The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories (40 page)

The Wall was aggravating no one, guaranteeing world peace, and protecting the socialist workers against the neo-Hitlerites in the
West. But still Peter Fechter made a dash for it across No Man’s Land and died in the sand rather than stay at home.

No wonder the authorities felt the need to improve the Wall. Year by year it evolved, and by 1975 it was perfected. There is a diagram of Grenzmauer 75, as the structure was officially known. It looks like some magical fortress designed by a child, with its strange perspective, its absurd, fantastic multiplication of defensive devices, and its sketchy little Alsatian ready to attack.

Each prefabricated concrete slab of Grenzmauer 75 was L-shaped, precisely twelve feet, one inch tall. The vertical outer face of the slab faced the West, and the inner angle of the L faced the East. The inner angle was carefully curved, so that it was impossible to gain a foothold on it. The top of the slab was covered with a rounded concrete pipe, so that it was impossible to gain a handhold on it. The concrete itself was smooth and slippery.

These concrete slabs formed the western face of Grenzmauer 75. Behind them there was a row of tank traps. Behind the tank traps was a ditch. Behind the ditch there was a patrol track for vehicles, and then a marching track for infantry. Behind the column track there was a row of street lamps, and behind the street lamps was a row of watchtowers. Behind the watchtowers was a barbed-wire corridor inhabited by attack dogs, and then a low-tension electric fence. Behind the electric fence was a “fakir’s bed” of nails that protruded from the ground, and another concrete wall. Behind this rear wall was a border area cleared of buildings, which the citizens of the German Democratic Republic were not allowed to visit. And behind the border area was an entire society that had been told nothing of the true nature of the Wall.

T
HINGS WEREN’T THAT
bad after Ute was finally allowed to go home. Her sister was gone forever, and Ute thought of her as if she were dead. She mourned her, she grieved, but she went back to work and saw her friends. It would have been madness to do otherwise. Life went on.

Then one day she received a message: “Come to Bernauerstrasse, and I will see you there.” So Ute went and peered over the rampart.
She saw a figure standing on a little steel tower, waving at her. And because it was dangerous even to approach Bernauerstrasse, Ute had to drop her hand, turn on her heel, and walk away—as if she had seen nothing, not even an apparition waving from the other side. “It was the bitterest day of my life,” she says. She wishes she’d never gone.

G
ÜNTER
S
CHABOWSKI LIVES
happily ever after with a modest career behind him as the editor of a local newspaper in Hesse. But once upon a time he was the minister for state propaganda in the Democratic Republic of Germany, and one day he’d made a mistake at work.

It was the ninth of November, 1989. Schabowski had been called to a news conference. There was a crisis: what had once been a trickle of escapees over the Wall had become a flood, and no one knew how to deal with it. He had just returned from his holidays, and he was exhausted, but no one else would speak to the press that day—they’d left it up to him. No one had told him what he had to say, so he improvised.

We know about this tendency in the population, this need of the population, to travel or to leave the GDR. And (um) we have ideas about what we have to bring about . . . namely a complex renewal of the society (um) and thereby achieve that many of these elements . . . (um) that people do not feel compelled to solve their personal problems in this way.

We have decided today (um) to implement a regulation that allows every citizen of the German Democratic Republic (um) to (um) leave the GDR through any of the border crossings.

The room erupted. Would people need visas or passports to leave? When would this regulation come into force? “It comes into effect,” adlibbed Schabowski, “according to my information, immediately.” “That has to be decided by the Council of Ministers,” an aide murmured, but he was not heard above the hubbub. The subsequent questions were
inaudible, but Schabowski repeated four times: “I haven’t heard anything to the contrary.”

The press conference was broadcast live on GDR stations, but no one watched them in those days—not if they wanted to know what was actually going on. Four hours later, a West German news program reported the press conference under a sensational headline.

This ninth of November is a historic day: the GDR has announced that its borders are open to everyone, with immediate effect, and the gates of the wall stand wide open.

It wasn’t quite what Günter Schabowski had said, but that didn’t stop anyone. The people of the GDR got up from their sofas, put on their coats, and walked out to the gates of the Wall, expecting to find them wide open. The queues at the Bornholmerstrasse checkpoint were soon overwhelming, and the guards didn’t know what do to do. They telephoned their bosses, and their bosses reminded them that the Council of Ministers had in fact recommended nothing more than a review of travel restrictions. Headlines on the West German news did not constitute official East German government policy, they said.

Except that this time they did. No matter what the guards said, the people refused to go home. At about half past eleven, as if prompted by some hidden signal—or perhaps just because they didn’t know what else to do—the guards began to wave people over the old railway bridge into the West. They marked their papers with an “exit with no right of return” stamp, as if they were sentencing them to death. But from that moment, the Wall ceased to be the Wall and became a wall. It ceased to be the boundary between states and ideologies and hemispheres and became a length of concrete, twelve feet tall and only a few inches thick.

U
TE, TOO, HAD
been listening to the West German news that night. She rose slowly from her chair, went into the bedroom, and opened her suitcase. She packed some underwear, a few shirts and trousers, and a sweater, because it was cold. She switched off the light, tiptoed down
the stair, crossed the courtyard, picked her way to the front door, and dropped the key as her shaking hands felt for the lock. She made her way to her workplace and left a note on the little roll of paper hanging by the door that people used in the absence of telephones. She apologized: she wouldn’t be back for a while.

One day later, Ute was sitting on the doorstep of her long-lost sister’s house in West Germany, waiting for her to come home from work. They didn’t talk about the Wall. They had dealt with quite enough history for now.

V
OLKER
P
AWLOWSKI LIVES
happily ever after in Bernau, the town outside Berlin for which Bernauerstrasse is named. He is the proud owner of a building yard, a huge silver Chrysler cruiser, and U.S. patent number 6076675, issued to him for

a presentation and holding device for small-format objects that has at least two transparent joinable halves that form a hollow body when fitted together into a corresponding opening in a presentation surface, such as a picture postcard. The hollow body is effectively used to contain an object which has some connection with the motif presented on the picture postcard.

Once upon a time, Pawlowski was a construction worker in East Berlin, but he slipped a disk around the time when the gates of the Wall were opened. Stuck at home, he came up with the modest device that has made his fortune. Pawlowski’s invention is only half the secret of his wealth, for it is the specific motif presented on the picture postcards he sells, and the “small-format objects” that have a connection with it, that lend patent 6076675 its awesome power.

Every so often, Volker Pawlowski drives his truck into Berlin and picks up sections of the Wall. Then he brings them back to his building yard, where they are unloaded and showered in bright spray-paint to make it appear as if they have been covered in graffiti. When the paint has dried, workers chip away at the slabs until there is a pile of little concrete shards on the ground. These are sorted into different
sizes; and then, in accordance with patent number 6076675, they are attached to postcards of famous sections of the Berlin Wall in its heyday.

In pieces pinned to postcards, the Wall is taken back into town. Alongside old Russian army uniforms and GDR badges, it is piled up on souvenir stalls around Checkpoint Charlie, the Brandenburg Gate, and Potsdamer Platz. At the height of his success, Pawlowski was shifting between 30,000 and 40,000 postcards a year. That’s a lot of wall. “It’s worthless,” he says, “but people seem to want it, and who am I to complain?”

Pawlowski isn’t the only one to profit from the destruction of the Wall. The very morning after Günter Schabowski’s mistake, bulldozers turned up in Bernauerstrasse. Although the gates of the Wall had already been thrown wide open, they forced a new opening in it. Then the giant machines rumbled away, and left the people to continue their work.

Some of them started with graffiti. For a long time people had been coming from around the world to deface the Berlin Wall. The border guards might have kept a close watch on the eastern side, but they could effect no jurisdiction over its western face, which by 1989 had become a riot of abusive color. When the bulldozers broke down the Wall, artists streamed through to attack its inner, eastern face, which had hitherto remained pristine. They created trompe l’oeil murals that poked gaps in the structure upon which they had been drawn. A painted desert glimpsed through a painted hole evoked the sandy void of No Man’s Land. A tinny little East German car—the Trabant—crashed through the concrete. The president of the Soviet Union locked himself in a passionate tongue kiss with the president of the German Democratic Republic. The stories painted on the surface of the Wall weren’t just pictures: they challenged its very right to exist.