Tunnel 29

by Helena Merriman

It begins. The journalists ask about the money. How much did NBC pay the diggers?

  The real answer is $12,000, which paid for five tonnes of steel for the rail in the tunnel, a VW van, electric cables and bulbs, pumps to suck out water, compressors and pipes to bring fresh air in, pulleys, ropes and motors for the cart, and lastly, several months’ worth of tea, coffee and sandwiches.

  To the journalists, Reuven gives a shorter answer. ‘Not much in TV terms,’ he says. ‘And the tunnel would have been built without it,’ he adds.

  Someone asks when NBC got involved.

  In the summer, he replies, only after the students had been digging for a few weeks. He wants the journalists to understand that the tunnel would have been built anyway, even if NBC hadn’t funded it. ‘We were not going around recruiting tunnel builders.’

  Then he tells the press about the mechanics of filming the escape, the long hours in the tunnel, all the safety precautions to protect the diggers and keep the tunnel secret, and then it’s done. Reuven Frank and Piers Anderton leave the stage, hoping this will put an end to it.

  But the next day the story catches fire.

  The New York Times runs an article claiming that NBC helped build the tunnel, and newspaper stories appear with interviews from diggers in West Berlin who feel angry about the film, saying they should have got a cut of the money. Some are calling for the film to be banned.

  West Berlin’s Senate then puts out a statement saying the film should be dropped. The East German government writes a letter, describing the film as an ‘attack’, complaining that escape tunnels cause damage to ‘gas mains and electricity lines’ and demanding that the US government ‘inflict severe penalties’ on the NBC journalists. Even a state-run news service in Moscow gets involved, claiming that NBC had hired the diggers, that the refugees were played by actors, and that if the film went ahead it would inflame the situation in Berlin. As a journalist for the New York Times put it, the issue had become ‘a minor international incident’. And all this in the autumn of 1962, when Americans were so terrified about an accidental nuclear war between the US and the Soviet Union that fallout shelters were sprouting up all over the country.

  But Reuven Frank still hopes things will calm down. He hunkers down in his office with Piers Anderton and the two of them sit next to each other, working on the film. They’re making good progress. Because most of the footage is silent, Reuven has commissioned jazz bassist Eddie Safranski to write a score. Give me a hint of Kurt Weill, says Reuven, but not too much that it’s a cliché. Reuven and Piers are now working on the narration. Sitting at typewriters, they spend hours each day on the script, paring it down, ridding the sentences of phrases like ‘free world’ that Reuven knows can numb an audience. The words they reach for aren’t the words of politics and ideology, but the language of the tunnel: mud, dirt, pulleys, blisters, carts. They want those who are watching to know what it’s like, what it’s really like, to spend four months of your life digging a tunnel; what the people who crawl through it are risking, what horrors they must be leaving to make those decisions. They want this to be a story not for the mind, but for the heart and the gut.

  As they write, every so often Reuven’s door flings open and someone tells them about the latest developments in the film-saga, but they ignore them, burrowing deeper in their work, spending hours in the studio, marrying footage of digging and crawling to music and words. On 16 October, they’ve almost finished and they know that what they’ve made is special, not like anything they’ve seen before.

  That afternoon, as they tweak the final section of the film, the door opens: it’s an NBC staffer with something to tell them. Reuven tries to wave him away, but the man says it’s important. There was a press conference a few hours ago, he says; a State Department spokesman said that the NBC film is ‘not in the national interest’, that it’s ‘risky, irresponsible, undesirable and contrary to the best interests of the United States’.

  He leaves the room, and as Reuven Frank looks back at the film, ready to go, he knows that apart from him and Piers, no one will ever see it.

  68

  The Library

  EVI WALKS INTO her office at the library. It’s been a long morning, padding around the shelves, replacing books read by students at the Technical University: politics tomes, maths books, poetry, music – and of course – the engineering manuals that the diggers used while digging the tunnel.

  She feels grateful to be here, to have found a job, just two months after arriving in West Berlin. It hadn’t been easy. First, there was the search for a place to live – Evi and Peter had found a one-bed apartment in a student hall in Grunewald, not far from the CIA villa where Joachim first tasted pineapple marmalade. It was tiny, the three of them stuffed into one room, and they knew they would need somewhere bigger soon. So Evi had started looking for work.

  One crisp November morning, walking down Hardenbergstrasse, Evi heard her name ring out: ‘Frau Schmidt?’ It was her old boss from the library in East Berlin. She was looking for someone to work with her at the university library. Was Evi interested?

  Evi started working there a few weeks later, cataloguing books, just as she’d done back home. It was calming. She loved being around the musty smell of paper as she brought order to all the knowledge in the library. It was also a welcome break from Peter. Since arriving in West Berlin, things hadn’t gone well. Without the Wall to push against, they were pushing against each other, feeling their difference more acutely. While Evi was out working, Peter would hang out at home, looking out of the window, strumming his guitar. Always the dreamer. Evi used to love that in him, but now, things had changed. As Peter put it, they were like a ‘flock of birds who move together until they reach their goal and then everything falls apart’.

  Sometimes at the university Evi would bump into Joachim, they’d eat lunch together in the canteen and she’d feel drawn to him, just as she had been that night when they danced together, but Evi had her family to think about, her daughter. One day she’d decided she couldn’t risk it all by seeing Joachim, and now she kept her distance.

  Then a few weeks ago, Evi had found a larger apartment for the family, and she and Peter made plans for the move. But a few days before, Peter had flown to Holland for a lithography course, leaving Evi to move house on her own.

  Walking into her office today, Evi feels exhausted by the thought of moving house, feels abandoned by her husband and defeated by everything. Then the door opens, a librarian walks in and says: ‘Frau Schmidt, there’s a phone call for you.’

  It’s Joachim. He says he’d heard that she was moving house on her own; would she like some help? Evi’s stomach lurches and she thanks him, tells him her address.

  Later that week, Joachim goes to her flat to help Evi pack up the house. As they put clothes and pans in boxes, they talk and Joachim discovers that he feels safe with Evi, feels as though she understands all the different pieces of him. Living in West Berlin is still strange for someone who’d spent all their life on the other side of the Wall, and Evi is the umbilical cord that reconnects Joachim with the parts of him he might forget. Joachim discovers that, like him, Evi had a tough childhood, growing up without her father, and without her mother too. There’s a shyness to her, but a resilience that he’s drawn to as she tells him about getting her first job aged fourteen, finding her way in the world.

  By the time Joachim has helped Evi move house, he realises he is falling for her, but Joachim, the man-who-rescued-strangers, knows he is not the kind of man who will meddle in a marriage, and he pushes these feelings to the back of his mind.

  69

  A Message

  REUVEN FRANK IS back in Berlin. It’s December 1962, and he’s given up on the film ever being shown. A few weeks after his press conference the world had changed: an American spy plane flying over Cuba had brought back photos of missiles on the island – medium-range, nuclear-capable, they had been sent there by Khrushchev. The Soviet president now had nuclear weapo
ns that could reach American cities.

  President Kennedy had to respond, but how? Discussions in the White House had run long into the night, Kennedy’s yellow doodle-pad filling with black scrawls. Some advisors wanted air-strikes on Cuba, but Kennedy talked them down, decided he would give Khrushchev an ultimatum: if the Soviet leader didn’t remove these missiles, the US would begin a blockade of Cuba. Behind the scenes, diplomats prepared for war: American embassy staff in Berlin evacuated wives and children, and Kennedy sent forty American ships ready to impose the blockade. At 7 p.m. on 22 October, Kennedy appeared on TV, told the country what was going on. That day, NBC announced it would postpone the film.

  Then the world held its breath.

  If Kennedy had misjudged Khrushchev, they could be moments away from nuclear war. But five days later, Khrushchev caved in, agreeing to dismantle every single one of his missiles in Cuba. It was a victory for Kennedy, the man who’d done so little when the Berlin Wall was built. The ‘boy in short pants’ had learnt from that experience, shown he could stand up to Khrushchev.

  The press soon moved on to other things and the controversy about the NBC film died down. NBC gave money to some of the aggrieved diggers, West Berlin’s Senate was no longer calling for the film to be banned and, most importantly, after NBC reassured the State Department that the film wouldn’t endanger the lives of the diggers, and that they had sought permission from anyone who appeared in the documentary, the State Department softened its position.

  Still, it was made clear to Frank that the film would never air – NBC managers were worried about blowback from the White House. Reuven was devastated. He knew he was too deeply involved, cared too much, but that was because he’d seen the finished film and knew that, unlike anything else about Berlin, it would explain to audiences across America why the city mattered, why the US should never leave it to fester on its own.

  One night, in a moment of despair, Reuven talked to his wife and decided to resign. NBC accepted, but asked him to wait out the year – and now he had flown to West Berlin to work on a final documentary for NBC, something unrelated to the tunnel.

  Arriving at Hotel Kempinski, Reuven asks for his key and the receptionist tells him he has two messages in his box. Opening it, he finds a tiny pick and shovel, along with a message from Peter and Klaus Dehmel. ‘In memory of what we went through together’, it says.

  Smiling, he turns to the second message: it’s a telegram from New York. He reads it once. Then again, barely daring to believe it. It’s from his boss at NBC. He says they have scheduled the film for Monday 10 December at 8.30 in the evening.

  70

  The Film

  IT’S EARLY EVENING on Monday 10 December and across the US, TV dinners are being prepared, baths hastily finished, curtains pulled against the winter cold in preparation for tonight’s TV. Usually, on Monday nights, most American homes tuned into CBS, watching prime-time tuxedoed-comedians performing overly rehearsed routines, but tonight, hardly anyone is watching CBS. Instead, just before 8.30 p.m., people turn on NBC for a long-awaited film: The Tunnel. With all the controversy surrounding the documentary – the articles, the criticisms – the publicity for the film couldn’t have been better.

  At 8.30 p.m. exactly, there’s a short announcement, then the film begins, opening with this written statement:

  The program you are about to see is a document on human courage in seeking freedom. It is a first-hand report – filmed as the event took place – of the digging of a tunnel, and an escape, under the Wall that divides Berlin.

  Then up flashes apartment number seven Schönholzer Strasse. An oboe plays a mournful tune, the camera zooms in towards the flat, over the Wall, and Piers Anderton begins his narration.

  That is number seven Schönholzer Strasse, a narrow tenement one-city block inside Communist East Berlin…

  You see a couple of women stroll by in long coats, a man on a bicycle, and the pockmarked walls of number seven Schönholzer Strasse. Piers Anderton continues his narration, describing how people had come to this apartment on Friday 14 September.

  Some had come two hundred miles. All were strangers to this place. They came here past the… armed People’s Policemen on patrol… they went quietly down these cellar stairs by ladder down a shaft and stood fifteen feet below the surface of Schönholzer Strasse. There was a tunnel there, less than three-feet wide and three-feet high. Through this, they crawled… one hundred and forty yards to West Berlin and a free future. I’m Piers Anderton, NBC News Berlin. And this is the story of those people and that tunnel.

  Over the next seventy-eight minutes, in eighteen million homes, people who so far have only seen short news reports about the Berlin Wall, people who had little understanding of what was happening in the city, watch the story unfold. They see the Wall, the death strip, the tank traps and the VoPos up close, and listen as Piers Anderton explains how the students were planning ‘the most daring refugee rescue operation in Berlin’s history’. They watch the diggers smash through the concrete at the factory, they watch them lying on their backs in the tunnel, digging, covered in mud, then they see the flood of water that almost destroyed it, the floorboards floating; they see Joachim with his inventions – the lights, the stove pipes, the telephone – and then from over the Wall, they watch the home videos of Evi and Peter in East Berlin, preparing to leave everything behind. They see the photo of Peter Fechter lying dead, they watch Ellen disappear into the East, then finally, they watch as Evi climbs out of the tunnel, up the ladder, followed by twenty-eight others. At that point, Piers Anderton reflects on it all:

  To escape through a tunnel is as risky as to build one. What lies ahead is unknown. The couriers were strangers. The rendezvous could have been a trap. Death was not the greatest danger. Prison camps can be worse. These are ordinary people, not trained or accustomed to risk. What must they be leaving to risk this?

  Then finally, the American viewers watch Inge crawl through the tunnel with her baby, and the camera freezes on Claus’s face as he bundles his son into his arms, holding him for the first time.

  The next day, the reviews appear. Reuven Frank is nervous, has no idea what to expect after all the controversy about the film, but the response is unlike anything he’d imagined.

  The LA Times describes the film as ‘one of the most profound and inspiring human documents in the history of the medium’. The Boston Globe writes that it is ‘probably without parallel in the brief history of television’.

  One journalist points out that in the run-up to that year’s Senate elections, Republicans in Washington had accused Kennedy of doing almost nothing to tell the world about Berlin’s ‘Wall of Shame’. The journalist suggests that The Tunnel should now ‘head the list of government films and be telecast in all free countries and across as many communist borders as possible. For, if the Wall symbolises “the failure of Communism,” the tunnel symbolises man’s incessant drive for freedom.’ And perhaps the government was listening, for the United States Information Agency (run by Edward R. Murrow) buys hundreds of copies of The Tunnel and screens them around the world. Foreign broadcasters all over the world buy copies of the film and stream it (except, of course, in communist countries). And so the government that once threatened to ban Reuven Frank’s film is now firmly behind it. There’s even a rumour that President Kennedy watches The Tunnel and is moved to tears.

  A few months later, on 26 June 1963, Kennedy flies to West Berlin, his first visit as president. At City Hall, he walks on to a large wooden platform. In front of him, in the square and stuffed onto balconies, half a million Berliners cheering and screaming.

  Kennedy had been apprehensive about coming to West Berlin, worried that people might still be angry about his anaemic response to the Wall, but on the thirty-five-mile drive from Tegel airport, millions of West Berliners had lined the streets in the June sun, hanging from trees, lamp-posts, traffic lights, standing on rooftops waving scarves and handkerchiefs. As Kennedy stood in his open-t
op limousine waving to them and laughing in disbelief, people screamed until they were hoarse: ‘Ken-ne-dy! Ken-ne-dy! Ken-ne-dy!’ They threw flowers at him, his driver leaning over to wipe confetti off the windshield so he could see the route.

  If he’d come in the months after the Wall was built, Kennedy might have been heckled. But he is now the hero of the tank stand-off at the border and the hero of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the man who stood up to the Soviets.

  People watched as Kennedy visited Checkpoint Charlie, then Bernauer Strasse, walking down the street that Joachim and the others had tunnelled under, into the East. Climbing a platform overlooking the Wall, Kennedy had gazed at it, seemingly unprepared for the sight of the barbed wire, the watch-towers and the grey concrete stretching into the distance. A few brave women in East Berlin waved at him from their windows, VoPos looking on. Walking back down, a journalist from Time magazine (one of 1,500 reporters covering the visit) said that ‘Kennedy looks like a man who just glimpsed hell.’

  Now, standing on a stage overlooking the square at City Hall, Kennedy is about to make his speech. He’d drafted it back in Washington, filled it with meaningless phrases intended not to provoke the Soviets. All morning it had been bothering him, the mismatch between his sterile words and the unfettered emotion in West Berlin. On the drive to City Hall, Kennedy had redrafted his speech, throwing away the notes he’d brought with him. He knew that West Berliners needed to hear something different from the man who’d done so little to prevent the Wall.

  Standing in front of them all now, he begins. Slowly and steadily at first.

  ‘I am proud to come to this city as the guest of your distinguished mayor, who has symbolized throughout the world the fighting spirit of West Berlin.’