The Year that Changed the World Read Online Free PDF Page B

Ulbricht hoped: between 1949 and 1962, 2.5 million East Germans fled. Between 1962 and 1989, that number fell to about five thousand. Overnight, the forty-two thousand square miles of the German Democratic Republic became a prison. Transportation and communication links were cut. Bustling streets and lively sidewalks in the heart of metropolitan Berlin suddenly became abandoned dead ends. Sewers, tramlines and power grids were blocked or cut. Families were broken, friendships severed. Children lost parents or grandparents. On official maps, the western half of the city was blotted out—figuratively erased from the world of the living. The city, particularly in the East, settled into a grim sadness, a long sleep from which its troubled citizens scarcely dared dream they would ever awake.
    Only Berliners called it the Wall. Elsewhere, it was the “fence,” or the “border,” a three-hundred-mile swath through the heart of Germany. By 1989, the East Germans had removed their mines and remote-control machine guns. Even so, it was a formidable barrier: a twelve-foot-high mesh fence that could not be climbed without grappling hooks; an antivehicle trench to keep people from crashing through in cars; armed patrols with dogs; concrete watch-towers and machine-gun bunkers every few hundred yards; a three-mile security zone inside the border, where East Germans could live and travel only with special permits. Here and there it opened—guardedly—to admit a railway or highway. But for the most part it marched ahead unchanging and featureless, cutting through forests, zigzagging up sheer mountainsides, slicing through fields, streams and towns.
    Early in my assignment, as late autumn turned into winter, I traveled along the divide at odd intervals over a few weeks, from the Baltic Sea in the north, where gray East German gunboats floated off a sandy beach, ready to shoot anyone who might try to swim to freedom, to the Czech border near Bavaria in the south. The idea was to search out the cracks that I supposed must be there, to intuit a coming revolution. But I found little evidence. Wherever I went, the Wall was simply there.
    Driving in the countryside, down lanes of oaks lining the road, through verdant meadows and rolling green hills, you would unexpectedly come across it and stop, as if jolted by electricity. Along the border near the central West German town of Philippsthal, just north of the famous Fulda Gap where NATO forces fighting what they called the “next war” would try to stop invading Soviet armies rolling toward Frankfurt and the English Channel, the road wound along a pleasant river lined with willows. Boys fished on one bank. On the other, a gray wall suddenly loomed up, laced with barbed wire and studded by watch-towers. Soldiers peered through binoculars. Around a bend, the wall cut across the road; the older, bigger part of town was off-limits. You could only turn around and go back. If you lingered, a guard emerged to snap your photo. You were in the files of the East German security police.
    Farther down the highway, in Rohringshof, a town renowned for its picturesque half-timbered barns and medieval houses, the Wall snakedthrough a cement plant. Once a single complex, there were now instead two huge cones of cement dust, two big conveyors, and two identical smokestacks. One belched choking clouds of dust (on the Eastern side); the other (on the West German side) emitted a more modest, environmentally conscious plume. Farther north, near the university city of Göttingen, developers had built a new golf course at Bad Sooden, only a long slice from the border. In neighboring Wanfried, the border split the local train station. The town’s ancient baroque church with its cemetery was caught in the security zone between East and West. “When there is a funeral or a wedding, I sometimes get to see my relatives,” said a West German farmer, standing on a hillock looking