Sixty-five years ago today, the Berlin Wall was built—virtually overnight.
At the time, Berlin was divided into four zones occupied by the victorious Allies, but the city was administered jointly by all four powers. They all viewed with concern the fact that thousands were leaving the GDR every day to go to West Germany. The GDR was being drained of its people, and this threatened to destabilize the balance between East and West.
William Fulbright, an influential senator from South Dakota who advised then-President John F. Kennedy, sympathized with the Soviet Union. Two weeks before the Wall was built, he told NBC that a wall could bring peace to the border and was better than a new war. Many see this as an American signal to the Soviets to actually build the Wall—which was erected by Germans loyal to Moscow, led by Walter Ulbricht.
The Wall cut through not only streets and houses, but also subway lines, streetcars, and railroad tracks. Berliners on both sides lost their jobs overnight.
You can read about what it was like to live in Berlin immediately after the Wall was built in “Unser West-Berlin” (Our West Berlin), in the first story by Ralph Blumenthal, who was a young reporter in Berlin at the time. For those interested in the political history of the Cold War, we recommend “Berlin in the Cold War” by Thomas Flemming.
The First Brick in The Wall
Four weeks before the Berlin crisis broke last summer, there was nothing in the West Berlin atmosphere to suggest an awareness of what was coming. The sun was hot, the tans were deep, the clothes were bright and fashionable and the people seemed happy and healthy.
They would not say they were afraid of their landsmen, on the east side of the Brandenburg Gate. “It is only politics which separates us,” they said. “Besides, how can one be afraid every day for twelve years? You get tired of fear.”
Kurfürstendamm, the main West Berlin artery, nicknamed “Kudamm” by the practical Germans, confidently stretched its two miles of Oriental carpet shops, silversmiths, camera stores and Mercedes Benz showrooms. The fine wares in the glass display cases on the wide sidewalk bespoke the prosperity. The twisted, burnt-out steeple of the Kaiser Wilhelm Gedächtniskirche dominating the east end of the Kudamm has come to be accepted by the people and they even tell visitors that they keep it as a warning to themselves.
But the historic German characteristics haven’t changed. The first German I met was on the train from Amsterdam. He was a blond, blue-eyed seven-year-old boy whose father owned a large farm in West Germany. The kid could rattle off production figures like a stormtrooper. When he learned I was an American he couldn’t contain his curiosity. “How many men,” he wanted to know, “were there in the FBI? Do they wear uniforms? Do they carry guns? Pistols or rifles?”
At the East-West border check, he showed an astounding political awareness. Throughout the “orientation” lecture about East Germany that each visitor is compelled to sit through at the border, he shouted “Propaganda!” so loud and continuously that I felt sure the East German police woman would have us all arrested.
The West Germans were not thinking of the next war and they were trying hard to forget the last one: West Berlin helps them forget. The few remaining bomb ruins are rapidly being replaced by modern projects and developments. The mass rowhouses built during the 1930s are being hidden by the newer constructions and therefore stand out less ominously.
But there are still those who can’t forget. They are haunted by guilt, troubled by nightmares. When I signed the register in an old but stately rooming house, the landlord looked at my name and, apparently feeling that some sort of explanation was necessary, said to me in German, “I helped many Jews during the war. I kept them here. I did.”
The East Berliners seemed no more aware of the impending crisis than their western brothers. However, it is harder for them to forget the last war. About fifty per cent of the Soviet sector is still in ruins.
The East Berlin counterpart of the Kudamm is Stalinallee, formerly Frankfurter Allee. Although its shops don’t approach those of the Kudamm with respect to quality merchandise and luxuries, the avenue itself is monumental, each wide sidewalk being divided by a mall with trees. However, through the archways of the impressive facades, the ruins behind are visible.
The West Berliners have constructed an elaborate pleasure dome dedicated to the “laugh, drink and make merry” principle which is another reaction, or non-reaction, to their problems. The name of the nightclub is Resi. Each table there is equipped with a small telephone connecting to the other tables. Those people too shy to call others can send messages to them via pneumatic tubes. When the phones start ringing and the tubes start clicking more than one guest can—for the moment—free himself of the fear that waits outside the door.
I wrote this article in September 1961 when I was beginning my senior year at the City College of New York. As news editor of the student paper, the City College Campus, I assigned myself to report on my junior summer abroad --my first overseas trip. Of course, it included an ancestral visit to Berlin, where my family had deep roots. As I then wrote, Berlin was enjoying a lovely summer—once called “Hitler weather”—with little to suggest the upheaval just around the corner: a hateful Communist wall that would split the city, east and western Europe, and the entire world. Nor did I imagine then how well I would come to know divided Berlin as a foreign correspondent of The New York Times in 1968-69, and later as a researcher of my family’s happy and tragic history in a reunited city.
My father, Hans Blumenthal, was born in Berlin in the last month of the last year of the 19th century. His two older sisters left Germany in the 1920s as early Zionist settlers in the British mandate of Palestine, establishing flourishing new roots of the family in what was to become Israel. Hans, too, fled home as soon as possible, for reasons I never learned.Like many patriotic German Jews, he was quick, even at 17, to rally to the fatherland in the Great War, becoming a stretcher-bearer in an ambulance unit on the Western Front. Luckily, he was captured by the British in 1918 and survived the carnage as a POW. His best childhood friend, Szilard Diamant, had a younger sister, Rosa, born in 1902, which is how my father met the love of his life –my mother-to-be -- whom he married in 1929. With enviable foresight, they promptly sailed for the U.S., arriving just in time for the stock market crash and the Great Depression but well before Hitler might have sent them fleeing (or not, too rooted in their homeland to escape the Holocaust.) I grew up in the German-Jewish enclave of Inwood in northernmost Manhattan in the care of my German-speaking Omi, my mother’s mother –also a Berliner and, by 1934, a refugee from Nazism. Two of her brothers soon followed.
Like the stupid son in the Passover Haggadah, I didn’t ask them enough questions and had to piece together their histories later -- what little I could. I didn’t do much digging on my maiden voyage to Berlin, or even a few years later, posted to Bonn as a Times correspondent. I arrived just days after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968. Germans on both sides of the Iron Curtain were in a panic, along with much of the rest of the world. Would the Russians keep rolling west, triggering World War III? What about divided Berlin, inside the Soviet zone? Times bureau chief David Binder suggested I fly back and forth, in case the Russians were shooting down western planes. Great idea, I agreed, but then I might not be the one writing the story.
I did make regular road trips to Berlin and East Germany. Until I was detained for interrogation. In Leipzig, where I’d gone for a twice-yearly trade fair that offered a revealing window on the reclusive Communist bloc, I had written about rare anti-Soviet protests that broke out in the German Democratic Republic after the invasion of Czechoslovakia. My handler had warned me the story wouldn’t sit well with the authorities, and it didn’t. Then, too, the Volkspolizei had found, crumpled in my wallet, a suspicious slip of paper reading “Rother, antenna.” It was a long-forgotten note to ask my Bonn landlord about TV reception, but it reeked of espionage. They finally let me go but from then on, over the protests of my editors and the American embassy, I was barred from Berlin. So when my parents bravely overcame a vow never to return to their homeland and paid me a visit in Bonn, their native city was left off the itinerary.
I didn’t get back to Berlin for more than forty years, long after my parents died, the Soviet Union and the wall fell, and Germany reunited. In 2011, I returned to a very different capital city with our two daughters on a roots tour. This time, we visited the apartment building at 49 Guenzelstrasse in the Wilmersdorf section where, I had learned, my mother’s extended family had lived since at least 1919. That included my mother’s older brother, my uncle Szilard, and his wife, Hella, from Oswiecim (Auschwitz to the Germans) until 1939 when, his metals business having been been “Aryanized” and his Czech residency papers having expired, they fled to Slovakia.
That’s where they were rounded up in 1942 and put aboard trains to the east, Szilard to disappear, murdered enroute or in Majdanek or Bergen-Belsen, or who-knows-where?, and Hella to land in a Sobibor work camp from which she miraculously managed to escape, surviving the war with fake Catholic papers in Warsaw and emigrating to Australia in the 1950s with a new husband and stepson.
Having pieced together that much more of my family history, I returned to Berlin once again in 2015, this time with my wife, to re-visit 49 Güntzelstrasse and lay Stolpersteine for Szilard and Hella, a story I was to tell in The New York Times, “In Berlin, Unraveling a Family Mystery.”
For those interested in the political history of the Cold War, we recommend “Berlin in the Cold War” by Thomas Flemming.
