Berlin Wall - May 1968

This was originally published in the Northland Reader now the Reader Weekly, November 11, 1999.

Last Tuesday, November 9th, was the tenth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.  Not being much of a TV viewer, I did not get the full thrill of seeing it come down.  But 21 years earlier I did get the full impact of seeing it up close.

In 1968 I transferred to Europe with Sperry Univac and was assigned to work in Basel, Switerland.  Within two weeks of my arrival I went to Berlin for a user conference.  I arrived early the day before the conference began and spent the day sightseeing.

I went through parks, into shops, and up into buildings to look out over a thriving city.  Unlike other cities, there was one place I was blocked from seeing the whole city: The Wall.  Unlike the green parks, the elegant shops, and the modern buildings that invited you in, the wall was grey, shabby, old-looking and uninviting.

The Wall was a combination of grey concrete and the façades of old buildings.  The concrete was topped with barbed wire.  Mounting one of the many observation platforms, one could see more fences and walls, with tank traps and other impediments between them.  There were light towers and watch towers in both directions.  It was a gross caricature of a high-security prison.  On some streets the wall joined the fronts of a series of apartment buildings.  But there were no apartments behind the fronts whose doors and windows had been filled with concrete.  Every so often there would be a cross with flowers and ribbons; the cross marked the spot where somebody had been killed crossing over the Wall.

My wanderings took me to a large park that had a sign pointing to the Brandenburg Gate.  Over a half mile from the gate was a little gate house.  An unarmed guard indicated that we should follow the walkway that went way around the barricades on the road leading to the Brandenburg Gate.

Halfway to the Gate and on the other side of the broad street there was the Monument to the Soviet Soldier.  Two Russian soldiers marched stiff-legged back and forth.  Two others did some repair on the paving.  The only thing separating us was a normal crowd-control barricade on my side of the street.

About three-quarters of the way to the Gate, I encountered the first armed West Germans that I had seen.  Two policemen with machine pistols were chatting in the street.  They didn't even look at me when I took their pictures.  Behind them and on the other side of the street was the Reichstag, an imposing building with almost no activity around it.  And right behind it was The Wall.

In the middle of the street, a few yards before The Wall, was a block house with the main floor about a half-story above the ground.  It had large windows in front, and a balcony.  On the balcony stood an American soldier looking over The Wall with a pair of binoculars.  The Wall made a great semicircle around the Brandenburg Gate.  In that semicircle stood a number of East German soldiers looking back over the wall, some with binoculars.

I was free to walk in front of the block house to either side of the semicircle.  Inside the semicircle it was barren except for grass between some of the cement blocks and the soldiers.  Outside the semicircle on the "west" side of The Wall there were numerous small trees and many propaganda signs directed to the east.  Among them were a quote from Bertold Brecht and a count of the number who died trying to cross The Wall.

Back at my hotel I met three people from one of our Swiss customers.  They said they were going to go to Checkpoint Charlie (one of the few openings in the wall); they invited me along.  We hopped in a taxi and went to what appeared to be a normal European mixed residential/business district.  That is, stores below and offices and apartments in the one to three stories above.

However, right in the middle of the street was a white frame bungalow.  It was the office of the American soldiers who monitored that section of The Wall.  And beyond it was The Wall.  Nobody paid any attention to us as we walked towards The Wall.  I don't remember how it looked as it crossed from one side of the street to the other.  I just focused on the little overlapping opening that we walked through.

On the other side we were met by an armed East German soldier who handed each of us a numbered ticket off a roll of tickets.  He directed us to a wooden building on the right side of the street.  Inside we had to write out a customs declaration, and give up our passports and the numbered ticket.  When we did this we were given another numbered ticket and directed to the next wooden building.

In the second building our passports were called out by number, in German, no name.  We turned in our second ticket and were given our passports back with a third numbered ticket.  Each ticket was a different color.  We were then directed to a third building.

As we walked between buildings we saw a car parked in front of the wooden building on the other side.  Several soldiers were around it and one soldier was on his knees looking under the car with a mirror on a stick and wheels.  We didn't watch long enough to know if the car was allowed to pass or not.

In the third building we turned in our ticket and ten West German Marks (about $2.50 at the time) in exchange for ten East German marks (almost worthless).  I put my East German ten-mark bill into my passport.  We were given a fourth ticket and allowed to go outside.  We were met by a soldier who took our tickets and allowed us to proceed down Friedrichstrasse.

What a difference met our eyes.  When we got out of the taxi, we were in a neighborhood that has been normal in European cities for a couple of centuries.  Not elegant but well-kept.  In front of us on the other side every other building was just as it had been at the end of World War II.  A few partial walls and a pile of rubble.

Every now and then there were some buildings undamaged or restored.  One of them was the Berlin Comic Opera which displayed playbills for coming performances.

We continued on to Unter Den Linden, before World War II one of the most fashionable streets in Berlin.  Now it had some rather plain looking shops with nothing much in their windows.  We continued on to the Brandenburg Gate but we were not allowed to get as close to The Wall as I had from the other side.  We were stopped by a line of crowd control barricades.  Nothing more was needed because there were plenty of soldiers around The Wall.

We returned to Friedrichstrasse down the other side of Unter Den Linden.  At the intersection we found a popular restaurant, at least among East German soldiers.  They seemed to be about one-third of the customers.  We found a table and ordered our food.  When it came it had a medium sized portion of meat with potatoes and vegetables filling almost all the space left on the plate.  I thought the restaurant was trying to show how good life was under Communism.  It was many months before I learned that serving style was typical of ordinary restaurants all over Germany.

We finally finished our meal and paid in West German marks, which pleased the management very much.  When we got outside it was late and dark, and so we took a taxi back to Checkpoint Charlie.

We were met again by a soldier who gave us each a numbered ticket.  We went into the wooden building on the right side of the street leading to The Wall.  We handed our tickets and passports to the sergeant behind the single, long counter.  He opened mine and saw ten East German marks.  One was not permitted to export East German marks.

A long conversation ensued between my Swiss companions and the sergeant.  With not 200 words of German vocabulary yet, I could only turn my head from speaker to speaker.  Finally, the sergeant looked me directly in the eye and asked, "Sprechen Sie Deutsch?"  I responded without hesitation, "Nein!"  This brought out laughter from everyone.

Just as two officers came in the door, the sergeant pointed to a Red Cross box at the far end of the counter.  The Swiss told me that I should deposit the ten East German marks in the box.  I later dubbed it the "Officers' Coffee Fund".

Now all our passports disappeared through a window to a back room.  After several minutes they were returned to us with yet another numbered ticket.  We left the building and went to another overlapping opening in The Wall.  We handed our tickets to the soldier at that opening, and walked through.  Nobody in the white frame building on the other side paid any attention to us.

It is amazing to think that we walked into freedom by entering a city that was completely surrounded by The Wall.

Contrasting counters to radical Islam

The January-February issue of Utne Reader has two articles about wildly contrasting ideas about countering radical Islam.

The first is "Jihad Against Islam, America's right wing is on a witch hunt, and they're tying Muslims to the stake" by Robert Steinback, from Intelligence Report, a publication of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

It is a summary of how a large number of people in the U.S. believe that all Muslims are sympathetic to Al-Qaeda and that "mainstream Islam advocates violence against non-Muslims". Much of this is being fueled by a "coterie of core activists". Max Blumenthal called it "the Great Islamophobic Crusade." Their complaint about the Islamic center near the World Trade Center gained support from Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich. The assumption of these modern Crusaders is that the likes of Osama Bin Laden are interpreting the Koran correctly.

The second is "Bollywood's Soft Power, India's hugely popular films wage a cultural war on extremism" by Shikha Dalmia. The article was original published in The Daily. The Utne article is excerpted from Reason, a libertarian magazine.

Bollywood is "India's flamboyant film industry", and its films are shown all over Asia from Indonesia to Dubai. Dalmia likens the effect of Bollywood to extremism to the effect of rock and roll on the demise of the Soviet Union. It wasn't Reagan that brought down the Berlin Wall but the Beatles, and "Mikhail Gorbachev acknowledged to Paul McCartney that the Beatles paved the way for perestroika and glasnost".

Bollywood's allure is that it is based on Eastern values and that the actors look like the viewers. Some countries like Dubai embrace Bollywood. Others that are trying to control all aspects of life, like Pakistan, "are trying to purge Bollywood from their soil". The harder they try to limit Bollywood, the greater its popularity.

BTW, Bollywood's "three highest-grossing male leads are Muslims".

These two articles illustrate the old saw about catching more flies with honey than vinegar. And you would think that the intellectuals in the anti-Islam jihad would have learned that all the vinegar (and money and lives) that have been sloshed around in the name of defense of the U.S. would have caught on by now to the fallacy of their approach.

Reagan, Gorbachev, and the Berlin Wall

Many credit Ronald Reagan with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall, citing Reagan's "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down the wall!" and other actions.

First, Gorbachev was no absolute dictator like Stalin. He had many constituencies to please, both hard-line and open-minded. Gorbachev knew the Soviet Union was not working, but he could not like Stalin or Mao simply declare a change of course. He had to move politically rather than autocratically.

Second, Gorbachev's predecessors had put the Soviet Union in a precarious financial position with an overabundance of subsidies. The only thing that propped up the finances of the Soviet Union was the export of oil at $70/barrel.

Then the price of oil collapsed to $10/barrel, and with it the Soviet Union.

The severe drop in the price of oil was caused by millions of consumers saving energy, something Reagan was not enthusiastic about.

Unfortunately, things have turned around and consumption has gone up, the price of oil has gone up, and petro-dictators have been propped up. But blame Americans only indirectly. Many people in the world want to live like us and now they are - in China, India, South America, and many other places. And to live like Americans, they drive cars, air-condition their houses, and power their proliferating gadgets.

See "Hot, Flat, and Crowded" by Thomas Friedman

Iran, Berlin Wall, and Snapping Fingers

An old bromide raised its head on the comments in today's Lede of the New York Times; see comment at 8:06 a.m. by nymarty. Ronald Reagan said "Tear down that wall, Mr. Gorbachev!" and the Berlin Wall came down! Except the wall came down ten months after Ronald Reagan left office. It's like the hippy snapping his fingers on the park bench to keep the tigers away. Since there are no tigers nearby he assumes snapping his fingers is working.

The Reaganites ignore that the Soviet Union was changing under Gorbachev's leadership and it was probably not because of Western Armaments. It was probably because of Western ideas that Gorbachev saw how bankrupt the Soviet system was. The East German government was already being marginalized within the Warsaw Pact. The xenophobia of the East German government only prolonged the agony.

nymarty wrote that Obama said too little too late. Obama can only say so much without increasing the xenophobia of the Iranian government. It has already lashed out at the English, French, and German governments for their statements. And words are just that, words! What can any U.S. President do about Iran? Stop oil shipments? What a ruckus the increase in gas prices will cause in the U.S. Invade Iran? Remember, the people with the guns are mostly supporters of the Iranian government. But even those in the Iranian army and police who don't support the current government are going to be very hostile against any foreign invader.

What is interesting about nymarty's comments is that he goes on to say that JFK spoke out against Castro's Cuba and that Churchill and Roosevelt spoke out against Hitler. Castro's Cuba is still there and it took nearly seven years of war to defeat Hitler.

What is most ironic about nymarty's comment is that he ends with "The Mullahs want the bomb and nothing our president can say will stop them from getting it." In other words, Obama is wrong for not saying enough, but no matter what he says it won't mean anything.

My view is that Obama is choosing his words carefully to support the people of Iran while not giving the Iranian government an excuse for claiming "foreign interference" in "Iran's internal affairs", a well-known cop-out for corrupt governments everywhere.