More than 28 years after the fall of the wall, stories are still emerging about East Berliners' attempts to flee across the border — with help from their western neighbors. Rachel Stewart reports from Berlin.
Image: picture alliance/dpa/Bildarchiv
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The Berlin Wall: 28 years up, 28 years fallen
From 1961 to 1989 the Berlin Wall divided a city and the world. February 5, 2018 marks the date on which the Wall will have been down for as long as it once stood: 28 years, 2 months and 27 days, to be exact.
Image: picture-alliance/W.Kumm
1961: The Wall goes up
On August 13, 1961, the East German Democratic Republic began cordoning off the Soviet sector in Berlin. All communication between East and West was cut off. In the following weeks the concrete wall began to rise, as can be seen in the above photo taken in Zimmerstrasse in the Kreuzberg neighborhood. Barbed wire crowned the wall to prevent people from climbing over the top.
Image: Stiftung Berliner Mauer/M. R. Ernst
1962: An icon behind barbed wire
The division of Berlin also split the world into East and West. The "Iron Curtain" had finally been drawn closed. Spouses, relatives, friends were brutally torn apart from one another. The communists' name for the wall, the "anti-fascist protection barrier," was a misnomer, however, since the barrier's true purpose was not to keep intruders out but to prevent those in the East from fleeing.
Image: Stiftung Berliner Mauer
1962: Early victim at the Wall
A good year after the construction of the Berlin Wall, 18-year-old Peter Fechter tried to climb over it. After reaching the top, GDR soldiers shot him. He fell down on the East Berlin side, where he lay for nearly an hour begging for help in the "death strip." Border patrols eventually picked up the wounded man, who died later in the afternoon. The world was horrified.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa
1963: A symbol of hope
US President John F. Kennedy visited Berlin on June 26, 1963, sweeping his gaze across the Wall and the death strip. During his speech, he made the legendary statement: "Ich bin ein Berliner." He stressed that the US would not allow West Berlin to fall in the hands of the Soviet Union.
Image: picture-alliance/Heinz-Jürgen Goettert
1965: Deadly no-man's-land
Between the Brandenburg Gate and Potsdamer Platz, a no-man's-land with various barriers evolved which would define the appearance of the border area during the first decade of the Wall. It was a maze of fencing, barbed wire, heavy-duty vehicles and wooden watchtowers.
Image: Stiftung Berliner Mauer/W. Rupprecht
1973: Scared stiff on both sides
The East, with its death strip, but also West Berlin were marked by the Wall, particularly the city districts directly adjacent to the border sectors. In the shadows of the Wall, run-down, abandoned areas and open stretches of land developed and became makeshift parking lots, trash dumps or wild gardens. Children would play there, and artists and activists would use the grounds for activities.
Image: Stiftung Berliner Mauer/W. Schubert
1976: A new kind of Wall
Beginning in 1975, the Wall became much more massive, with the so-called "Grenzmauer" (Border Wall) measuring 3.6 meters (11.8 feet) in height. Here, a group of builders fills in the cracks between the newly installed concrete segments while a crane manages the round elements atop the wall. Border patrols monitor the construction, while a US military policeman watches the spectacle from the West.
Image: Stiftung Berliner Mauer/E. Kasperski
1984: White-washed monster
The white-washed side of the Wall marks the beginning of the border strip from the East, while St. Thomas Church in the background is located in the West. But surveillance by the Stasi, border patrols and police began far in front of the Wall. A permission slip was required to enter the area.
Image: Stiftung Berliner Mauer/M. Schuhhardt
1987: Clear demand
US President Ronald Reagan visited Berlin in June 1987, giving a speech in front of the Brandenburg Gate on the West Berlin side with the famous words: "Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Tear down this wall!" Some 40,000 people cheered. Over a year before, then-Soviet leader Gorbachev had initiated his policies of "glasnost" (openness) and "perestroika" (restructuring).
Image: picture-alliance/dpa
1989: An image of Freedom that went around the world
It was ultimately those who were locked in whose peaceful struggle for freedom eventually paid off. November 9, 1989 was a day that went down in history: the fall of the Berlin Wall. At least 101 people lost their lives at the Wall trying to escape the GDR between 1961 and 1989. But not a single drop of blood was shed when it finally opened up.
Image: picture-alliance/W.Kumm
1990: The work of the "Wall woodpeckers"
Chris Gueffroy, aged 20, was the last refugee to be shot at the Berlin Wall, nine months before it fell. By 1990 "Wall woodpeckers" had done their work, opening up the Wall bit by bit, with border patrols now letting families pass through.
Image: Stiftung Berliner Mauer/E. Kasperski
1991: Transformation
In June 1990, work got underway to tear down the various elements of the Wall and the accompanying barrier constructions. Remnants of the Wall were broken down and even shredded, and then used for building city streets.
Image: Stiftung Berliner Mauer/H. P. Guba
2014: Light shines where darkness once stood
By 2014 very little of the Berlin Wall remained in its original location, and few people knew where it once stood. Maybe that's why the 2014 installation entitled "Lichtgrenze" (Light Border) was so popular. The temporary project by sibling artists Christopher and Marc Bauder featured 6,880 light "balloons" marking a 15.3-kilometer-long (9.5 miles) path where part of the Wall once stood.
Image: Stiftung Berliner Mauer
2018: East Side Gallery as a monument
The "East Side Gallery" is at 1,316 meters (4,318 feet) the longest stretch of the Berlin Wall remaining. After the Wall opened up, 118 artists from 21 countries painted it in spring 1990. It draws hundreds of thousands of visitors each year. Once it becomes part of the Stiftung Berliner Mauer (Berlin Wall Foundation) as planned, there will also be an information center.
Image: Stiftung Berliner Mauer
2018: 'Berlin with and without the Wall'
Many of the photos in this gallery are also being shown in a special exhibition presented by the Gedenkstätte Berliner Mauer (Berlin Wall Memorial). The show runs from February 6 to August 15, 2018 at the visitor center in the city's Bernauer Street. Many of the photos have never been shown before, and there is one for each year between 1961 and 2018: Berlin — with and without the Wall.
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The Berlin Wall sliced up its city, dividing East from West, for 28 years, two months and 27 days. Monday marks a turning point: for the first time, the wall has been gone for as long as it stood.
Its construction in 1961, designed to stem the flow of East Germans fleeing over the Berlin border, forced would-be escapees to come up with more creative methods to make it to the West. Some enlisted the help of sympathetic West Berliners to try to cross over where nobody would see them: underground.
A woman emerges from an escape tunnel in West Berlin in 1964.Image: picture alliance/dpa
It is estimated that about 75 tunnels were dug underneath the Berlin Wall. An archaeologist recently found the entrance of one such tunnel near the city's Mauerpark. Its rediscovery has unearthed the story of a man whose committed opposition to the wall began with this underground passage to the East.
Painstaking progress
"You couldn't just shovel away at this kind of soil — you had to really scrape your way through," says Carl-Wolfgang Holzapfel. "That's what made it so difficult and frustrating. Sometimes you had the feeling you weren't getting anywhere at all."
In 1963, the then 19-year-old West Berliner, along with a group of friends, started burrowing underneath a disused warehouse in the Wedding district of the city. Their aim was to reach a basement 80 meters (262 feet) away, on the eastern side of the wall, so that Gerhard Weinstein, an acquaintance of Holzapfel's, could be reunited with his young daughter.
Carl-Wolfgang Holzapfel at the site where the western entrance to the tunnel has recently been rediscovered.Image: DW
After four months of painstaking work, news of the group's endeavor reached the Stasi (the East German state security service). In total 21 people on the eastern side, who had been planning to escape via the tunnel, were detained. Holzapfel did not hear from them again.
It was a bitter disappointment, but 73-year-old Holzapfel insists his group's efforts were not entirely in vain.
"It was a reminder that there will always be people who will fight against injustice, and who will find ways to erode that injustice," he told DW.
Time travel: Berlin Wall panorama
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Taking on the wall
For Holzapfel, the tunnel marked the beginning of a struggle that would last nearly three decades.
"At 17 I told myself: You're going to fight against this wall — because it is unjust — until you see it come down or until it outlives you," he recalls.
Berlin 1964: A young Carl-Wolfgang Holzapfel protests against the Berlin WallImage: C.-W.Holzapfel
In 1965 he was arrested during a peaceful demonstration at the Berlin border crossing known as Checkpoint Charlie. He spent nine months in the infamous Stasi prison at Hohenschönhausen. After his release, he continued to protest and remained resolute in his conviction that he would see a reunified Germany again.
On the 28th anniversary of the wall being built, Holzapfel made perhaps his most symbolic act of protest.
"I thought: now I need to do something to clearly show the madness of dividing a city."
'One body'
Bridging the East-West divide in an unconventional mannerImage: Burmeister/Archiv Carl-Wolfgang Holzapfel
Holzapfel draped himself in the German flag and tied a thick white band around his waist. As he lay down on the ground at Checkpoint Charlie — heart and head in the East, feet in the West — the white line marking the border appeared to run over his body.
"Just as I am obviously one body," he explains, "Berlin is a whole, and Germany is a whole."
Less than three months later, on November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. The next day, Holzapfel stood where East and West met at the city's Potsdamer Platz.
"I was in tears," he recalls. "There is nothing better — nothing will ever top that feeling."
Plans are in motion to preserve Holzapfel's escape tunnel and integrate it into the official Berlin Wall Memorial. For him, returning to the site of the tunnel's entrance has been a moving experience. "But it's not just my own story," he adds. "It's a piece of Berlin's history."
Tracing the division of Berlin
On November 9, 1989 the border separating East and West Berlin suddenly opened, and the Berlin Wall became history. DW traces the remnants of the wall that divided the city.
Image: Britta Pedersen/ZB/dpa/picture alliance
Brandenburg Gate
The Berlin Wall divided Berlin for 28 years, two months and 27 days, from August 1961 to November 1989. The Brandenburg Gate had long been the symbol of the division of Germany. Even after the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, there was no passage here. That changed on December 22, 1989. Since then, Berliners have been able to walk unhindered through the landmark of their city again.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa
East Side Gallery
The East Side Gallery on the River Spree in Friedrichshain is a 1.3-kilometer-long section of the so-called Hinterland Wall, which artists from all over the world painted in 1990. It was located in front of the death strip and a second wall. The area near the Oberbaumbrücke is a tourist attraction, but several wall elements have already been removed in the course of construction projects.
Image: DW/V. Esipov
Berlin Wall Memorial
Nowhere is the former "death strip" as vivid as it is here. An 80-meter-long segment of the Wall, including a guard tower, has been reconstructed. The authentic border fortification complex serves as a central reminder of the division of Germany. It pays homage to the victims who died or were killed at the Berlin Wall.
Image: DW/F. Wiechel-Kramüller
Traces of the route of the Wall
The Berlin Wall has disappeared almost everywhere in the city. East and West have now grown together. A strip of cobblestones in the city center marks where the Wall used to run.
Image: DW/F. Wiechel-Kramüller
Checkpoint Charlie
This border crossing is among the best-known sights in Berlin. Only foreigners and diplomats were allowed to pass through this checkpoint. In October 1961, shortly after the Wall was built, there was a standoff here as armed Soviet and American tanks stood face-to-face. The situation very nearly escalated.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/W. Kastl
The Palace of Tears
It was a place of tearful farewells. Hundreds of people crossed this border post at Friedrichstrasse station when leaving East Germany for West Berlin. The former departure terminal now serves as a reminder of the forced separation of friends and families. Visitors can walk through an original cubicle where passports were checked and relive the border clearance procedure for themselves.
Image: ullstein - Mrotzkowski
Hohenschönhausen Memorial
This former Stasi prison has been a memorial to the victims of communist dictatorship since 1994. Visitors are informed about the detention conditions and interrogation methods in communist East Germany. Former inmates lead the guided tours.
Image: picture alliance/dpa/P. Zinken
The former listening station at Teufelsberg
After World War II, this area was used to deposit debris. Rubble from the war was collected to form the Teufelsberg, the highest elevation in West Berlin. During the Cold War, the US National Security Agency used the hill as a listening station. From here, military radio signals from the Warsaw Pact countries could be intercepted, monitored and jammed.
Image: Ullstein/Getty Images
Glienicke Bridge
You might imagine that the exchange of captured spies only took place on the silver screen, but this bridge between Berlin and Potsdam was actually the scene of three such operations. Steven Spielberg used this historic place as a setting in his feature film "Bridge of Spies."
Image: imago/Camera4
German Spy Museum
This interactive museum right near Potsdamer Platz takes visitors into the world of espionage. Special emphasis is placed on activities in Berlin during the Cold War. Among the more than 300 exhibits is an East German Trabant car with infrared cameras hidden in its doors.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/B. von Jutrczenka
Berlin Wall Trail
The Berlin Wall Trail follows the path of the former division of the city and covers some 160 kilometers. The Japanese donated some 10,000 cherry trees "to bring peace in the hearts of the people." They were planted in different sections of the former Wall. This avenue is right by Bösebrücke, the first crossing to open on the day the Wall came down.