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Berlin Wall - 50 years ago...(pics)


Mike O

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Today, they celebrate in Berlin, the 20th Anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. In 1960, it was a stark reminder of the Cold War, and it was as real a symbol of the Iron Curtain as the Western countries could imagine.

 

I was born in Germany (Helmstedt) and lived in Berlin. I watches as they erected different portions of the wall. What started as barbed wire, eventually led to large concrete walls. The pictures below were all taken approximately 1963.

 

The building towards the left was a newspaper building. When the barbed wire went up, East German military evacuated the building and left the current newspaper edition in the windows. It was like that for months (if not years). This is actually the second generation of the Wall (concrete with barbed wire across the top).

 

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A shot of the span of the 'walls' (you can see 2 generations of the wall). In the foreground is a memorial erected for someone that had attempted to flee from the east to the west. I saw LOTS of these along the wall throughout Berlin. Just as we see roadside memorials along our roads, so were there memorials along the Wall

 

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Berlin was divided into East and West Berlin with Russia (and East Germany) controlling the Eastern sectors and US, Britain and French the West. Here is a shot of the infamous "Checkpoint Charlie". (There was also a checkpoint Alpha, and Bravo). I passed through this checkpoint 100 times! We got to know the border guards on a first name basis. Notice the 'tank stops' (steel crossed I-beams) buried in the concrete.

 

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Another shot of Checkpoint Charlie looking from West Berlin into East Berlin. Notice the sign on the right "You are leaving the American sector."

 

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And what it looks like today...(a tourist destination).

 

check-point-charlie.jpg

 

And 20 years ago, the Wall came down (thankfully!) and marked the end of the symbol we all associated with the 'Cold War'. Today is a time to celebrate...! And as President John F. Kennedy proclaimed:

 

"Ich bin ein Berliner"

 

Regards,

 

Mike O

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Worthy. I have a lot of great memories from being there 20 years ago. I have a piece of that wall that I got not from a vendor but with my Uncle's hammer. I gave it to my Mom who left everything behind to go to the West when she was in her 20's. Still probably the best present I ever gave her.

 

In my office hangs a Grenzgebiet sign too. I love having to explain to people under 30 what it means. May have to scan a few pictures this weekend of that time if I can find them.

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Francois_Dumas

Thanks for that Mike !

 

So much has happened over the years. I often forget that younger people have absolutely no clue at all about the grimness of the 60's. If they've heard (and remembered) anything, it usually is about hippies and flower power.

 

The Cuba crises, the Wall, the threat of a real nuclear war, the decades of oppression continuing after WW2...... no clue. And even if they've heard about it, they can't imagine what it really was like.

 

I don't blame them for that and even through our stories, films and pictures we cannot truly make them understand.... but I think we should continue to try and pray something like that will NOT happen in THEIR life time..... or after that.

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When the wall came down, I was working for a German gentleman (in Wheat Ridge, no less). The day after, he called all his employees together to say a little something. He described how he escaped as the wall was going up. Things were too hot to include his recent bride, so they had to wait about two years before the underground helped reunite them.

 

I had worked for Guenter for a couple of years, & didn't think anything could get to him emotionally. He virtually broke down while attempting to describe what this meant to him. There wasn't a dry eye in the lab.

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I remember the day it fell. I was only 10 years old, but I remember my Dad watching it on TV that evening. There were people smashing it with sledge hammers and climbing all over it. I was being a typical PITA kid and bugging him about something and he told me to sit down and pay attention because I was watching history. I didn't know or understand at the time what was happening, but it made an impression because I remember watching it clear as day.

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russell_bynum
I remember the day it fell. I was only 10 years old, but I remember my Dad watching it on TV that evening. There were people smashing it with sledge hammers and climbing all over it. I was being a typical PITA kid and bugging him about something and he told me to sit down and pay attention because I was watching history. I didn't know or understand at the time what was happening, but it made an impression because I remember watching it clear as day.

 

I had a similar experience.

 

 

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Amazing it was only 20 years ago. I think the wall was 70 or 80 miles long. Some 5000 people attempted to cross from E Berlin to W Berlin. Over 200 people while attempting to cross the wall were murdered by E german Guards. One thing I found astonishing was that at the time when Reagan gave his great speech "Mr Gorbachev, tear down that wall", Margaret Thatcher didnt want the wall to come down or East and West Germany to unite because she was afraid a united German might fall backwards into a post WW2 country witha national movement to idealize hitler again. Fortunately she was wrong and that didnt happen.

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I was in Kaiserslautern watching it on AFRTS on leave from my ship which was in Marseilles. Me, a close friend and his brother sat there drinking and wondering when the call was going to come down to return to our stations because WWIII had just started.

 

It feels like a lifetime ago to me, not just 20 years...

 

Pretty incredible stuff.

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I was stationed in Germany at the time also. I happen to be in Berlin the evening there were protests down Unter Den Linden in the east that I got a few pictures of. A week before reunification day, I took a bike trip over to the east. Being a GI, we were not allowed over until the official reunification, but I wanted to beat the rush. I was young and single, consequences were less important back then. It was the most interesting trip I have ever been on. I was the first American most had ever seen live. (1 old man said the last American he saw was shooting at him) There were not a lot of hotels in the smaller towns, so I stayed in people's houses that I met. I went to a grade school in one town that I had met one of thier teachers, and I wrote back to that class for a few years. They wanted pictures from my home, and anything else from the states. That trip cemented in my mind why we had been there for the previous 40 years. They hated thier government, but were very afraid to do anything about it. In my previous trips to east Berlin, no one would look at you, let alone talk to you, for fear they would be questioned by thier Stasi. Thing were much different after the wall came down. I chipped quite a few pieces of the wall for my family and friends back home, (to get a small baseball size, you had to start chipping about a 2 foot section, it would just crumble). I still have a piece sitting at my bar. My how time fly's.

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It is hard to believe it has been 20 years. I was home sick the day the wall came down, and I just sat on the couch and watched the news all day long, waiting for the announcer to admit that it was a giant hoax. Of course, I was also hopped up on a narcotic painkiller at the time, so it all had a very surreal feeling to me-it probably would not have been quite so unreal feeling if I had been somewhat less loopy.

 

 

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A bit of history and a piece of my pride of being born Hungarian: Hungary was a major kick-off to bring down the Berlin wall. In August '89 they opened the border to Austria and many German, who had free travel between Eastern Germany and Hungary, escaped to the West. After that the wall was pretty useless.

 

"The reforms in the Soviet Union also had its effects on the other communist countries, especially in Poland and Hungary.

On August 23, 1989 Hungary opened the iron curtain to Austria.

Months before East German tourists used their chance to escape to Austria from Hungary and in September 1989 more than 13 000 East German escaped via Hungary within three days. It was the first mass exodus of East Germans after the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961."

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I remember the day it fell. I was only 10 years old,
Keith, you make me feel old. My daughter was 18 when the wall came down. She moved to Berlin in 1993 after spending a junior year abroad in Goettingen. She has lived in Berlin ever since. Finished school there, all the way through to a PhD in Chemistry. I have been to visit her most every year since. I didn't see it before the wall came down, but I have watched the changes since. It has been incredible. The contrast between the former East Berlin and West was extreme in the early 90s. The difference gradually disappeared, so that now it is hard to tell where the wall was. However, many distinctions between the former East and West still remain. Different salaries, higher unemployment, lots of unemployed young males attracted to the neo-nazi movement.

 

That time period was an amazing moment in history to live through. The fall of the wall, the liberation of eastern europe, the fall of the Soviet Union. It is not often that history is made in such broad strokes that it is obvious at the time, particularly not without a war.

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Ich bin in Deutschland als Austauschstudent gewohnen. Sorry...Having a flashback. I lived in Germany as an exchange student. The group I was with spent one week in West Berlin and I had the opportunity to visit East Berlin for the day. This was in 1987 and I was 17 years old. I remember being extremely apprehensive about going through the border checkpoint. This of course had nothing to do with the fear instilled me by my German teacher's repeated warnings about strip searches and such. Passing through to the DDR in '87 was during the height of Perestroika, and the DDR border guards were rather passive. They laughed at my passport picture which had been taken five years earlier at the age of 12, asked if I had any drugs or porn, and waved me through.

 

East Berlin was a stark contrast to vibrant West Berlin. Grey, drab, and lifeless are adjectives that come to mind. I remember having to give my Östdeutschmark away to children on the street as we headed back towards the crossing to West Berlin because there was nothing to buy.

 

Today I am proud that I was able to experience visiting the DDR. Die Mauer was such an iconic representation of a dark and bizarre time in modern history and I was there!

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Francois_Dumas
..... particularly not without a war.

 

Oh but there was one, just not so very visible. I was in it, on several accounts.

 

I like the memories some of you wrote down here... they match many of mine, although I never went to East Germany until a few years ago. It was pretty much the same drab and grey life in all the former Eastblock countries. And it has changed beyond belief compared to that era. 30 years ago we could not believe that it would ever happen !

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I remember the day it fell. I was only 10 years old,
Keith, you make me feel old.

 

Sorry, I get that alot around here.... :grin:.

 

We also had an interesting perspective. When I was a Sophmore in high school ('94-'95), we took an exchange student for a year that was from Marburg, Germany. He was around 17-18 at the time and of course grew up in West Germany, but it was always interesting to hear his stories about how things changed. My parents took the opportunity to go visit him and his family in '99, but I coulnd't because I had just started a new job. Looking back, I should have just quit the stupid job and gone along. I still stay in touch with our exchange student. He ended up going on to Med School to be a surgeon and currently lives in South Africa.......another place I would love to see.

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Sorry, I get that alot around here.... .

 

 

Keith....you are beyound your years.....NO jokes ment....

 

I'll take that as a compliment. Thanks Bill, I guess that explains these damn gray hairs that Danielle keeps pulling from my ever increasing receding hairline

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Despite the 'drab' appearance of East Germany, most folks there (including a lot of the border military) were ordinary folks just trying to sustain themselves. To put things in perspective, we traveled the autobahn between Berlin and the town where I was born through East Germany. Along this road were many East German border patrol both in vehicles and on horseback in the forests along the way (they intentionally mowed down the forests on either side of the autobahn for 100 meters to prevent attempts of folks trying to 'catch a ride' by hiding in the woods.)

 

In our many travels, we met regular East German military border guards that invariably just waved us through the checkpoints (we recognized them, and visa versa). On the occasion to visit relatives at Christmas time, we were stopped at one checkpoint and ordered out of our car (a very rare occurrence for us since we had traveled this road so frequently). Order to stand out of view of the car for quite some time while our 'papers' were examined, re-examined and they went through every piece of luggage in our VW Squareback. Dad was fuming since we were eager to get Helmstedt and this was a delay we hadn't ever encountered before. What seemed like 30 minutes later we were hustled back to the car and as the East German Border guards passed us through the checkpoint, they waved as normal with our Dad, cursing under his breath (but trying NOT to raise any suspicion that would further delay our arrival.

 

That evening in Helmstedt we hauled our luggage upstairs to the bedroom apartment. As always, we opened suitcases to transfer clothes to a dresser. Each of us had our suitcase, and as we fiddled with the latch and swung open the case, we were all surprised.

 

As we were being detained at the checkpoint, the East German Border guards (with whom we always exchanged pleasantries and routinely waved us through) had used the 'search' of our vehicles and luggage to fill each of our suitcases with a Christmas gift to each of us kids.

 

It turned out, that under those drab green uniforms were ordinary folks participating in the Christmas holiday....just like us.

 

Mike O

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