The Infamous Berlin Wall
In the fall of 1962 I spent six weeks visiting relatives and friends in Berlin, and listening to their reactions about the latest Soviet harassment measure—the infamous Berlin Wall, which had been built a year earlier.
On Sunday morning, August 13, 1961, Berliners had awakened to construction in progress. Under the protection of heavy tanks and armed police and soldiers, concrete barriers and barbed wire fences were being put into place to seal off the borders of the Soviet-controlled sector of Berlin and the Soviet occupation zone, i.e. East Germany. The monstrous construction project was continuously reinforced over the following years. It became known as the infamous Berlin Wall. This ugly wall was to stand for more than twenty-eight years and caused hundreds of deaths among those who tried to escape. It encircled, and therefore isolated, West Berlin, and cut it off from the eastern part of the city as well as from surrounding East Germany.
Berliners in both East and West Berlin went into shock. West Berliners who were visiting family or friends in East Berlin on that fateful weekend were not allowed to return home. East Berlin residents who worked in West Berlin were cut off from their jobs. Any human contacts between families and friends that had still existed in the divided city were now cut. The S-Bahn (city train) and subway through-traffic was interrupted. Anyone who tried to escape in the years to come was ruthlessly shot.
Direct telephone service had been cut during the Blockade in 1948, but phone calls had been possible afterwards by routing a call through West Germany and East Germany, back to the other part of Berlin. Now even this circuitous way was no longer possible.
On this visit to Berlin a year after the construction of The Wall, I found that people had still not recovered from the shock. If anything, they were more disheartened than ever. The Wall affected their everyday lives. People could not attend weddings, births, and funerals on the “other side.” There were sad scenes, where a bride and groom would stand on one side of The Wall on their wedding day and the parents or grandparents on the other, straining to get a glimpse of the happy couple.
Aunt Lotte and Uncle Martin had lost the sales personnel in their butcher shop. Help was extremely hard to find in West Berlin. At that particular time there were more jobs available than there were people to fill them. This led to the importation of guest workers from Turkey which, years later, turned into a migration, and some areas of West Berlin became wholly Turkish.
I also found a number of Berliners who were quite disappointed, and even angry, that the Americans had watched this happen and had done nothing to stop The Wall from being built.