Behind the Berlin Wall: East Germany and the Frontiers of Power by Patrick Major

Author:Patrick Major [Major, Patrick]
Language: rus
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2011-03-20T13:20:21+00:00

160

Behind the Berlin Wall

Others have compared the numbing process to that of an amputee, as Berliners developed a ‘phantom pain’ and symptoms of ‘hospitalism’.³⁵ One of the rather obvious healing factors was geographic distance from the Wall. Saxons were assigned border duty because they supposedly did not have the same personal ties as Berliners. Away from the direct centre of operations, out of sight could become out of mind. When the local party interviewed residents on Leuna’s housing estates, several hours south-west of Berlin, responses were relatively conformist, praising the end of economic exploitation and espionage. Only those who had relatives actively complained. One teacher talked of the closure being ‘quite disruptive’, since he had relatives on the other side, but qualified himself that it was all for the sake of peace. A housewife explained matter-of-factly that ‘every bastard who bust up with his wife scarpered’. Only a few responded along the lines that it was politically correct, if inhumane.³⁶ Thus it is clear that distance did not mean indifference, but even East Berliners grew apart from West Berlin.

As one woman recalled, ‘the high-rise buildings towering on the other side appeared completely unreal as if on another planet’.³⁷ By architectural sleight of hand, town planners also built a screen of buildings along the Leipzigerstraße, to shield downtown East Berlin from the city lights and political message boards of the West.³⁸

Another part of the answer is generational. For those old enough to remember a united Germany (anyone over twenty-five), or Germany before dictatorship (anyone over forty), the building of the Wall had a marked effect; we have already seen that national sentiments were still strong during 1961. It is more difficult to assess the ‘middle’ generation. There were certainly opportunities for young adults who had remained in the GDR after the great 1950s brain-drain.

The expansion of university education began to tell in the 1960s, creating some system loyalty among socialist careerists. Yet it was precisely the eighteen to thirty group who had had most contact with the West. Less conflicted

was the successor generation. Dorothee Wierling’s collective biography of the cohort born in 1949 covers perhaps the youngest group aware of a before

and after the Wall; they were eleven or twelve when it went up. Yet these

interviews reveal an adolescent generation susceptible to SED propaganda who recall confusion and panic, but were very hazy about the political implications of border closure at the time.³⁹ Then there were the nearly 6 million East ³⁵ Markierung des Mauerverlaufs: Hearing am 14. Juni 1995: Dokumentation (Berlin: Senatsverwaltung für Bau- und Wohnungswesen, 1995), 11.

³⁶ July 1963 survey in LAM, BPA SED Halle, IVA2/9.01/29.

³⁷ Feversham and Schmidt, Berliner Mauer, 121.

³⁸ Alan Balfour, Berlin: The Politics of Order 1737–1989 (New York: Rizzoli, 1990), 204.

³⁹ Dorothee Wierling, Geboren im Jahr Eins: Der Jahrgang 1949 in der DDR: Versuch einer Kollektivbiographie (Berlin: Links, 2002), 180–4. See also Thomas Davey, Generation Divided: German Children and the Berlin Wall (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994).

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