellers, behind glass walls. I filled out an application, passed my passport along with a suitable number of West German deutschmarks through the wicket to a clerk, waited a few minutes, and my passport came back under the glass with said visa. The young woman who had arranged this transaction and I gazed at one another like zoo animals through the glass, neither being sure who were the captives and who were the visitors.
But I went even further. I crossed into East Berlin.
The Wall: The East
It was then possible, not for German citizens, but for other foreign nationals, to get a day visa to visit East Berlin. So, one morning I showed up at the fabled “Checkpoint Charlie.” “You are leaving the American Sector!” said the signs in four languages as I walked through the checkpoint and to a small building, a living bubble in the death strip. This was manned by grim-looking East German officials in uniforms who took my passport into another room while I sat in a claustrophobic transit hall. One couldn’t help but feel nervous. Some 15 minutes later they emerged with a slip in my passport that allowed me, after exchanging a requisite number of West German deutschmarks into East German ones at an extortionate rate, to enter East Berlin. I was warned that I could not leave the perimetre of the city, and that my visitor’s visa expired at midnight. If I hadn’t returned by then I was subject to arrest. Quaking slightly, I walked out the other end of the building, passed the armed sentries and the anti-tank obstacles to prevent a vehicle from storming the gate, and emerged into East Berlin.
Compared to the garish, colourful, consumerist spectacle that was West Berlin, the East was a gray facsimile. Colour was a scarcer commodity. Throughout the city there were gray stone and cinderblock buildings, an uncommonly large number of which were still scarred by bullets and mortar shrapnel, as if the Battle of Berlin had only just ended (and, indeed, it had only been 27 years since the guns had fallen silent). The streets of West Berlin were awash with capitalism; fleets of Volkswagens and Mercedes racing from home to office; trucks, trams, and trains; the gleaming cars of the S-Bahn that ran on the surface) In East Berlin, far fewer vehicles patrolled the streets, many of them the noisy exhaust-spewing, two-cylinder Trabants. Diesel-smelling busses were the commoner mode of transport.
I wandered along the Unter den Linden, on of the most famous boulevards of central Europe, much storied and much travelled since its birth in the 16th century. Young men and women walked arm in arm, carried string bags with various goods and produce. Fashions seemed 10 years out of date, but people, young and old, were much the same as they were a stone’s throw away across a wall.
I passed Bahnhof Friedrichstraße on the Admiralspalast where I had been just a couple of days previously, and hermetically sealed it was. Now, in East Berlin, there was no possible way for ordinary civilians to enter the building. Only the carefully screened workers who staffed the offices could pass into or out of the building.
Even though I rubbed elbows with East Berliners all day (I stopped at a small restaurant/pub for a lunch of beer and sausage) I still felt as if I were in the zoo looking at them through invisible glass. I couldn’t break through. My German, it is true, was rather rudimentary, but still there seemed to be a hesitancy. I’m sure my clothes betrayed the fact that I was from the West. I was still an odd, colourful tropical fish swimming through their world — an alien from another environment.
I stayed into the night, wanting to savour every minute in this alien land, wandering on dimly lit streets, traversing Marx-Engels Platz, past the Palast der Republik, looking up at the towering Fernsehturm TV tower, illuminated and blinking in the night sky. At about 10:00 p.m. I started getting jittery lest something delay me and walked briskly back to Checkpoint Charlie. Signs warned that it was strictly forbidden to photograph the checkpoint from the east side. I entered the same bleak transit lounge, saw similarly grim faces who repeatedly looked at my passport photo, then at me, then at the passport photo, then at me … and finally allowed me to re-enter West Berlin. I was relieved to come in from the cold.
The Fall
It’s now been 25 years since the Berlin Wall fell when, on November 9, 1989, and almost by accident, Günter Schabowski, the East German party boss announced new regulations for crossing the East-West border. Asked when these would take effect he replied, “Immediately, without delay,” an announcement that was interpreted as meaning that the borders were open to everyone. Vast crowds of East Berliners (Ossies) gathered at the six checkpoints between East and West Berlin, and after frantic telephone calls back and forth, the border guards relented and, at least metaphorically, the Berlin Wall came tumbling down. Indeed in the following days, both East and West Berliners did their level best, to level it with hands and sledgehammers.
And not only did the wall fall; with it fell much of the Soviet edifice, of which it was the most visible, and notorious symbol. With the span of a handful of years, the East Bloc penumbra of the USSR had entirely melted away and the Soviet Union itself shattered into its constituent republics. The fall of the Berlin Wall marked not only the dissolution of an empire, but the end of a nightmare.
Postscript
Now that the Wall has gone, only small fragments of it remaining in situ and as museum artifacts, what lessons might there be in this colossal monument to human folly and intransigence?
1989 was the era of Regan and Thatcher, and the western nations crowed about how we had “won” the Cold War. In truth, it’s not so much that capitalism won, but that communism lost. Rather than replacing the exploitative structures of free-market capitalism — as Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky had advocated — the system they created — nurtured by Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov, and the vast and nameless nomenclatura and Gulag that worked at their behest — was even worse. The exploitation of workers was even more ruthless, the degradation of the environment even worse, the brutality of the regime even more savage, the emptiness of the ideology even more hollow, and the material benefits even more depauperate than anything produced under capitalism. The old joke in the east went:
Q. What’s the difference between capitalism and communism?
A. Capitalism is the exploitation of people by others. In communism, it’s the other way around.
The citizens of the East Bloc recoiled against this en masse and — thankfully — the walls came tumbling down.
As it transpires, what they found on the other side was far from perfect, and getting worse. As documented in rich, empirical, and analytical detail by Thomas Piketty in his monumental Capital in the Twenty-first Century the era from the end of the Second World War in 1945, until the end of the 1970s was amongst the most economically fruitful and egalitarian periods since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, largely because of the enormous destruction of wealth in both world wars and the Great Depression, and also because of the Keynesian economic policies adopted after the end of the Second World War to rebuild that shattered face of the planet. When I was in Berlin in 1972 the view from east to west over the wall couldn’t have been any rosier.
However, since the rise of neoliberalism, championed by Ronald Regan in the USA, Margaret Thatcher in the U.K., and their legions of corporate, military, political, and economic supporters, cheerleaders, and acolytes, inequality has grown with alacrity. [See my article, Thomas Piketty: Economics Transfigured for more information on this topic.] Societies in almost the entire developed world have been becoming markedly less democratic, more unequal, less egalitarian, and less meritocratic. Corporate capitalism has become much less regulated, inequality much more stark, the concentration of wealth much more acute, democracy much more attenuated, the public sector much more diminished, and — if all of this were not enough — the future habitability of the planet is threatened by climate change.
Walls have not disappeared either; there now being a fence that separates the United States from Mexico and the shattered fragments of Palestine from the state of Israel.
Have we learned anything?
The German philosopher, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel — who incidentally lived and taught in Berlin from 1818 until his death in 1831 — wrote:
“What experience and history teaches us is that people and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.”
There are too many instances that prove Hegel right, although perhaps there are slim hopes that we can occasionally prove him wrong. Politics should unite people, not divide them. Ideologies that become impermeable membranes — to the flow of ideas as well as the passage of people — are pathology, and ought to be demolished. Ultimately, it was the tens of thousands of people gathered at the Berlin Wall on the night of November 9, 1989 that overwhelmed the Stasi troops … who finally opened the gates. The walls of neoliberalism still stand throughout the globe, indeed efforts are underway to reinforce them with more climate denial, fossil-fuel, free-trade, market deregulation, tax cuts, corporate merger, union-busting, race-to-the-bottom mortar. Only a prodigious chorus ofvoices and a gathering of many bodies will cause this to change. As Miya Yoshitani says in Naomi Klein’s recent book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate:
“We can’t sit this one out, not because we have too much to lose but because we have too much to gain.”
Christopher Majka is an ecologist, environmentalist, policy analyst, and writer. He is the director of Natural History Resources and Democracy: Vox Populi.
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