The Berlin Wall Quotes

“In 2003, Klaus Wowereit, Berlin’s popular and long-serving Social Democratic governing mayor (2001–2014), had described his city as ‘poor but sexy’. Though its infrastructure was and remains drastically underfunded, it is no longer quite so poor – sexiness has always been a matter of opinion – but as of 2016, Berlin was the only capital of a significant European country with a lower income per head than the nation as a whole. The average British person would be 11.2 per cent worse off without London; in France without Paris the figure would be 15 per cent; and in beleaguered Greece the income per head would be a huge 19.5 per cent less were it not for Athens. Berlin’s situation has improved in the past decade, but without its capital, Germany would still be better off by 0.2 per cent.5 Not a lot, but part of the reason that many Germans who do not live in Berlin consider it a snobby, pleased-with-itself, ungrateful waste of their tax euros.”
― Frederick Taylor, The Berlin Wall: August 13, 1961 - November 9, 1989

“For anyone who knew the city when the Wall cast its pall across Berlin, nothing can beat the pleasure of being able to stroll through the Brandenburg Gate and across the Pariser Platz, maybe heading for an espresso in one of the boulevard cafés on Unter den Linden. And nothing is sweeter than the awareness that, compared with twenty years ago, the greatest danger you run when taking these few unhurried paces is of being knocked into by an over-enthusiastic bicycle courier, not cut in half by a burst of automatic fire. When we’re doing this, and the sun is shining, sometimes we can believe that Hitler never happened, that Auschwitz was just the German name for an obscure village in Poland, and that the Berlin Wall was just a figment of somebody’s mad imagination.”
― Frederick Taylor, The Berlin Wall: August 13, 1961 - November 9, 1989

“Shortly after returning from Moscow, Honecker had joined the recently refounded, 500-member German Communist Party. Though mortally ill, he admitted he could not bear to remain ‘unorganised’ – his Communist equivalent of a Catholic’s horror of dying ‘unshriven’.”
― Frederick Taylor, The Berlin Wall: August 13, 1961 - November 9, 1989

“Ulbricht, the East German state’s true begetter, died while his GDR still had a decade and a half of life in it. His successor and protege, Erich Honecker, survived to be held responsible for the state he had helped create and the Wall whose construction he had overseen. He had fled to Moscow in the early spring of 1991, just as legal proceedings were being opened against him. After the Soviet Union itself collapsed, he was extradited back to Germany to answer accusations of having caused almost 200 deaths at the Berlin Wall and the border between the two Germanys. However, Honecker escaped the worst because he faced the worst. By the time the former General Secretary came to court in 1992, now aged eighty, he was dying from a liver cancer that the surgeons had failed to find and remove during his hospital stay in the fateful summer of 1989. Sometimes, as he shuffled to and from the courtroom, he would bump into the likes of Mielke, Kessler, Hoffmann, all also arraigned for the Wall deaths. The elderly comrades would exchange gruff Marxist-Leninist phrases of encouragement, for all the world as if they were young, persecuted anti-Fascists again, with a future to fight for.”
― Frederick Taylor, The Berlin Wall: August 13, 1961 - November 9, 1989

“The young of the former GDR – those who stayed behind – often expressed their disillusion, and the results of decades of intellectual isolation, in a tendency to swing not to the old far Left but to the new far Right. This was particularly true in smaller provincial centres, but there was also a strong presence in cities such as Magdeburg, Halle, and Chemnitz (which had changed its name back from Karl-Marx-Stadt). Racist skinhead gangs sought out the relatively few foreigners who lived in the East and often committed terrible acts of violence against them. Support for far-right parties such as the NPD and the DVU burgeoned. A fervent, if ultimately poisonous and stifling, ‘national’ subculture spread across the former East Germany, and remains a prominent and ugly feature of the ‘new provinces’ well into the twenty-first century.”
― Frederick Taylor, The Berlin Wall: August 13, 1961 - November 9, 1989

“The backlash set in within a couple of years. The industries in which most of the citizens of the former GDR had worked and which, however their work-forces grumbled and chafed, had formed the social framework and economic basis of tightly knit community-based lives, were taken over and disposed of by an overwhelmingly West German public body known as the Treuhandanstalt (Trust Agency). Money from the West flooded into the so-called ‘new provinces’ of the former GDR, but much was spent by and on consultants and ‘experts’ who were seen, not unfairly, by the bewildered and increasingly angry East Germans as greedy carpet-baggers. The merciless ‘Yuppie’ culture of the 1980s West collided bruisingly with a society in the East that, behind the grisly but prophylactic barrier of the Wall, had kept many of those old-fashioned social values that had once been accepted all over the industrialised world but were now dismissed as wilfully eccentric, even contemptible.”
― Frederick Taylor, The Berlin Wall: August 13, 1961 - November 9, 1989

“On 1 July 1990, the West mark became the official currency of both East and West Germany, as the two states remained for another few months yet. For the first 2,000–6,000 East marks, depending on various factors such as the age of the individual in possession of the money, the exchange rate was fixed at one West mark to one East. For all other sums held, it was 1:2. This was an astoundingly generous ‘gift’ to the East, since the open-market rate at that point from East into West marks stood at between 10:1 and 20:1. The first of July was also the day that border controls between the two Germanys were abolished. On 23 June, the final structures at Checkpoint Charlie were removed in the presence of the Foreign Ministers of France, Britain, the USA, the USSR and of the two German states. The presence of the Soviet Foreign Minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, was a tacit admission by Moscow that unification was inevitable. Shevardnadze took the opportunity to make a surprising offer: that all foreign troops be withdrawn from German soil within six months of reunification. The timetable turned out longer – the last would leave in 1994 – but the principle proved true.”
― Frederick Taylor, The Berlin Wall: August 13, 1961 - November 9, 1989

“The first free vote in East Germany for almost sixty years was held on 18 March 1990. The SED received 16 per cent. This respectable outcome probably reflected its true support – time-serving apparatchiks combined with inveterate idealists – even throughout the long years of dictatorship. The CDU, whose Western leader Helmut Kohl had become a hero to the East German masses for his promotion of reunification and promises of rapid prosperity, got 40 per cent. The SPD paid for its ambivalence on both these issues with a disappointing haul of around 22 per cent. Support for the ‘third way’ dissidents of ‘New Forum’, ‘Democratic Awakening’ and so on, who just months previously had seemed so influential, had dwindled quickly. Their votes amounted to no more than 6–7 per cent of the total. In April, a CDU-dominated government, led by Eastern CDU chairman Lothar de Mazière, took power. Reunification was inevitable. Only the terms remained a matter of speculation.”
― Frederick Taylor, The Berlin Wall: August 13, 1961 - November 9, 1989

“Appearing to give an account of himself before a newly emboldened East German parliament, the state’s foremost secret policeman tried to present himself and the Stasi as diligent and humane guardians of the East German people. When heckled and booed by hitherto obedient parliamentary deputies, the old man seemed genuinely upset. ‘But I love you all!’ Mielke declared, on the verge of tears. ‘I love all human beings!’ Then he left the podium and never returned.”
― Frederick Taylor, The Berlin Wall: August 13, 1961 - November 9, 1989

“A mix of hype and hope has defeated bureaucratic obfuscation. A little over six hours after a fumbled press conference and a Western press campaign that took the fumbled ball of the temporary exit-visa regulation and ran with it, a revolution has occurred. One of the swiftest and least bloody in history. A revolution that has, whatever Gil Scott-Heron may have predicted to the contrary fifteen years before, most certainly been televised.”
― Frederick Taylor, The Berlin Wall: August 13, 1961 - November 9, 1989

“At around 11.30, a group of East Berliners pushed aside the screen fence in front of the border crossing and everyone swarmed into the checkpoint area en masse. Checkpoint commander Lieutenant-Colonel Harald Jäger decided that he was not prepared to risk the lives of himself and his soldiers. He ordered his men to stop checking passports, open up fully, and just let the crowd do what it wanted. And the crowd knew what it wanted. Within moments, thousands began to pour through the checkpoint. They simply walked or, in most cases ran, into West Berlin. The sensation of running freely over the bridge, of crossing a border where such an action, just days or even hours before, would have courted near-certain death, brought a surge of exhilaration that, if we are to believe those who were there, all but changed the chemical composition of the air and turned it into champagne. Large crowds had already gathered on the Western side. They greeted the Easterners with cries of joy and open arms. Many improvised toasts were drunk. By midnight, all the border checkpoints had been forced to open. At the Invalidenstrasse, masses ‘invaded’ from the West and met the approaching Easterners in the middle. It was now twenty past midnight, and the entire East German army had been placed on a state of heightened alert. However, in the absence of orders from the leadership, the 12,000 men of the Berlin border regiments remained confined to barracks. The night passed, and the orders never arrived.”
― Frederick Taylor, The Berlin Wall: August 13, 1961 - November 9, 1989

“Dresden, the demonstrations outside the station were not forcibly dispersed. The Volkspolizei colonel commanding the forces of order had to decide whether to start shooting, and he decided not to. He became, and remains to this day, a hero in Dresden. Within hours the news spread, first to Leipzig and then to Berlin. People had defied the regime in Dresden, but the regime’s policemen had not dared open fire.”
― Frederick Taylor, The Berlin Wall: August 13, 1961 - November 9, 1989

“The GDR was still in bad financial trouble, and relations with Moscow under the new, reformist leadership were frosty. On the one hand, the GDR was too Stalinist for the Gorbachev clique, on the other Honecker and his supporters were too close to the West Germans (and their open-handed lending institutions) for the Soviets’ comfort. If anything, the trip caused a further deterioration in relations with Moscow. Honecker had not consulted Gorbachev before announcing the visit, and it was a slight the Russian never forgot.”
― Frederick Taylor, The Berlin Wall: August 13, 1961 - November 9, 1989

“But the moment that briefly provided a glimpse into Erich Honecker, the human being, was his short but intensely felt trip to his home town, Wiebelskirchen in the Saarland, so far west that the French border lay just a short drive away. On arrival, he visited his sister, who still lived in the family house, and paid respects to his parents’ grave in the local cemetery. The powerful leader’s eyes moistened as he heard the miners’ choirs sing the songs of his youth. He chatted with pleasure in the distinctive dialect of his homeland. There were boos, and cries from the crowd of ‘murderer’, a handful of hostile or sarcastic placards, but on the whole the Saar greeted its long-lost son with a certain perverse approval. Its provincial premier, leftist SPD politician Oskar Lafontaine, told Honecker that ‘people around here feel a certain satisfaction, even a certain pride, when they see a born Saarlander ruling over the Prussians and the Saxons’.”
― Frederick Taylor, The Berlin Wall: August 13, 1961 - November 9, 1989

“One younger member of the Soviet Politburo who had voted against allowing Honecker to visit West Germany was 54-year-old Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, Second Secretary of the CPSU. In 1985, after Chernenko died, he was elected First Secretary and de facto leader of the USSR by colleagues tired of gerontocracy as a system of government. The first leader of Communist Russia to be born after the 1917 revolution, Gorbachev preached reform expressed through the principles of glasnost or ‘openness’, perestroika (‘restructuring’) and uskoreniye (‘acceleration’).”
― Frederick Taylor, The Berlin Wall: August 13, 1961 - November 9, 1989

“Through KoKo, the élite at Wandlitz were supplied with Western goods and personal luxuries unavailable to the vast majority of East Germans. Once Honecker himself became leader in the early 1970s, he gained personal control of a hard-currency bank account, the so-called ‘General Secretary’s account’, number 0628 at the Deutsche Handels-bank in East Berlin. By order, this had always to contain a minimum of a hundred million marks. Honecker used it for whatever purposes he saw fit. He might decide to donate forty million marks’ worth of grain to Nicaragua, or make a grant of eighty million to Poland during the political difficulties there. He might, as he did one year, personally write a cheque for two million marks for the importation of apples in order to counteract a fruit shortage in the GDR.17 The image of the General Secretary as absolutist ruler, dealing out largess at his gracious whim, grew year by year; back to the eighteenth century again.”
― Frederick Taylor, The Berlin Wall: August 13, 1961 - November 9, 1989

“With a strength totalling almost 4,000, lavishly funded and equipped, the HVA was especially adept at penetrating West Germany with ‘sleepers’. One of these, specially trained and sent into the West in 1956 among many thousands of refugees from the GDR, was Günter Guillaume. Guillaume’s cover was that of a firmly anti-Communist Social Democrat, and so it was that over the years he rose through the ranks of the SPD to become a prominent aide to Willy Brandt and finally, in 1972, his personal assistant and constant companion. Early on the morning of 24 April 1974, the doorbell rang at the villa in Bonn where Guillaume lived with his wife (also a Stasi agent) and his children (who knew nothing of their father’s true identity). Guillaume answered the door in his dressing gown. His visitors identified themselves as officials of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, West Germany’s equivalent of the FBI or M15. ‘Are you Herr Günter Guillaume?’ asked one of the officials. ‘We have a warrant for your arrest.’ At this point, Guillaume made a fatal error. He drew himself up to his full height and announced: ‘I am a citizen and officer of the GDR – respect that fact!’ Actually, they had no conclusive evidence against Guillaume until he incriminated himself.”
― Frederick Taylor, The Berlin Wall: August 13, 1961 - November 9, 1989

“But this ‘normalisation’ was only partial. The East still treated the West as ‘the enemy’. Both sides had long spied on each other, but in the 1960s and 1970s the Stasi’s foreign-espionage department, the ‘Main Administration for Reconnaissance’ (HVA) was hugely expanded. Its head, Markus Wolf, had grown up in exile in the USSR as son of a well-known German Communist writer, Friedrich Wolf. Bilingual in Russian and German, highly intelligent and renowned for his charm, he rapidly climbed the hierarchy after 1945 and was put in charge of the HVA in 1957 at the astonishingly young age of thirty-four. He was both admired and feared in the West. John le Carré is said to have modelled his fictional KGB mastermind Karla, after Wolf.”
― Frederick Taylor, The Berlin Wall: August 13, 1961 - November 9, 1989

“Most of the travel was, as before, one-way, from West to East. Until the mid-1980s, only East Germans of retirement age could travel freely to the West. They were, of course, no longer productive. What did it matter if they chose not to return?”
― Frederick Taylor, The Berlin Wall: August 13, 1961 - November 9, 1989

“It was true that the East German Politburo was strangely sensitive. Its members wanted to keep their population shut up inside the GDR, but at the same time they wanted themselves and their state to be well thought of.”
― Frederick Taylor, The Berlin Wall: August 13, 1961 - November 9, 1989

“In the early 1980s, East German punks found a refuge with the Protestant churches, whose pastors often offered them places to socialise and to practise and play punk music, sometimes as part of ‘modernised’ church services. The numbers of punks increased as in the 1980s discontent grew, along with the ranks of the skinheads, who represented an altogether more sinister trend towards racism and neo-Nazi nostalgia which the state, for all its power and rigour, seemed helpless to prevent.”
― Frederick Taylor, The Berlin Wall: August 13, 1961 - November 9, 1989

“In contrast with the West, where alternative lifestyles were by and large tolerated, in the GDR, between the sixties and the eighties, pressure on ‘hooligan’ or ‘subversive’ elements was intense. Hippies were bad enough, but probably the most serious conflict between the state and its young came in the late 1970s when punk culture spread to East Germany. It wasn’t just the clothes – the ripped garments, the fetish objects and chains – or the excessive drinking – drugs were almost impossible to get in East Berlin at this time – or the flaunting of evidence of self-harm. There was something else about punk that the authorities couldn’t stand. Perhaps it was the key phrase of the movement, ‘No Future!’ In a society where the past was uncomfortable, the present seriously problematic, but the utopian ‘socialist’ future was everything, pessimism of the kind that punks luxuriated in was considered deeply anti-social.”
― Frederick Taylor, The Berlin Wall: August 13, 1961 - November 9, 1989

“Eastern Europeans who arrived in West Berlin were bemused by its leftist scene, this exotic political and social hothouse flower. They were appalled by the extent to which such far-left thought could be so widespread and dogmatically expressed, with the real-world results of Marxism-Leninism so painfully and cruelly apparent right on the rebels’ doorstep, in the shape of the Wall.”
― Frederick Taylor, The Berlin Wall: August 13, 1961 - November 9, 1989

“All the same, in the late 1960s and 1970s, West Berlin was a pleasant enough place to live. It had an intimate, piquant flavour, very relaxed and yet slightly dangerous, that you either liked or disliked, and if you liked it you probably loved it. You could avoid being confronted too much by the depressing fact of the Wall if you knew which routes to take. There was a lively party and cultural scene, plenty of interesting people. Little was forbidden, just about everything was tolerated. The alternative lifestyle types could be seen, if you forgave their showy and sometimes violent excesses, as a kind of noisy, permanent street cabaret. It was in Berlin that several soon-to-be-notorious anarcho-radical figures, including student leaders such as Fritz Teufel and Dieter Kunzelmann, and the precocious Ulrich Enzensberger, younger brother of the famous German writer, Hans-Magnus Enzensberger, set up the so-called ‘Commune One’ (Kommune 1). Here sexualised politics and politicised sex became the order of the day. What most people understand as politics often receded into the background.”
― Frederick Taylor, The Berlin Wall: August 13, 1961 - November 9, 1989

“On the other hand, the fact that 80 per cent of doctors in the East German province of Thuringia had been members of the Nazi Party before 1945 did not lead the Communist authorities to sack them all.5 Exceptions were quietly made, and plenty of them. The same applied to other key areas of the administration and the economy. Neither Germany could really afford to start again with a completely clean slate.”
― Frederick Taylor, The Berlin Wall: August 13, 1961 - November 9, 1989

“So far as broader social and political attitudes were concerned, there had been some ‘denazification’ immediately after the war, but there is no question that in West Germany many who had made sordid, even brutal careers under Hitler seamlessly achieved the transition into the new postwar élite, in industry, the law, the state apparatus and the armed forces. The Allies, keen at first to purge the country of Nazis, quickly realised that to do so with any thoroughness would also purge Germany of the men (and they were overwhelmingly men) who knew how to run the place. And with the Cold War quickly dominating the international horizon, it was more important that the new Germany functioned, and joined the Western side, than that it was politically pure. A lot of investigations against useful men of a certain age and curriculum vitae were not pursued with due process or energy.”
― Frederick Taylor, The Berlin Wall: August 13, 1961 - November 9, 1989

“Free to come and go in the East as they wished, Western radical tourists liked its lack of commercialism and advertising, the cheap food, the bookshop next to Friedrichstrasse station where you could buy very inexpensive copies of the Marxist classics. What could be so wrong with a state where you could buy a hardcover copy of Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire for the price of a cup of (terrible) coffee? While enjoying the pleasures of a free and easy existence in West Berlin, many of the alternative crowd sneered at the existing population, mocking its consumerism, apparent social conservatism and continuing gratitude to the NATO forces who stood between their beleaguered part-city and its absorption into the surrounding ‘Workers’ and Peasants’ State’. Instead of spending the 1970s continuing to protest against the Wall, the radical activists who flocked to West Berlin spent their considerable free time protesting against imperialism in far-away countries and, closer to home, against the allegedly proto-Fascist nature of the post-war West German state created by Adenauer’s conservatives.”
― Frederick Taylor, The Berlin Wall: August 13, 1961 - November 9, 1989

“Significantly, in the 1960s, the newcomers were not the traditional immigrants looking for work, nor were they ambitious young professionals. West Berlin was not a place to go if you wanted advancement – that happened in thriving centres like Frankfurt (finance), Hamburg (the press), Düsseldorf (advertising and insurance) or Bavaria, where the new electronic industries were beginning to flourish. No, those coming to Berlin in large enough numbers to make their presence felt were an interesting crowd, despite – or perhaps because – they were not mainstream. Here were people in search of alternative lifestyles, cheap rents, round-the-clock nightlife, and, last but not least, looking to avoid conscription into the West German armed forces, the Bundeswehr. Under Allied occupation law, a West Berlin residence card granted immunity to the West German call-up.”
― Frederick Taylor, The Berlin Wall: August 13, 1961 - November 9, 1989

“In fact, in the late 1960s – and certainly by the 1970s – West Berlin came to resemble in significant ways the ‘free city’ that had been Khrushchev’s brainwave back in 1958. True, its population of just over two million survived because of huge subsidies from the half-city’s rich ‘big brother’, the Federal Republic. But West Berlin was not West Germany. It operated under different laws and had – increasingly – a curious social and political flavour all of its own. Cut off from its economic and demographic hinterland, and from almost half its former urban area (and a third of its former population), West Berlin was truly an island in the Communist sea. The majority of established Berliners were still pro-Allies and especially pro-American. They still cheered at Christmas, when the tanks of the 40th Armoured toured Steglitz and Zehlendorf with Santa Claus in full fig in the turret and toys for the local kids.3 America was the guarantee that their freedoms would not go the same way as those of their friends and relatives in East Berlin. But the established Berliners no longer entirely dictated the tone. During the 1960s, the balance of the city began to change.”
― Frederick Taylor, The Berlin Wall: August 13, 1961 - November 9, 1989

“The rewards for successful coaches and athletes were high: foreign travel, privileged treatment when it came to homes and cars, bonuses in Western currency. Unfortunately, the price was often equally high. At the 1968 Mexico Olympics, the GDR’s team achieved third place in the medals table, behind only the USA and the USSR. Many competitors were already on dangerous performance-enhancing drugs such as anabolic steroids and hormones. Olympic success strengthened this trend. From 1969, a comprehensive doping programme was embarked on. The Leipzig Institute, the Academy of Sciences in East Berlin, and the Jenapharm drugs company all collaborated shamelessly to ensure that East German athletes kept their place at the top of the international rankings. Such world-beating achievements provided other countries with a positive image of the German Communist state, as well as a sorely needed focus for communal pride back in the GDR. For a state of only sixteen million to enjoy such success was indeed amazing. Only after 1989 would the extent of this ruthless state conspiracy become clear. Many children and young people were given these powerful and often damaging drugs without their parents’ permission, and many, as they experience middle age, suffer from disastrous long-term effects.”
― Frederick Taylor, The Berlin Wall: August 13, 1961 - November 9, 1989