I Hated That Wall

Summary: Thirty years ago today, as I finished a speech in Zurich, I heard that the students had toppled the first section of the Berlin Wall . I boarded the first flight to West Berlin, a twin engine propeller plane. I remember looking out the window as we flew in over the wall while listening listening to Tina Turner’s “Steamy Windows” on my Sony Walkman. Landed, bought a hammer, joined the others breaking the wall into pieces. 

I hated that wall. I had lived in West Berlin in 1968. My apartment was the upper floor of an old at house at 68 Steinträgerweg in a small village called Alt Buckow, 200 meters from the Wall, which means 250 meters from the first guard tower. The Wall at that point was a grotesque combination of a tall wire fence, then a mine field, then towers manned 24/7 by rotating pairs of guards with machine guns at 50 yard intervals, then Steel barriers to stop people crashing through with their cars. I could walk along the edge of the fence and wave at the guards but they never waved back. At night I would be woken by sirens, searchlights and machine gun fire; someone else had tried to slip across. At that point, some 500 people were killed trying to get to the other side of that wall.

My sharpest memory of 11/9/89 was standing beside one of the gaping holes in the wall, hammering away while talking with an armed East German guard standing just on the other side of the wall. He looked a little embarrassed that he was literally on the wrong side of the story. He did nothing to interfere as we chipped away at the concrete. He tried his best not to look happy. I am holding a small piece of that concrete in my hand as I type this post.

People today seem to have forgotten what it means to have a totalitarian government. I never will. 

JR