TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/112089/11208900.062

Text File | 1990-09-19 | 3KB | 57 lines

WORLD, Page 42

Wall of Shame -- 1961-1989


    The geography of the past is studded with walled cities.
Jerusalem and Rome, to name but two from antiquity, fortified
themselves against enemies without. Later, in medieval times, the
citizens of London and Paris built and rebuilt ramparts to
safeguard their liberties, ones that many of their rural
contemporaries, burdened with the feudal status of serf, were
denied. Only in the 20th century has a city had a wall rammed
through its innards, circumscribing the freedom of two-thirds of
its people, forcing upon them a serf-like tie to the land. Only in
Berlin.

    Images of the violation recur. When Berliners in the Soviet-run
sector woke on the morning of Aug. 13, 1961, to find families
sundered and the city rived by barbed wire -- and soon concrete --
many frantically sought routes of escape. The Berlin Wall was meant
to halt a tide of migrants to the West that had left East Germany
short of workers and threatened the stability of the Communist
regime: more than 2.7 million had departed since the founding of
the German Democratic Republic in 1949, 30,000 in July 1961 alone.

    At first, buildings along the new boundary afforded windows on
the West. Many refugees leaped, some into fire nets, others to the
pavement; more than a few died in the fall. After the regime
bricked up the windows, the resourceful tunneled beneath the 20-ft.
"death strip" and its mines and gun emplacements. The most daring
efforts came from Wall jumpers, who confronted head on the
"antifascist protective barrier," as the jargon of totalitarianism
described the Wall. In their jagged sprints, dodging searchlight
beams and bullets, they created a theater of longing where the
value of freedom -- and the maleficence of its denial -- found an
extraordinary visual expression. In 1962, in one of the most
publicized instances, 18-year-old Peter Fechter, an East Berlin
bricklayer, was cut down by machine-gun fire as he tried to scale
the Wall and, in plain view of Western policemen and reporters, was
left lying for an hour while he bled to death; finally East German
border guards retrieved his body. Fechter was one of an estimated
75 who have been killed over the past 28 years while trying to
escape across the barrier.

    The significance of the Wall extended far beyond the city, far
beyond Germany. It became an epitome of the partitioning of Europe,
the overarching symbol of the cold war and one of the places where
the Western alliance and the Warsaw Pact came gunsight to gunsight.
After the magnificent oratory of John F. Kennedy's "Ich bin ein
Berliner" speech, it was de rigueur for U.S. Presidents -- and
other Western leaders -- to come and shake their fists at the Wall
and call down imprecations against those who had conceived and
built it. But the barrier also stood as a reminder of the limits
of power in the nuclear age. Paradoxically, the Wall, despised
though it was, acted as a bulwark for stability in Europe,
ratifying two spheres of influence and thus maintaining the
alternative of cold war to hot war. It was the most palpable
evidence of a deep wound in European civilization -- and it is
finally gone.