It is 50 years since the division of Berlin – but those who were most affected by the wall now guard its memory
AT ABOUT 1am on August 13th, 1961, Berlin’s city centre was plunged into darkness. The barbed wire was unspooled, the bricks piled high, and the era of division began.
Today, exactly half a century later, Berlin recalls the 28-year Cold War division and the vanished Berlin Wall. Official ceremonies began at midnight in Berlin’s Reconciliation Chapel on the former death strip, with a marathon reading – broadcast on national radio – of biographies of almost 200 victims of the wall.
The chapel is located on the Bernauer Strasse, home to many of the wall’s first victims – like 58-year-old Ida Siekmann, who lived alone in a third floor apartment on Bernauer Strasse 48. She woke on August 13th to the news that, for “security reasons”, East German authorities had sealed the border to West Berlin.
The closure of the border, in reality to staunch a massive flow of refugees and skilled workers to the west, took place along Berlin’s old administrative borders, with drastic consequences for Bernauer Strasse residents. It meant that many of their apartment buildings stood in socialist East Berlin, while the pavement in front of the buildings was in capitalist West Berlin.
Shocking television images flashed around the world of people flinging themselves out of windows to escape.
What the television cameras did not record were the hundreds of residents who stayed behind, like Ida Siekmann. Unsure what the new border meant she stayed at home until, on August 18th, she had her answer: East German border police arrived to nail shut the ground floor apartment door and brick up all the windows facing West Berlin.
Four days later she decided to flee. At 6.50am she gathered a few possessions and, before the fire brigade could open their rescue sheet below, flung herself from the third floor. She hit the ground and was rushed to hospital, but died hours later, one day short of her 59th birthday.
“The pool of blood on the pavement was covered with sand,” an East German border guard recorded in his file.
Hours after the Berlin Wall had claimed its first victim, West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer and Berlin mayor Willy Brandt visited the street to show their moral support, but could promise nothing.
Today, when Germany’s political VIPs arrive once more on the Bernauer Strasse, residents will smile politely and wait for them to leave again.
“They come on this day to remember, but we’re always concerned that they want to co-opt it for their own political ends,” said Elke Kielberg, a pensioner with grey hair and sad eyes, who has spent her life here. “They remember once a year, we always remember.”
Nearly every weekday at noon, Kielberg and other members of the Lutheran congregation gather to remember wall victims in the Reconciliation Chapel: an oval clay chamber surrounded by a wooden slat structure.
Behind the decade-old chapel’s altar, visible through a glass floor tile, are the foundations of the old Reconciliation Church. Built in 1894, it stood empty for two decades in the Cold War no-man’s land until the East German authorities demolished it in 1985.
On the back wall of the new chapel hangs a heavy oak cross and a Last Supper altar relief rescued from the old church before demolition, though not before the faces of Jesus and several disciples had been chiselled away.
In the last two decades the Bernauer Strasse chapel and the central Berlin Wall memorial next door – one of the few surviving stretches of the Cold War border – have staged a countless number of Germany’s wreath-and-speech rituals. It’s a chance for Berlin politicians to hide their continued uneasiness at remembering the city’s division. That uneasiness is clear when you realise neither the chapel nor the memorial’s existence was a given.
In the 1990 unification treaty, politicians on both sides promised the Bernauer Strasse site would be preserved as a memorial to the wall. But when, in June 1990, the bulldozers had moved in, it was the local Lutheran pastor who raised the alarm.
“Pastor Fischer called me and I went immediately with a copy of the document to the head of the demolition team to explain the situation,” remembered Helmut Trotnow, then an employee of the German Historical Museum. “To my great surprise he was very co-operative, and the demolition crew moved on. The wall memorial on the Bernauer Strasse was saved, the historical authenticity retained.”
After 28 years living in the shadow of the hated wall it is the courageous Bernauer Strasse residents, not politicians, who have become the guardians of its memory. “We are just thankful that the division of our country, and our street, has passed,” said Elke Kielberg. “I had such happy memories of the old church, we had so many objects from it, that we simply refused to allow the past be forgotten.”