Dateline Discovery

East German Authorities closed off East Berlin overnight in 1961. Only recently has the city begun to heal.

It was yet another tense summer afternoon in Berlin when teenagers Peter Fechter and Helmut Kulbeik hatched their daring plan.

Just more than a year earlier, on Aug. 13, 1961, East German authorities suddenly closed the border with West Berlin and erected a barbed wire entanglement away from the sanctioned checkpoints. In the following days, the wire was gradually replaced by a concrete barrier; residents, believing rumors of its construction were just that, were startled and dismayed.

The two bricklayers, both 18 and living in East Berlin, decided they had enough of the government’s increasing oppression and austerity. Wishing to defect, they studied the movements of the patrolling East German guards from a carpenter’s workshop near Checkpoint Charlie, then dropped from a window into the “death strip,” an area between the border’s inner and outer walls.

Both had reached the outer barrier before gunshots were fired. Kulbeik was able to scale the six-foot wall, topped by barbed wire, and threw himself over, but Fechter was not so fortunate. He was shot in the right hip and collapsed against the wall, where he lay, groaning, for 50 minutes in front of several concerned West Berlin onlookers before bleeding to death on Aug. 17, 1962.

One hundred forty people are known to have died trying to cross the wall by the time it was torn down nearly three decades later. Only a few small sections remain standing in place; because of the emotion it evoked, many panels were destroyed shortly after the first sledgehammers struck.

Even now, although it has been reduced to rubble for longer than it stood intact, it’s hard to think of Berlin without thinking of the Berlin Wall. It affected more people than the city’s combined three million residents. It was, and remains, an everlasting symbol of the Cold War.

Why was it there? Once World War II ended, the United States, the United Kingdom, France and the Soviet Union agreed to separate Germany into administrative areas. Berlin, the country’s capital and economic center, was to be carved up in a similar manner.

After 15 years, the political gulf between the powers grew significantly, and residents of East Berlin — and East Germany as a whole — increasingly believed their futures were bleak under socialist rule. Fearful of the effect the constant emigration would have on society, East German authorities decided to close off their section of Berlin literally overnight, terming the border an “anti-fascist barrier.”

Over time, that original bundle of barbed wire was replaced by a pair of walls, with watch towers, anti-tank barriers and trenches constructed in between. To some, such as Fechter and Kulbeik, the effort to keep people in only heightened their desire to escape. Residents leapt from windows, built tunnels and even strapped themselves to balloons to attempt to leave.

Tensions only began cooling in the 1980s, and it was on Nov. 9, 1989, partly the result of a miscommunication, that the East German government announced the border would be open effective immediately. People flocked to the crossings and demanded border guards let them through. Nearly as quickly as the wall went up, it was taken down.

Today, understandably, very little of the wall remains. The East Side Gallery, a nearly mile-long stretch of it along the River Spree, endures as a series of political murals. The poignant Gedenkstätte Berliner Mauer [Berlin Wall Memorial] was built opposite a preserved section along Bernauer Straße. Another segment stands on nearby Bornhlmer Straße, where the gates were first breeched.

The physical appearance of the city is otherwise continuous. Development along the frontier has flourished, especially in the once-barren Potsdamer Platz, where two angled, graffiti-covered sections of the wall bookend the open space. A thin trail of bricks along the wall’s path is all that remains in many places, stitches holding the two halves together.

Not too long ago, those living behind the wall believed they would never again see a time of unity and togetherness. It has happened, though many hard lessons were learned along the way.

Want to go? Remaining sections of the Berlin Wall in their original location can be best seen at the Gedenkstätte Berliner Mauer (Bernauer Straße 111), outside the Topography of Terror (Niederkirchnerstraße 8), at the East Side Gallery (corner of Warschauer Straße and Mühlenstraße) and at the Platz des 9. November 1989 (Bornholmer Straße 70). To see an area where the wall used to stand, visit Potsdamer Platz.

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