The MacNeil/Lehrer Report; Berlin Wall

So, the East Germans, yeah, I've been 40. And this is too difficult! Funding for this program has been provided by this station and other public television stations

and by grants from Exxon Corporation and AT&T and the Bell System companies. Twenty years ago, the East German started building a wall to stop their people from escaping to the west. It worked, but what have 20 years of living with the wall done to the people of West Berlin? Good evening. Twenty years ago, communist East Germany was bleeding to death. Its young and talented people were fleeing by the thousands to prosperous West Berlin. On August 13, 1961, the communists shocked the world by starting to build a wall to imprison their own people. Yesterday, they celebrated that anniversary on both sides of the wall.

The East Germans held parades and made speeches claiming it had prevented World War III. In the west, they held demonstrations and laid reeds where people have died trying to cross the wall. Tonight, a documentary report on how West Berliners have lived with the wall and how life there is changing. The film was made by the BBC and the narrator is Gabriel Wolfe. The Berlin Wall isn't just a wall through a city. It's also this giant scar across the landscape of Germany. And it's much more than merely a wall. It includes anti-tank barriers, anti-vehicle trenches, electrified fences, watchtowers, dog runs, giant electric lights.

All set in a death strip of carefully raked sand, which goes on for a hundred miles, in circling West Berlin. There is one concession, unlike the iron curtain between East and West Germany. It doesn't include anti-personnel mines. In the city itself, it has cut through streets and even houses, separated neighbours, divided communities. This is one of the most recognisable symbols of divided Berlin.

The Brandenburg Gate, beyond which lies 9 East Berlin, the famous Avenue Unter den Linden. The Brandenburg Gate was a key point on the day in August 20 years ago. When Berliners woke to discover that their city was being physically ruthlessly cut into. Wolfgang Wilder, an 18-year-old at the time, remembers that bitter morning. I was listening to the news over breakfast, and I heard about some strange activities here at the Brandenburg Gate. And they made it quite dramatic, so I knew something is definitely wrong. I decided to go here. When I arrived, I saw a crowd of between two and three thousand Berliners standing in a semicircle. There were workmen building up a wall, which was at that time, around ten o'clock, about three feet high. Behind that were lots of soldiers, Russian soldiers, DDR Army, with machine guns, heavily armed.

And first the cart was very quiet, because we thought the Americans would do something. After a while, we realized that the American Army is guarding us and not stopping the East Germans building up that wall. And the cart really got emotionally very highly charged, and I think we were ready to run over that square and pull down the wall. And I think if one detuned man would have been there, it might have been different, I think the wall would have been pulled down. The redrawing of front is, since the Second World War, has left Berlin deep inside Eastern Block Territory. It's over a hundred miles from West Germany. It's only 40 miles from Poland. West Berlin is politically linked with West Germany and has its own city government, but is still legally an occupied city, occupied by the Western Allies who came here in 1945. And now it's ringed by the Berlin Wall.

There have been other walls in history, but city walls have usually been built by those inside them to defend themselves against outsiders. This wall is different. It's been built around West Berlin by East Germany, to keep this island of Western capitalism firmly isolated. And here it stands, solid in the heart of Berlin. This is one of the classic images of Berlin, since the wall. The young man is waving to his father in East Berlin. It's a rare sight now, but in the early days after August 61, people stood for hours, waving to relatives or friends on the other side. It was something particularly done on a Sunday. Instead of meeting for Sunday lunch, they waved at each other across the wall. While on the other side, less obtrusively, people waved back.

These were the days of the frantic early escapes before the loopholes in the wall were closed up. There were dramatic escapes to from houses adjoining the border, not always without injury. Sometimes people were literally pulled to freedom from the hands of the East Berlin police. Meanwhile, the East Germans worked incessantly to plug the gaps, clear the ground, build up their walls. This is an East German song of the time. Build up, build up, young German people build up, clean up your homeland for a better future.

For to the East Germans, this was not the Berlin Wall. It was and still is the anti-fascist protection barrier, built to keep out the corrupting philosophy of the West and to ensure the continuance of an unsullied socialist state. But its real purpose was to keep people even. And as the wall became more sophisticated, so the attempts to cross it grew more desperate and more dangerous and the fatalities mounted up. This man's death caused an outburst of impotent anger in West Berlin. His name was Peter Fechter, shot by the border guards on the 17th of August 1962. He was left dying for 50 minutes, while the East Germans made no attempt to remove him and Western policemen vainly threw him packets of first aid. At the point where he died, across stands. A hundred yards or so from Checkpoint Charlie.

Peter Fechter was 18 years old. And now, escaping became organized. It became almost an industry. In the early years, escape tunnels built from the West were even sponsored by newspapers and television companies. Films of escapes won prizes. One non-Berliner who became deeply involved in the escape trade in the 1960s was American journalist and historian James P. O'Donnell. Although tunnels, for example, were the most spectacular method and caught the world headlines, they were not the most successful. I think out of more than 50 tunnels, it's quite possible that only to my mind, I can only remember eight or nine that you could call really successful. And the other hand, small individual escapes literally by the hundreds, every hour, every night, all for at least a year, a year and a half after the war. Those well thought out and well planned were, I think, the percentage of success was highest. But these were still the early heroic days. Berlin was in the center of the world stage and even the president of the United States came to offer the city his congratulations.

I know of no town, no city that has been besieged for 18 years, that still lives with the vitality and the force and the hope and the determination of the city of West Berlin. So do you, in the world of freedom, the proudest post is, it's been I believe. But then the defined mood of the early days began to change and for a curiously humane reason, East Berlin offered to open the war for West Berliners to go over at Christmas. West Berlin at first refused then accepted, which meant they had recognized the war. And now, headline making escapes suddenly became dangerous news. They might upset the new tentative relationship between East and West.

Those who were the escape artists, the pimpinals of these early years are now on the whole dissolutioned men who keep their former exploits quiet. And a more recent understanding that grew up between East and West Germany in the 70s made them even more unfashionable, so that by now, in 1981, they won't even show their faces on television screens. Wolfgang Fuchs explains how the atmosphere gradually changed. The policy of partial reconciliation with the East led to a change in attitude towards those who organized escapes. Our phones were tapped, we were tailed, our houses were searched without a search warrant, and much more besides, which ended up by taking the fun out of the door. Also, all those who arrived at the refugee camp at Marie in Felder in West Berlin were systematically interrogated to find out which route they'd used to escape to the West. The intention being to eventually close this route. For example, if you'd aided the escape of a refugee by using a car with false number plates, which is of course against the law, you'd be prosecuted. But surely, doesn't this success of the undertaking justify the committing of a small offense?

What finally happened was that decisions were made which were always detrimental to us. In other words, the people who helped East Germans to escape were systematically being turned into criminals. These men meet almost like veterans commemorating a forgotten unpopular war. But Fuchs and his friends pulled off a few more coups before the political mood finally changed. This is one of his last exploits, a typically daring enterprise dependent on split second timing and speedy getaway. That's Fuchs, the man directing the escape in the back of the truck. The escape was from a graveyard on the border of the French sector. The escape was a 24-year-old East German eager to rejoin his fiancé in the West. So Berlin settled down to live with the war, with the certain knowledge that it wouldn't, at least not for a very long time, go away.

Fuchs and his friends went to the West. Fuchs and his friends went to the West. Fuchs and his friends went to the West. Political climates change. The rituals of occupation do not.

The Western Allies still patrol their sector boundaries as they've been doing now for 36 years. This is a routine wall patrol in the American sector. There are 6,000 American servicemen in Berlin. The machine guns are loaded, but it's unlikely that they'll have to fire. Here, going down the Bernarshtraser, a scene of many hectic escapes and some tragic deaths years ago, is a patrol of the French Army. There are just under 3,000 French servicemen in Berlin. This, on the western edge of the British sector, where Berlin borders East Germany is a British Army patrol. These are soldiers of the Royal Irish Rangers. There are 3600 British servicemen in Berlin. The function of all these patrols is basically to show the flag to remind the East Germans that the Allies still exist. The Starken railway crossing point, where trains from West Germany penetrate the wall, usually carrying freight. The British patrol always stops here to check developments and monitor the activity on the other side.

It's a place particularly well cared for by watchtowers and observation platforms. By border guards whose instructions are quite simply to seek out a rest or exterminate anyone violating the frontier of the German Democratic Republic. And by specially brutalized guard dogs. At the latest count, there were 267 of these dog runs surrounding West Berlin. But, this is a city with many surprises. Here's the typical one. An old railway station derelicts because of the wall, has been converted into a popular beer house, where Berliners gather on a Sunday, and the wall, concrete, the dogs and the border guards could be a thousand miles off. A few people realize how large West Berlin actually is, and how much of the good life is possible here.

West Berlin has lakes, it has beaches, and the largest area of natural forest contained inside any great city in the world. Some people may be pessimistic, but it's possible to be young and to commit yourself totally to this city. Peter and Sabrina Edert, both Berlin-born, are in the early 20s, have two children and intend to build a good family life here. They have never known Berlin without a wall. I like Berlin, and we can find nice places here to play with a family, and we have lakes, and we have everything like they have in West Germany, so I don't miss anything. If you live inside of Berlin, you hardly notice the wall. You only notice the wall if you want to leave the town.

But as long as you stay inside of the town, and as you see out here, we've got everything, we've got woods and everything, so you hardly notice the wall if you don't live close by it or so. It is still very unnatural, that is not a natural part of a city like Berlin. As soon as I see it, of course, I am aware of the political reality that stands behind this wall. This, of course, makes me sad at times, but since I have never been aware of what has been grossed Berlin before the war, since Berlin, for me, has always been West Berlin. I don't feel that East Berlin is somehow an organic part of West Berlin. For me, West Berlin is the organic part that I belong to, and East Berlin is just another city. The funny thing is you don't think of it all the time. You don't get up in the morning and say, well, this hideous wall, and what could I do? You life goes on. I see it. I walk in the tear garden, which isn't very far away from here every day, in the afternoon.

And I see the wall, going to work, I see the wall. It's a thing you get accustomed to, but a thing you still hate. There is, of course, one inevitable way of humanizing this peculiarly ugly institution. And the impromptu artists and the slogan writers, common to every large city, have a particularly good canvas here. West Berlin, indeed, has its own problems, quite apart from those stemming from the East West Division. It's changing its identity. Young men avoiding West German military service, not applicable in Berlin, arrive here in hundreds. Migrant workers, mainly Turkish, are coming in and perhaps inevitably settling for the Sedia suburbs. The city is not what it was.

I feel that this divided city has changed. The houses are dirty. The streets are not clean. The houses are not painted. At once we said about Berlin that it is one of the cleanest cities. And now, what is now? The young people, if I would be 20 and I had 60 horsepowers, Kawasaki, I never would stay here. I would leave that city. Among the young who come here, many looking for a new lifestyle and alternative society, which they believe is particularly attainable in this cut-off island city. Monika Hupner, for example, from Munich. So, reliably, you know, there are many young people living here, many different opinions, many different ways of life and good possibilities to do something, to work, to learn something, or to talk to people, to communicate. It's better, I'd say it's better than any other West German big city.

In particular, some of the more aggressive alternatives have resulted to squatting. Berlin has a housing problem, yet many houses are left empty, some of them by speculators who let them deteriorate in the hope that the city authorities will buy them out. The squatters don't wait for that to happen. West Berlin used to adopt a softly, softly approach to the squatters, but the new conservative administration takes a harder line, and this summer there have been battles in the streets. Seems like these must give satisfaction to the communist leaders in East Berlin, because these young people have no interest in campaigning against the wall, they're locked in conflict with the authorities inside the wall. For someone like Thomas Weber from Hamburg, the potential enemy isn't in East Berlin, but in the West.

There's miles and miles between you and the rest of Berlin, the official life that's happening here every day. When you read the newspapers, there's hardly anything left which is concerning you. For example, the Eastern politics, or President Reagan to be shot, or the Pope to be shot. This is nothing which is interesting, the only longer, because I know the guys who shoot those are fascists, and I regard Reagan as well as a fascist, so it's only fascist shooting each other. Why should I care? There's only one or two small articles that are really concerning my life and the life of my friends here. And I feel, I really feel helpless here and I feel isolated here, and I feel that people would not tolerate me even if I wouldn't do them any harm. I said, this is the way how I feel unfree here.

Allied forces day 16th of May 1981, the annual march past of the occupying power. It must be curious for older Berliners to see the Western Allies still parading down this triumphal way. Curious yet for the most part reassuring, evidence of the West's frequently repeated determination not to let West Berlin fall. Some young people now see all this differently. I'd say they have to leave. I'd say they have to leave the Berliners, you know, and I'd say it's not very good to have it controlled like this, and to have it occupied like this, you know. Demonstrations were forbidden that day, but they took place, and it's a sign of the times that the protesters, these soldiers of the danger, not the 90,000 war saw pack troops, moaned to ring West Berlin. This is West Berlin's most forceful reminder of the encircling presence of Soviet power.

The Russian war memorial near the Brandenburg Gate. It's a reminder scarcely necessary to mature Berliners. Even if like Karl Beutel, they see danger for West Berlin not from the outside, but from within. Maybe that one day later on West Berlin may fall to the eastern system, but not forced by the Russians or the German democratic republic. Only because the town itself will dry out more and more, and one day there will be no more Berliners in Berlin. And what US has a town named Berlin, if there are not any longer Berliners. It is today only attraction for tourists. It is an attraction for criminals of all sorts, not only burglars and so on, or we have the highest amount of prostitution in West Berlin. And just that town that once has been the capital of an empire today to be seen as just a tourist attraction that does not only an inhabitant of that place, it is made very sad. It also makes quite clear that there is no future to descend from a world capital to such a place of tourist attraction and then ascend again to a place of importance and meaning.

I don't see it. I don't see it especially under the special situation we are living in. The wall is there to keep the people from East Germany in their country. And I think there is only one chance to pull the wall down when the living condition in East Germany and the political situation in East Germany were to change so that the standard comes up to the living condition in West Germany. People will stay in their country in East Germany and that is the only chance. But I can see how we can achieve that change in the system in East Germany and therefore I expect that I won't see the wall coming down in my lifetime. That report was by the BBC. That ends our program tonight. We'll be back on Monday night. I'm Robert McNeil. Good night.

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Thank you.