Since there are numerous mentions of the anniversary of the Berlin wall I thought I’d share my experiences. In 1961 I was an exchange student in Paris and decided to go to see the wall for myself. (Berlin in December was the coldest I have ever been.)
Passing through Checkpoint Charlie I entered Communist territory for the first time. It was as I’d expected: the universal hopeless shabbiness of the city and the people. I spoke with as many as I could. No one criticized the regime, of course. One old man said, gratefully, “Sie geben uns alles was wir brauchen.” (They give us everything we need.) I maliciously asked another man where THEIR Kurfürstendamm, the Fifth Avenue of West Berlin, was. He replied, abashed, “Well, we don’t have anything EXACTLY like that.”
I visited a few bookstores, noting the endless shelves of works by Marx, Lenin, and the then East German leader, Ulbricht. I was hoping that they might have Mises’s Socialism, misled by the title, but they weren’t fools—they knew their enemy. I had a crummy lunch at one of their elite restaurants, and decided to go back. Still on East German soil I encountered a soldier.
Idiot that I was—I could have been detained for trying to subvert their military—I looked him in the face and said, “Komm mit.” (Come along.) He replied, “Kann nicht.” (I can’t.) I sauntered back past Checkpoint Charlie, feeling a burden lifting from my shoulders, and went home.
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That’s a great story. I have spent many hours in the East Germany, after the wall came down. It was not so dreary as you describe, attitudes were getting better, but the infrastructure was really shabby and the Traband was a joke. West Germany has spent huge sums integrating the East, but there’s still a lot of “bad” attitudes.
that great chronicle! I hope that Germany has already forgotten that part of its history.
They haven’t, which is why they’re doing so much better then the rest of Europe. I was there this summer and was shocked by all the bullet scarred buildings and monuments. Speckled with memorials, they are much wearier of socialism and better off for it. I just wish everyone else could learn from their tragedy before they induce more of the same.
I went thru Check-Point Charlie in November of 1988, exactly a year before the wall came down.
I had spent part of the day touring around and seeing the West-side. In the afternoon I went thru and was shocked to see how rather drab it was compared to the West.
There were fewer cars and those that were around were small and crappy. The people’s dress was much heavier and darker (completely functional), not like the lighter and brighter clothes in the West. The buildings seemed to all need a cleaning or were prefabbed in concrete little to no architectural flourishes. Even the old more architectural interesting buildings seemed mired in gray.
One thing that stood out profusely was that the street lights had bright new walk/don’t walk lights. Since they were so new and had new black glossy paint and bright new bulbs they really stood out against the dreariness. It was surreal.
I left at dusk and one would have thought that the streets were going to be rolled up, as dramatically fewer people and cars were out. On the West-side I was immediately confronted with the hustle and bustle and bright lights of a thriving community.
To top it off, I had made some new friends while touring the “needle” tower and wanted to invite them to the Ku-dame for that night’s fun. Obviously they could not go with me.
Quite an experience.
Wonderful recollection. I went thru Checkpoint Charlie just after the fall of the wall, IN 1990–as shown in some pictures in my post Hoppe on East vs. West Germany and the Fall of the Wall, I and two buddies chipped off pieces of the wall. We went a few miles down from checkpoint charlie where the wall was still up, but softer, and used large rocks to knock pieces off. We carried them in our backpacks till we returned home and gave some of them out as gifts. Like idiots we hopped over the gate into East Germany, and when an East German patrol came by we scurried and hid behind an abandoned gate tower–three moron law students looking for trouble.
Eventually we went into East Berlin and stayed the night in some hotel that used to be nice. I remember they could not take credit card since they were not set up for that. The city was grimy and depressing. It looked like a war zone.
In 1977, my father was stationed in Berlin with the US Army. My memories of East Germany, albeit from a small child’s perspective, were indeed grim. My grandmother hailed from Vienna, Austria, and my mother spent her first 15 years moving about West Germany, which most likely contributed to my personal perspective. I vividly recall soldiers boarding trains and demanding “ihre papiere bitte” and checking underneath the cars for stowaways. I also recall an incident at Checkpoint Charlie when our sad little Opal broke down at the gate, resulting in a huge drawn out bureaucratic debacle. Watching Die Mauer come down on that day in 1989 was singlehandedly the most important event of my young life to that point.
Thanks for sharing such a memorable experience. I wonder what Eugen Richter would have thought.
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