East Germany: Back to the Wall

As rain spattered on the casket and a small band played a dirge called Immortal Victim, the body of former East German Boss Walter Ulbricht was carried to cremation last week. The funeral came only a few days before the twelfth anniversary of Ulbricht's ugliest legacy: the Berlin Wall. TlME's chief European correspondent William Rademaekers, who witnessed the birth of the Wall on Aug. 13, 1961, returned for another look. His report:

It was on a sun-drenched Sunday that the Wall first appeared. Steel-helmeted East German troops had moved in convoys through the night, carrying rolls of barbed wire and concrete posts to the relatively open border that separated the two Berlins. When dawn broke, the border was sealed off. I walked to the Brandenburg Gate. There thousands of West Berlin adults were screaming insults at the East German soldiers standing stolidly behind the barricades.

Farther along the demarcation line, an old woman teetered on a window ledge in an East Berlin apartment building. West Berlin firemen held a large tarpaulin underneath her, but she was afraid to jump. A gathering crowd shouted warnings that police were moving up the stairs of her building. But the old woman could not let go. Finally she turned and climbed back into her apartment to wait for the police.

She may or may not have been lucky. Since the Wall went up, at least 69 people trying to escape have been killed and 99 seriously wounded. Hundreds have been arrested, but thousands have got away. There were the three East Berliners who painted a Volga automobile in Soviet army staff colors, donned homemade Russian uniforms, then calmly drove past saluting East German guards at a checkpoint. There was the woman who got out in the gas tank of a truck, and the athletic young man who pole-vaulted over the Wall.

East Germans continue to filter over, under and through the Wall. Just last month, nine got out through a hand-dug tunnel in the Zehlendorf area. The East German government is currently pressuring Bonn to crack down on professional people-smugglers who openly advertise in the West Berlin press, and charge up to $30,000 per head to arrange escapes. But in general, Berliners on both sides seem to have learned to live with the Wall, the way an amputee learns to live with a wooden leg, hardly remembering the time he was whole.

In the region of the Ober-baumbruecke, where the River Spree forms the border, there is a simple black wooden cross and a few clumps of faded flowers commemorating an unknown East Berliner who almost made it across, but was shot a few yards from the riverbank. Last week an elderly woman basked in the sun there, feeding the swans and mallards that splash in the river. Woman and birds were oblivious to the watchtower in the middle of the nearby bridge, manned by a guard with binoculars.

Ignored or not, the Wall is not likely to go away--at least in the foreseeable future. Indeed, it is constantly being strengthened and enlarged, made more impenetrable, more deadly and more permanent. At first the East Germans concentrated on the 27-mile stretch of border that zigzagged through the heart of the city, to stop the flow of East Germans to the West. More than 3,000,000 had deserted East Germany from the end of World War II until Ulbricht ordered the Wall built. Now there is an elaborate network of installations along the entire 100-mile demarcation line that separates West Berlin from East Germany. At last count, it included 242 watchtowers, 137 bunkers, 249 dog patrols, some 65 miles of concrete wall and 35 miles of chain-link fencing, as well as assorted electronic-surveillance devices, lO-ft.-deep trenches and triple-pronged concrete pylons similar to the tank traps of World War II.

"The East Germans have already taken their raps for the Wall," says a high-ranking U.S. diplomat in West Berlin. "They are not about to tear it down." They are under little pressure to do so. After years of being ostracized, East Germany is currently enjoying international acceptance. It is about to become a member of the United Nations, and it has already received diplomatic recognition from 89 countries. The U.S. is on the brink of establishing relations. A State Department delegation will arrive in East Berlin shortly to discuss, among other things, the location of a U.S. embassy. One possible site (on land already owned by the U.S.): directly behind the Brandenburg Gate, abutting the Berlin Wall.

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