The Latest at Goethe

The wall was always an important theme for Thomas Brussig. In his essay in the recently published book on the Mauerreise, the writer also deals with the dead-sure border, which he forbade himself to think too deeply about in those days – to keep from ending up in prison or a lunatic asylum.

I have to admit: I can hardly bear to hear myself talk about the Berlin Wall any more. The Twentieth Anniversary of the Fall of The Wall was only last year, and I still have a very dry throat from all the interviews. There was always someone in an editorial office somewhere with the idea: let’s talk to a writer about it; with one from the East. Three names came up. There was no telephone number for the first one – the second one was travelling – and so they always ended up calling on me.

I am not completely without blame as the wall is actually my theme; it has always been, right from the start. While it was standing it held a morbid fascination for me, and my interest was coupled with a certain sort of shamelessness, like someone interested in animal carcasses. The Berlin Wall and the secure border between the Germans were both devised by people; they were built and guarded by people over decades, against the will of the majority. (How people organise against their own best interests, and through their actions clearly disregard their right to collective free will, was a question that later drove me to study sociology.) And the fact that they (the state authorities) could simply do this to us, prevent us from ever seeing the greater part of this wonderful world, I felt to be a great misfortune. So great, that at some point I forbade myself to think more deeply about it, as the swirl of emotions such as impotence and helplessness inevitably ended in depressive moods. It was clear to me: if I take my situation seriously then I will either end up in prison or a lunatic asylum.

The standard phrase “I never thought the wall would fall!” could have originated with me. And it was because there were so many of us who felt like this that the feelings of joy were so eruptive when it fell. There is probably no other historical event that so unexpectedly released such a mass of joyous feelings as the fall of the Berlin Wall. This lends it a permanent and global fascination, and pictures of the fall of the wall belong to a collective world memory. World news is usually filled with tragedy, whether brought about by storms, assassinations or wars. However, even propitious events such as the liberation of France by the Allies or an election victory of Obamaian dimensions, while longed for, were not unexpected events. That is why the night the wall fell is genuinely unique, a superlative. The opening up of the wall was not decided at the negotiation table: instead it was brought about by the many individuals that called themselves “the people”. It was only with the fall of the wall, as I experienced the feelings of happiness that must have lain dormant in me the whole time, that I fully realised how sad and frustrated the wall had made me. And I was only twenty-four when it fell.

I had no idea where Kreuzberg was

It is easy to say that it is the destiny of walls “that they fall”. Initially – and for quite some time – they stand and fulfil their purpose. The Berlin Wall stood from 1961 to 1989. I was born in Berlin in 1964. The city was divided by an insurmountable border, but this border did not run along a feature, such as a river, but straight through the middle of the city. There where streets where one side was East Berlin, and the other side West Berlin. There were blocks of flats where the entrance was in East Berlin, but where the West lay behind the rear-facing windows. There is the famous documentary footage of an old woman attempting to lower herself into the West from the first-floor window of such a building. From above, East German policeman are trying to pull her back into the flat, on the East, by her wrists. From below, West Berliners reach for her ankles to pull her down, into the West.


These houses were cleared some time after the building of the wall, to prevent a repeat of such spectacular images. I recall a sporting companion back in 1980, who, together with his family, was furious at having to vacate their flat in the border area in order to comply with a new regulation which proscribed a minimum distance between a flat’s windows and the so-called border security installations of 12 metres. At the same time, however, the West Berlin Underground travelled beneath East Berlin at five-minute intervals. I noticed this as I heard an Underground train rumbling beneath me in the Rosenthalerstrasse once – at a location, according to the Underground map, where, actually, no Underground ran. I noticed grilles, which looked like the ventilation grilles from underground shafts, at locations where none of the two Underground lines I knew of actually ran. The same applied to the barricaded descending stairways that one occasionally encountered surrounded by steel railings, which I was familiar with at the entrance to Underground stations. I took it in, but without putting two and two together.

The city maps of the “Berlin” that I knew (that is “Berlin, the capital city of the German Democratic Republic (GDR)”, i.e. East Berlin), showed the border, but beyond it the city appeared to descend into a single derelict lot, a huge wasteland without streets, stations, parks or museums. Only the River Spree was permitted to display its course behind the border. As the wall suddenly fell I had no idea where Kreuzberg, Wedding or Zoo stations were. I had a motorbike and cruised up and down the city motorway – relying on my intuition – and eventually found myself in pitch-black Grunewald. At Friedrichstrasse, a transfer station, I boarded the suburban railway to West Berlin. However, I didn’t get onto the jam-packed train heading for Wannsee (what did I want in Wannsee?). Instead, smart as I was, I sat in a quite empty train which left from a quite empty platform – only to arrive at a station called Humboldthain.

It wasn’t possible to have the GDR without the wall

Didn’t the wall have anything good about it? Spontaneous answer: no. However, my parents described to me how they experienced the building of the wall with a sense of relief. The GDR was weakened by the open border – due to the smuggling of subsidised goods into the West or the poaching of specialist personnel. I was also familiar with such stories from GDR propaganda, although there was a core of truth to them: the open border was a problem. And by closing the border, the vast majority of the GDR population was to experience an improvement in their standard of living. At the beginning this was actually the case. However, the wall increasingly became an instrument of naked power. It wasn’t as if the country was closed off and all the problems were solved “amongst ourselves”, instead the wall was to be used to crush all insubordination. Criticism of the wall was considered synonymous with the call to overthrow the state. In this respect the powerful were quite correct: whoever wanted the GDR must also want the wall. It wasn’t possible to have the GDR without the wall. And as the GDR understood itself to be the better German state, as a peace state in which “the exploitation of people by people has been abolished”, the wall acquired a strange veneer of progress. It was incorporated in the good, the beneficent of this world: only in the propaganda, however.



Incidentally, the wall was not called a wall here, but the “state border of the GDR” or a “border security installation” or “anti-fascist protection wall”. The last term in particular, with its attempt to imbue the naked, grey concrete (from which white paint was peeling off in places) with something positive, demonstrated a pretension to glorification, spilling over into the poetic. However, with the coining of this term, it was clear that the wall was sacrosanct: anti-fascism was state doctrine in the GDR, and in as far as something was titled an anti-fascist accomplishment – although it had as much to do with anti-fascism as shoes have to do with beer – any criticism of the wall could, ultimately, be countered with the accusation of fascism. And so the term “anti-fascist protection wall” became a term tinged with irony, to the extent that in the 1980s there was even a punk band that called itself Antifaschistischer Schutzwall (Anti-fascist Protection Wall) – while other bands were called DEKAdance or Kadavre Exquise or Schleimkeim (Slimy Germs) or Paranoia.

In return, the word “wall” became taboo, the un-word. It should be noted that in the German language there are two words for wall: mauer, meaning the wall as a barrier and wand, the surface of a wall. I recall a detailed and quite favourable synopsis of the history of the English rock band, Pink Floyd, in Germany’s most important popular music magazine Melodie und Rhythmus. Pink Floyd’s double album The Wall was translated as Die Wand. Oops, were they all agreed that there was only the one Mauer (i.e. Berlin Wall) – and as Pink Floyd’s The Wall certainly was not referring to it, it wasn’t necessary to translate “Wall” as “Mauer”? Or was this a form of political correctness under the GDR banner?

Read in the second part of Thomas Brussig’s essay how the writer discovered the shorter end of Sonnenallee and why it’s permissible to make jokes about the wall – today.