A return to the East German border

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Next week marks the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. In Berlin, only a tiny stretch of the wall remains as a memorial. From 1961 to 1989, 89 people were killed trying to escape over it. Such attempts are well documented. But a less talked about Cold War border was even deadlier. We’re referring to the northernmost section of the border separating East Germany from West Germany. Twenty four years ago, our Europe Correspondent Gerry Hadden lived along that dividing line, in the tiny beach town of Travemunde, West Germany. He recently went back to see how things have changed, and to learn more about those who tried to escape there. Download MP3

Gerry also produced this slideshow:

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

JEB SHARP: I’m Jeb Sharp, and this is The World, a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI, and WGBH, Boston.  You could say the Cold War ended when the Berlin Wall fell on November 9th, 1989.  Organizers of next week’s 20th anniversary festivities hope to recapture the euphoria of the moment.  But there are also sober memories of the split between East and West Germany.  Eighty-nine people were killed trying to cross the wall.  Even more died trying to flee East Germany at the northernmost section of the border.  That’s where The World’s Gerry Hadden used to live, in the beach town of Travemunde.  He recently returned and sent us this report.

GERRY HADDEN: Travemunde literally means Mouth of the Trave River.  The Trave empties here into the Baltic Sea, and it once divided West from East.  I lived here, on the west side, as an exchange student in 1986.  The town is much the same today:  tidy, wealthy, built mostly around sailing and tourism.  During the summer months it really comes alive.  But during the Cold War, the warm months brought constant reminders of a divided country in the form of people trying to   escape over the sea.   I lived here in winter, so I never saw an escape attempt, but locals, like 45 year old Torsten Eichhof, did.  Fishing along the Trave’s bank recently, he recalls a night twenty years ago when he was bartending in a nearby beach hotel.

TORSTEN EICHHOF:  [speaking German]

HADDEN:  He says, “I was working a night shift in the pub when suddenly the door swung open.  Standing outside were these four soaking wet people, a couple and two kids.  They said, ‘Can someone call the authorities?  We’ve just escaped from East Germany.’  They’d made it in a little dinghy.  We wrapped them up in warm blankets, then cooked them some big steaks.  Only after they’d had a good first meal did we call the police.”  According to researchers nearly 6,000 people

tried to cross this stretch of Baltic during the Cold War.  Nearly a thousand made it; 174 people died.  The rest were caught.  I remember what made the crossing here so dangerous.  Less than a mile from Travemunde’s beaches, East German military gunboats patrolled day and night.  On land a triple fence, covered in barbed wire and surrounded by mines, reached right to the water’s edge.  You never saw anyone just out walking on the East side.   It made you wonder what life was like over there.  Today a ferry plods across the mouth of the Trave.  It leaves us about a mile from the old East/ West checkpoint.  But just before going through that checkpoint, I stop in at the   house of Cristina Volkt-Mueller and her husband Bodo.   The Muellers are from the former East.   In the early 1980s they tried  to escape in a sailboat, but they were caught before clearing port.

CRISTINA MUELLER: [speaking German]

HADDEN:  Cristina says, “It’s still hard to describe the feelings. You think, my god, what is going to happen now? There’s nothing you can do.  You’re trapped.  It’s a terrible feeling of powerlessness and fear.  We’d spent a lot of time working this escape out, anticipating freedom.  When that gets quashed you are just devastated.”  The Muellers, like tens of thousands of others, ended up in a Stasi jail.  After their release, they spent years under state surveillance.  Today Cristina and Bodo research Baltic escape attempts.  Bodo tells me of one man who invented a hand-held underwater jet that pulled him to freedom.  Another guy painted his sailboat sails black and tried at night.  He got nabbed.  A third man, a doctor, swam 30 miles to the West, fueled by methamphetamines.  But Bodo says most people tried to flee simply on whatever was at hand, on whatever floated.

BODO MUELLER:  [speaking German]

HADDEN:   Bodo says many people tried to paddle across on air mattresses because having a

boat was complicated, because you had to smuggle a boat to the beach in pieces and assemble it there.  But if you were staying in a legal campsite you could have an air mattress.   So many people tried to escape spontaneously.  But the sea is cold and often there are heavy waves.  Lots of people drowned.  On this day I make the crossing in the other direction on land in a car.  It’s the first time I visited this once off limits area.  In the nearby village of Poetenitz I meet Sabina Kieler.  While I was studying in Travemunde, Kieler was working on a farm I could literally see, right across the border.  She says only a select few were allowed so close to the enemy.

SABINA KIELER: [speaking German]

HADDEN:  She says, “You had to finish your work by 8 PM.  If you were still in the fields after that or you didn’t have your passport they’d lock you up for three days.  It was very confined work.  You couldn’t go left or right.  There were no toilets so we would go into the bushes, but you had to be careful.  If you took one step too far the guards would descend on you.”  Kieler says one day in early November, 1989, someone came running across the fields yelling that the border had opened.  At first no one believed him, then the joy set in.  As the news spread, Kieler and other East Germans poured into Travemunde by the tens of thousands.   And West Germans came out to greet them with champagne and gifts.   But 20 years later Kieler says reunification has been a mixed bag.

KIELER:  [speaking German]

HADDEN:  She says, “Some things are better.  You can travel anywhere and buy whatever you want. But some things are worse, for example, childcare. Back in the old days there was guaranteed space for all kids in daycare.  Today hardly anyone gets in because there just too few spots.”  The other thing is the economy, she says, Lots of the old manufacturing here was destroyed with reunification.  And the West, she says, didn’t invest much in revitalizing the local economy.  But overall Germany has spent hundreds of billions of dollars to help the East get backs on its feet.  And as time passes it’s clear that the differences between the two Germanys have lessened.  That’s good news for everyone, but for Ingrid Schatz it also presents a danger.    Schatz runs the Lubeck Border Museum.   It’s housed in a former East German passport inspection house just across the old line from Travemunde.

INGRID SCHATZ:  [speaking German]

HADDEN:   On a recent morning, Schatz is showing the black and white photos of the massive border installations that once dominated the countryside.  She says, “Everything you see in the photo is gone.  The big border station, the fences, everything.  The only thing remaining is this one house.  That’s why we started this border museum.”  She says a German border like this, as deadly as it once was, should not just be forgotten. For The World I’m Gerry Hadden, Travemunde, Germany.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.