The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories (39 page)

A
CCORDING TO
U
TE
, the Socialist Workers’ Paradise wasn’t that bad. There were libraries and swimming pools, holiday resorts and good public transportation. There were protected rents, and safe jobs, and secure pensions. Life was predictable. In fact, Ute’s family had moved to the GDR in the late 1950s of their own volition. Her grandfather had been one of those communists who’d held out against Hitler throughout the Nazi years, and he had persuaded them all to come and join him in the democratic republic they were building out in the East.

“There’s everything you need,” he’d said, and so there was, in the village where Ute and her sister grew up. It was the things you wanted that took more time. If you wanted a car or a TV, you put yourself on a waiting list for about ten years, and you saved. If you wanted bananas, you went to the town square once a year and queued up for them all night. Ute and her sister were taught to make do, to expect little, and to be satisfied with what they had. They weren’t satisfied, though, and they decided they were going to do something about it.

H
AGEN KOCH’S PATH
ran through Berlin like a herald with a bell. It ran over the pile of rubble that had been the Gestapo headquarters in Niederkirchnerstrasse. It ran past the wasteland under which lay the remains of Hitler’s chancellery and the department stores of Potsdamer Platz. It ran under the bombed-out ruins of the Reichstag and the Brandenburg Gate, and through the quiet war veterans’ cemetery at Invalidenstrasse. It ran down Bernauerstrasse, turned the corner by the old railway station at Schedtwerstrasse, and then came out to the bridge over the tracks at Bornholmerstrasse.

As it passed them by, the residents of Bernauerstrasse woke up to find that the wall between their flats and the street outside—the one they’d just repapered, the one with the window with net curtains and flower boxes, the one with the front door that jammed a little every day—yes, that wall—had become the Wall.

They were taken by surprise. “There are no plans to build a wall,” their president had said just a few weeks before. The tenants of Bernauerstrasse saw their lives stretch out before them, and they knew what they had to do. They hurried to their windows on the first floor, and the second, and the third. They opened the casements and they jumped, and their bodies rained down onto the capitalist paving stones of the West below them. They had to be quick to beat the guards running up the stairs. Some people were too scared to jump, and spent the rest of their lives as citizens of the German Democratic Republic. Others were too bold and jumped too soon, smashing their bodies on the cobbles. Others were not quite quick enough.

There is a photograph in which a woman hangs from a window.
She is in her fifties, her hair dyed black and set neatly in a perm. She is wearing a long dark coat. East German police or soldiers are leaning out of the window, holding her arms so that she cannot fall; but this isn’t a rescue operation. Bystanders—her relatives who have already escaped, perhaps?—are on the ground outside. They are gripping her feet, trying to pull her down into the West.

Perhaps she lived happily ever after. The Wall stood there quite calmly, aggravating no one, guaranteeing world peace, and preventing skilled workers from being lured into a life of capitalist wage slavery. But the woman and her neighbors jumped out of their windows rather than stay at home in paradise.

No wonder the government felt the need to get everyone out. The inhabitants of Bernauerstrasse were evacuated, and the doors and windows of their flats were hurriedly bricked up. The streets that ran between the buildings were barricaded with whatever came to hand: a jumble of concrete blocks, curbstones, and bricks, garnished with unruly coils of barbed wire.

U
TE AND HER
sister moved to Berlin as soon as they were old enough. According to Ute, the capital of the Socialist Workers’ Paradise wasn’t that bad. You could go anywhere you needed—to the shops in Alexanderplatz, to the Pergamon Museum, to the rallies in Marx-Engels-Platz. You could visit the fine hospitals and the opera houses and the libraries. You could take an elevator to the top of the impressive TV tower, and from the round café at the summit you could see all the way to the western horizon.

It was going where you wanted that was more difficult. There were some streets that didn’t seem to lead anywhere; all that could be seen at the end of them was some empty ground and a concrete wall. If you tried to get a closer look, guards would appear and turn you away. “It’s dangerous for you here,” they’d say. “Go back home.” And that would make you want to walk down there all the more.

There was a clock in Alexanderplatz called the Welt-Uhr, the world clock, which showed the time in all the capital cities of the world. Ute always looked upon it with irony. “What’s the bloody
point of knowing the time in all these places you’ll never visit?” she’d say. Her knowledge of geography is still terrible.

A
FEW MONTHS
after Hagen Koch’s walk with his paintbrush, a young man found his way into number 44 Bernauerstrasse. He crossed courtyards that moaned in the autumn wind and climbed up empty staircases that creaked and squeaked under his weight. He wandered around the vacated homes, his shoes echoing on the bare floorboards. He made his way into one of the attics, and then he climbed out onto the roof.

It didn’t take long for the border guards to spot him and give chase. They climbed up the vertiginous little iron ladders on the sides of chimneys, ran past urns and statues and balustrades, and tripped through gutters that squelched underfoot. Dislodged tiles fell to the street below, and Bernd Lünser’s plans and dreams fell away with them. He reached an ornate cornice, and then there was nowhere else for him to go. He jumped.

The Wall stood there quite calmly, guaranteeing world peace and protecting socialist workers from a life of wage slavery. But Bernd Lünser jumped to his certain death rather than enjoy its protection.

No wonder the authorities knocked down the old flats along Bernauerstrasse. There is a photograph of the street taken a little later, showing what at first glance looks like a boulevard or a park. On the East side, gigantic windowless walls rise from the grass. The peeling wallpaper, the empty holes left by the floor joists, the marks where pictures had once been, and the mantelpieces suspended high above the ground all indicate that until recently these walls had been inside the rooms of people’s homes.

On the other side of the expanse there are two smaller walls, standing very close to each other. One, brand-new, is made of H-shaped concrete posts set firmly into the ground at uniform centers. Prefabricated sections of concrete slab have been set vertically between the posts, topped with a rounded concrete pipe and a coil of barbed wire. Next to it, standing closest to the inhabitants of West Berlin, is a crumbling, rambling structure about six feet tall. Plants sprout from its shattered masonry, and all the ornamental good manners of pilaster
and caryatid are flaking off the brickwork. Look carefully, and you can still just see the front doors and the parlor windows, hastily sealed with crude blockwork.

In between all these walls the ground is empty, except for thousands of gray rabbits. It is known as No Man’s Land.

A
CCORDING TO
U
TE
, things weren’t that bad until her sister disappeared. Then the police came for her and told her all about it. Her sister had gone over to the fascists, they said. It was Ute’s fault, they said; and then she found out what happened to people who went behind that concrete wall at the end of the road. The police locked her up, and they tortured her for six months. She was made to sit in pools of freezing water for hours, for days, until she couldn’t even shiver anymore. She was forced to crouch naked on a mirror and urinate, while the guards stood over her and pointed and laughed. She listened to the horrible cries that echoed down the corridors from God knows where. She didn’t sleep; the lights were always on, and she didn’t know whether it was day or night. After a while her hair and her teeth started to go, her periods stopped, and her body began to wither away. The police tried to make Ute say that she had helped her sister, but she said nothing. She still won’t say what she knew.

T
HE YEAR AFTER
Hagen Koch had painted his line, a teenage boy managed to climb into the empty expanse. Peter Fechter made a dash for it, but as he reached up to grab the top of the wall on the other side, the border guards shot him in the back.

He lay there for three hours, screaming for help, but nobody knew what to do. People poked their heads over the wall from the West and looked at him. Some of them threw bandages down to him, but he was too weak to pick them up. The border guards just stood and watched. He had brought it all on himself, they said. Eventually they released a smoke bomb, and when the air had cleared the guards and the body of Peter Fechter were gone.