the line where the American sector of ‘the divided city’ confronted Communist East Berlin.
On that sunny, rather windy, autumn afternoon in 2008 at Marienborn/Helmstedt family groups were picnicking on the grass and people of all ages queued to visit the small museum at this former flash-point where World War III might have begun. The motorway having been diverted once the checkpoint was redundant after the reunification of Germany, people wandered across the vehicle lanes that had often been clogged with Allied military convoys and commercial traffic deliberately delayed by Soviet troops or GDR border police. Others photographed a solitary watch-tower that had been left standing to remind visitors that Checkpoint Able had been one of the few tightly controlled gaps in the long internal German border stretching 866 miles from the shores of the Baltic all the way to the Czech frontier. Whereas two-thirds of escape attempts had previously taken place across this ‘green border’, the number of documented attempts there after the border was closed in 1952 plummeted to fewer than 100 per year, of which only about six were successful. 2 Many of the other would-be refugees paid with their lives.
For most of the Germans present on that day in 2008, the occasion was a pleasant family day out. Doubtless, some of the older visitors had unhappy memories, having lived im Osten – to the east of the border – under the most repressive Communist regime in Europe. I shared their mixed feelings, walking with my wife away from the crowds towards a small, rather temporary-looking building to the left of the traffic lanes. For other visitors curious enough to peer through the grimy windows, there was no evidence of the crushing bureaucracy of which this had been the westernmost outpost, but looking through that glass darkly took me back nearly half a century.
On 12 May 1959, aged 20, I was sitting in that office on a wooden chair facing an officer of the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit – the Ministry of State Security, usually abbreviated to ‘Stasi’ – who had been interrogating me for six long weeks. Also present were his escort of two Stasi heavies in ill-fitting suits and a distinguished-looking English lady in the smart blue uniform of the International Red Cross, who had come to escort me back to the free world. For twenty minutes, she fielded all attempts to get her to make any political remark by her ready stream of small talk about the weather, the pleasure of drinking tea as opposed to coffee and so on. As the clock on the wall showed the agreed handover time of midday, she rose to return to the Helmstedt side of the crossing, in what was then the British zone of occupied Germany.
With nothing against him personally, I shook hands with my interrogator. It was the Cold War that had made us enemies. If he had sometimes had me hauled out of my cell for questioning in the middle of the night or very early in the morning, it was not often enough to constitute harassment, but it did make me wonder whatever sort of life he led, if those were his normal working hours.
Walking with the Red Cross lady, whose name I never learned, out of the door and towards the western side of the checkpoint, time slowed down. It seemed a long walk, and I was frightened that this was a dream, a delusion or some kind of psychological trick that would end with a sudden shout of ‘ Halt! Stehenbleiben! ’ at which I would turn round to see a frontier guard with his machine pistol levelled at me – and raise my hands, waiting to be taken back to my cell.
That whole morning seemed unreal. Woken in my cell at 6 a.m. by a prison guard bearing the usual breakfast of black bread, some brown jam of unidentifiable fruit and a mug of ersatz coffee suitably called Muckefuck , I had been marched along the echoing corridors of the political prison in Potsdam’s Lindenstrasse, known ironically to its unfortunate inmates as das Lindenhotel . Instead of
On that sunny, rather windy, autumn afternoon in 2008 at Marienborn/Helmstedt family groups were picnicking on the grass and people of all ages queued to visit the small museum at this former flash-point where World War III might have begun. The motorway having been diverted once the checkpoint was redundant after the reunification of Germany, people wandered across the vehicle lanes that had often been clogged with Allied military convoys and commercial traffic deliberately delayed by Soviet troops or GDR border police. Others photographed a solitary watch-tower that had been left standing to remind visitors that Checkpoint Able had been one of the few tightly controlled gaps in the long internal German border stretching 866 miles from the shores of the Baltic all the way to the Czech frontier. Whereas two-thirds of escape attempts had previously taken place across this ‘green border’, the number of documented attempts there after the border was closed in 1952 plummeted to fewer than 100 per year, of which only about six were successful. 2 Many of the other would-be refugees paid with their lives.
For most of the Germans present on that day in 2008, the occasion was a pleasant family day out. Doubtless, some of the older visitors had unhappy memories, having lived im Osten – to the east of the border – under the most repressive Communist regime in Europe. I shared their mixed feelings, walking with my wife away from the crowds towards a small, rather temporary-looking building to the left of the traffic lanes. For other visitors curious enough to peer through the grimy windows, there was no evidence of the crushing bureaucracy of which this had been the westernmost outpost, but looking through that glass darkly took me back nearly half a century.
On 12 May 1959, aged 20, I was sitting in that office on a wooden chair facing an officer of the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit – the Ministry of State Security, usually abbreviated to ‘Stasi’ – who had been interrogating me for six long weeks. Also present were his escort of two Stasi heavies in ill-fitting suits and a distinguished-looking English lady in the smart blue uniform of the International Red Cross, who had come to escort me back to the free world. For twenty minutes, she fielded all attempts to get her to make any political remark by her ready stream of small talk about the weather, the pleasure of drinking tea as opposed to coffee and so on. As the clock on the wall showed the agreed handover time of midday, she rose to return to the Helmstedt side of the crossing, in what was then the British zone of occupied Germany.
With nothing against him personally, I shook hands with my interrogator. It was the Cold War that had made us enemies. If he had sometimes had me hauled out of my cell for questioning in the middle of the night or very early in the morning, it was not often enough to constitute harassment, but it did make me wonder whatever sort of life he led, if those were his normal working hours.
Walking with the Red Cross lady, whose name I never learned, out of the door and towards the western side of the checkpoint, time slowed down. It seemed a long walk, and I was frightened that this was a dream, a delusion or some kind of psychological trick that would end with a sudden shout of ‘ Halt! Stehenbleiben! ’ at which I would turn round to see a frontier guard with his machine pistol levelled at me – and raise my hands, waiting to be taken back to my cell.
That whole morning seemed unreal. Woken in my cell at 6 a.m. by a prison guard bearing the usual breakfast of black bread, some brown jam of unidentifiable fruit and a mug of ersatz coffee suitably called Muckefuck , I had been marched along the echoing corridors of the political prison in Potsdam’s Lindenstrasse, known ironically to its unfortunate inmates as das Lindenhotel . Instead of
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