Scaling the Berlin Wall

The Wall went up on August 13, 1961. The communist party leader of the time, Walter Ulbricht, saw it as the solution to his single most embarrassing problem: the flight of East Germans to the West, who were at the time leaving at the rate of some one thousand people a day. Historians know that the Allies could have prevented its construction and perhaps, thereby, changed history. Soldiers erecting the barrier—at first no more than a few strands of barbed wire—were not supplied with ammunition; Russian tank crews were ordered to withdraw if confronted. But the pugnacious Soviet premier Nikita S. Khrushchev, the man who threatened to “bury” the West and banged his shoe on the podium at the United Nations, knew what he was doing. At a small and jovial dinner party the night before, he tipped a small gathering of top Russian military leaders to his plans, clearly savoring the moment. “We’re going to close Berlin,” he crowed with his trademark gap-toothed grin. “We’ll just put up serpentine barbed wire and the West will stand there, like dumb sheep.” And it did, fearing a fight that might have gone nuclear.

Over the years, stone slabs and masonry replaced the barbed wire. A second parallel wall went up, one hundred yards farther in. Houses in between were demolished, creating a no-man’s-land that became known as the death strip. Much of it was covered with raked gravel or turned earth, making it easy to track would-be escapees; it was mined and booby-trapped. Border guards patrolled along an inner track, often accompanied by attack dogs; others watched from any of 302 towers. Almost until the end, their orders were to shoot to kill, on sight. Reports vary, but as many as 192 people died trying to escape over the Wall; roughly a thousand were killed trying to flee over the far longer East German border.

It worked as Ulbricht hoped: between 1949 and 1962, 2.5 million East Germans fled. Between 1962 and 1989, that number fell to about five thousand. Overnight, the forty-two thousand square miles of the German Democratic Republic became a prison. Transportation and communication links were cut. Bustling streets and lively sidewalks in the heart of metropolitan Berlin suddenly became abandoned dead ends. Sewers, tramlines and power grids were blocked or cut. Families were broken, friendships severed. Children lost parents or grandparents. On official maps, the western half of the city was blotted out—figuratively erased from the world of the living. The city, particularly in the East, settled into a grim sadness, a long sleep from which its troubled citizens scarcely dared dream they would ever awake.

Only Berliners called it the Wall. Elsewhere, it was the “fence,” or the “border,” a three-hundred-mile swath through the heart of Germany. By 1989, the East Germans had removed their mines and remote-control machine guns. Even so, it was a formidable barrier: a twelve-foot-high mesh fence that could not be climbed without grappling hooks; an antivehicle trench to keep people from crashing through in cars; armed patrols with dogs; concrete watch-towers and machine-gun bunkers every few hundred yards; a three-mile security zone inside the border, where East Germans could live and travel only with special permits. Here and there it opened—guardedly—to admit a railway or highway. But for the most part it marched ahead unchanging and featureless, cutting through forests, zigzagging up sheer mountainsides, slicing through fields, streams and towns.

Early in my assignment, as late autumn turned into winter, I traveled along the divide at odd intervals over a few weeks, from the Baltic Sea in the north, where gray East German gunboats floated off a sandy beach, ready to shoot anyone who might try to swim to freedom, to the Czech border near Bavaria in the south. The idea was to search out the cracks that I supposed must be there, to intuit a coming revolution. But I found little evidence. Wherever I went, the Wall was simply there.

Excerpted from The Year That Changed the World: The Untold Story Behind the Fall of the Berlin Wall by Michael Meyer. Copyright © 2009 by Michael Meyer. Excerpted with permission by Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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Michael Meyer was Newsweek's bureau chief for Germany, Central Europe, and the Balkans between 1988 and 1992. He is the winner of two Overseas Press Club Awards. He is the author of The Alexander Complex and a member of the New York Council on Foreign Relations.

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