Checkpoint Charlie

[kevin993]

Originally Posted by Rick Lee

I have a photo of the Frauenkirche I took in 1989. It was a pile of rubble then and unrecognizeable as anything else.

Please dig it out and post if you can - would love to see.

[Rick Lee]

Until I can find this batch of photos and scan them, here's someone else's photo of it. That's how it looked for about 60 years. Only difference when I was first there was that the sun didn't shine too much in E. Germany.

[masraum]

Cool, thx, I'll look for the first movie first. It sounds interesting. As long as there are subtitles, I'll be good with a version in German. I don't know why, but I've never seen a dubbed movie that had the same feel after the dubbing. Even when you don't understand the langauge.

[Dottore]

Originally Posted by dd74

Could any Americans get into the East before the wall came down? That's what I'm interested in. What was life like then, and if anyone witnessed it?

I keep thinking of burning oil drums for warmth, or some old fat German butcher, carving meat with a cleaver instead of a modern, electric tool.

I was born in East Berlin, and my mother's side of the family pretty well remained there. My father had the foresight to move us to West Berlin, when I was just a few years old, just before the wall went up.

I was a frequent visitor to the former East Berlin from wherever we happened to be living later on.

As others have said, it was a drab and sad place in many respects. Inefficient. Paranoid. Low tech.

But it did have a few saving graces. Life was simple. And because the state looked after you from cradle to grave—it was a relatively stress free place. Everyone had enough to live on modestly. No one worried about job security or their pension. You couldn't buy much, but the staples of daily life were incredibly cheap.

And they had a beautiful publishing industry. People would come from West Germany to buy beautifully hard-bound volumes of the classics for pennies.

And classical music was everywhere.

Whenever I visited my relatives people from the block would be over playing chess and table tennis, and listening to good music. People were very close and looked after one another. There was a very strong sense of community. Because you couldn't leave, you made the best of what you had, and tried to be content,

In a way it was as though the clock had been turned back 100 years in East Germany, to a time when people lived life without the stress and distractions of television and the information age and modern times.

These few things I've just mentioned were the positives as I saw them then. Whenever I had to leave East Berlin in those days it was genuinely with mixed feelings: mixed, because it was obviously a completely failed society and yet... and yet...on some simple human level life there was very rich and simple.

[dd74]

Great photos! The one of the rubbled building is awesome. One day, I'd definitely would like to tour Germany and Austria. Maybe start West and go East, end up in Prague.

Oh, and please forgive my ignorance, but was Austria part of the Soviet Bloc countries before The Fall in 1989? I can't remember if it was or not.

[dd74]

Originally Posted by Dottore

...because it was obviously a completely failed society and yet... and yet...on some simple human level life there was very rich and simple.

Good stuff, Dot. See, I grew up hearing the place was just hell. But in the '60s and '70s, you believed the propaganda you're fed as a child from school to home and Walter Cronkite in the evening.

You say "failed." Was it really because everywhere else was advancing. I think how the Amish forge on in their world without any real concern about the "English" world, and how the same attitude might have sufficed for E. Germany.

I know I'm oversimplifying this by not bringing in all the social-political strata of the country, just stuff on the surface as an American kid saw it.

[Rick Lee]

No, Austria was not part of the bloc. They were neutral, but very pro-western. I think it's the most beautiful place in the world.

Dottore, you surely know that E. Berliners had it a lot better than the rest of the country. Since the city was right next to W. Berlin, it made much more of an effort to show its good side, was kept clean and it was pretty much a privilege to live there. Someone from the countryside couldn't just decide to move to E. Berlin.

[Dottore]

Originally Posted by dd74

Good stuff, Dot. See, I grew up hearing the place was just hell. But in the '60s and '70s, you believed the propaganda you're fed as a child from school to home and Walter Cronkite in the evening.

You say "failed." Was it really because everywhere else was advancing. I think how the Amish forge on in their world without any real concern about the "English" world, and how the same attitude might have sufficed for E. Germany.

I know I'm oversimplifying this by not bringing in all the social-political strata of the country, just stuff on the surface as an American kid saw it.

It could of course be hell if you got on the wrong side of the authorities. It was a totalitarian state, and didn't tolerate dissent. So dissidents and churchgoers for example had a fairly rough ride.

But if you just minded your own business, your life could be quite comfortable.

I say failed state because nothing worked. Food production was dodgy. There were hardly and consumer goods to be had (apart from books and records). You couldn't leave the place and lived behind a wall. The apparatchiks all drove western cars—while you had to wait 11 years for a Trabant. Moreover, you were constantly confronted with the prosperity of the west (sometimes just blocks away) when you turned on the television. The state really failed its citizens on every level.

The positive aspects I describe in my previous post were really accidental—and a consequence of the adversity and alienation people felt from the society in which they lived. It brought people together and made them immensely human. The same was true in communist Russia. People compensated for their limited external possibilities by cultivating rich internal lives and rich social lives—much richer on average (in my experience) than those of their western counterparts.

This fact of course also accounts for the "nostalgia" for the "good old days" that is widespread throughout the former communist bloc today. Much of this "feel-good" camaraderie, the long evenings spent in the company of friends—all this was lost once capitalism reared its ugly head. Costs skyrocketed, job security disappeared, the explosion of the consumer society and the media completely overthrew the old values. Most importantly, people just didn't have time for one another any more.

This is a long topic—but the transition has certainly not been easy for many in the east.

[Rick Lee]

Ok, some photos. First the car content.

Here I am in in 1989 my friends' Trabbi in Obhausen, near Querfurt. Remember, it was about a 13 year wait to get one of these.



And here's a real 959 in West Berlin in 1988. I was a fan then too.



Now for the Wall stuff. The most popular viewing spot was right behind the Reichstag. Memorial to some of the Wall's victims.



The rest of the guard tower from the photo above.



E. German patrol boat on the Spree River.



A few months after I took that photo above, there was a daring escape right there and the woman made it. Tourists pulled her out of the water as the boat approached. There's actual footage of it on Youtube.

What a job these border guards had. No matter what they did, they were watched by everyone - their minders in the east and tourists in the west.



The Brandeburg Gate, just behind the Reichstag.



Years later I ran the Berlin Marathon and the route went right between those columns. When I took this photo, that was unimagineable.

And Checkpoint Charlie while still in operation. It's actually pretty far from the other photos above.

[Dottore]

Originally Posted by Rick Lee

Dottore, you surely know that E. Berliners had it a lot better than the rest of the country.

Yes. That's true.

[Rick Lee]

Originally Posted by Dottore

The positive aspects I describe in my previous post were really accidental—and a consequence of the adversity and alienation people felt from the society in which they lived. It brought people together and made them immensely human. The same was true in communist Russia. People compensated for their limited external possibilities by cultivating rich internal lives and rich social lives—much richer on average (in my experience) than those of their western counterparts.

Truer words were never written. You'll never meet a better bunch of folks than E. Germans or Russians IF you really get to know them and they know you understand them.

[slodave]

I'll have to look through the photo albums at my parents house for any pix from our Czech trip and the trip my mom and I took to Berlin in '89. There have to be a few more photos around.

I mentioned it before, but my mom was born and lived in Sankt Andreasberg, in the Harz mountains, pretty much on what was to become the East/West border in central Germany. My bed time stories were her war stories. My grand parents owned two hotels at the time. One was destroyed from bombing and the other was "remodeled". The one that survived continued to operate during the war - unless everyone had to hide in the bomb raid tunnels (old silver mines). There were period of times where the Hitler Youth stayed at the hotel. Not much you can do but put them up. Mom says they were all very nice and very helpful with the daily chores.. I believe they actually had women from the "East" side that were forced to work as well. They were not forced by my grandparents.

My mom was also captured by the Russians during the war as well a number of times, trying to sneak across the dividing line (Yet to be called the East/West border) to deliver food and clothes to our family on the other side. Nothing much came of the captures, other than being detained for a number of hours, yelled at and the food taken and either eaten by the Russians or the food was destroyed in front of them.

Towards the end of the war, when the Americans rolled through their town, they would toss the Germans, chocolate (American made, not as good ), toothpaste, which the kids ate, because it had the minty flavor and they had never experienced something like that. The whole town lined the main street as the tanks, carriers, solders came through and cheered them on.

These days, I don't think any of our family from the East has really moved from their towns. A few of my cousins do go to university in Bremen and other "Western" cities.

[dd74]

Two questions:

Rick: all those photos were taken from the Eastern side of Berlin, right?

Dave: so there was a dividing line even before there was a wall? Like an imaginary border or something?

[slodave]

Originally Posted by dd74

Dave: so there was a dividing line even before there was a wall? Like an imaginary border or something?

There were two things going on. Berlin was in, what was to become East Germany and Berlin itself was split in two. The Wall was put up in 1961. My mom was crossing what was to become the actual border for West and East Germany. During the war, there were no fences, mine fields.... I am guessing, if anything, there may have been guard posts and signs at the main roads going from town to town. The rest of the dividing line was patrolled primarily by Russians during the war. The line was fenced and mined after the war and became part of the Iron Curtain.

[dd74]

Fascinating. Man, I would have liked to have seen that. When I was a kid, I was very close to the DMZ zone between N and S. Korea. To think you're that close to what could be a flash point toward the end of civilization is stunning.

[slodave]

David, these links to Wiki give a better idea of what was going on with borders at that time..

The whole article is good, but check out "Erection of the inner German border"
Berlin Wall - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Inner German border - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[Dottore]

Originally Posted by slodave

During the war, there were no fences, mine fields.... I am guessing, if anything, there may have been guard posts and signs at the main roads going from town to town. The rest of the dividing line was patrolled primarily by Russians during the war. The line was fenced and mined after the war and became part of the Iron Curtain.

Correction.

There was no east/west german border during the war. The border came about after the war as a consequence of the way Germany was partitioned by the allies (including Russia). Everything east of the border was the soviet sector after the war.

[Rick Lee]

Yes, the fortifications didn't start for a couple of years after the war and the border was very porous anyway until the Wall went up. It got a lot better as technology improved.

Something I didn't know until I first went to the DDR was that everything west of the Elbe, which is still a good chunk of what became E. Germany, was actually part of the American Sector. We ended up later trading it to the Russkies for a slice of Berlin, which they controlled totally. Folk living in the American Sector of what became the DDR obviously didn't like this, as Soviet occupation was a lot less pleasant than US, British and French occupation. But the place I stayed near Halle, which was well inside E. Germany, was actually taken by the Americans on their way to meet the Russkies at the Elbe.

I think W. Berlin also contracted out a lot of serves to E. Berlin, like garbage and some road maint. It's not like there was a lot of space for W. Berlin to have their own landfills. And of course, the DDR regime charged handsomely for everything the west needed from them.

Those photos of Berlin are all taken from the west side. On the east side, you couldn't even get close to the Wall.

[Joeaksa]

Originally Posted by Peterfrans

I crossed checkpoint charlie, and it actually was a much more civilized experience than the one you are getting coming into the US at JFK nowadays.

We should get together someday. I have some very interesting stories about CC, and the other Berlin checkpoints.

Rick is right, its a good museum and I try to get there everytime I make it to Berlin. They update it from time to time...

[masraum]

lots of interesting stuff guys...