by Henry Porter
They crashed down the rickety stairway. At the bottom Hubert slipped into a doorway near the courtyard’s entrance, while a friend who had acted as lookout led them to a dark opening at the far end of the yard, then left them. They were hidden a minute or two before Zank appeared in the courtyard and started to organize half a dozen men to search the buildings. There seemed to be some reluctance among them, and when Zank vanished into Hubert’s stairway, two of them remained in the yard grumbling. The whole operation came to an end when Zank appeared, brandishing one of the crutches that Kurt had left in Hubert’s apartment because he’d move more easily with one.
‘We missed them,’ he shouted to the others. ‘They’ve only just left - the coffee pot’s still warm. They’ll be making for the Wall. We’ll search the area west of here.’
They waited a few minutes then left the yard, hurried through the area just to the south of the Hackescher Markt and made for the cold, friendless heart of the old city where the museums and churches of a more graceful age stood dark and brooding. Rosenharte’s plan was to keep to the smaller streets until they hit Friedrichstrasse, the north-south axis that sliced across the centre until it reached Zimmerstrasse, where it was itself cut in two by the border. At this intersection was Checkpoint Charlie. Rosenharte and Ulrike knew every inch of the way for they were within spitting distance of Humboldt University. Even with Kurt hobbling along beside them Rosenharte thought it wouldn’t take them more than twenty or thirty minutes to reach the border.
Having crossed the Spree, he decided it would be safer if they walked along Unter den Linden, the wide boulevard running east-west to the Brandenburg Gate. They took the right-hand side, passing the Hungarian cultural centre and the Atrium cafe. At the building containing the Polish centre they retreated to the shadows of a shopping precinct as a police car cruised by. Kurt leaned on his crutch like a war veteran and smoked a cigarette. He was slightly drunk on Hubert’s plum brandy, which had dulled the pain in his foot.
Ulrike slipped her hand into Rosenharte’s. ‘It’s so near and yet so far,’ she said. And then as an afterthought: ‘Whoever thought of dividing a city like this? It’s so bizarre when you see the reality of it.’
Plenty of people were milling around now. Many East Germans were making their way to Checkpoint Charlie and among them were some West Germans who had crossed over and were intent on a party. A young man came up to them and asked where he could get a beer at this hour. He told them his name was Benedict and that he’d just walked straight through Checkpoint Charlie from the West without anyone asking for his papers or stopping him. ‘There are more people on the western side than on the eastern. We’re waiting for you. But I have come to rouse you lazy communists so we can pull down this Wall together.’
‘You’re drunk,’ said Ulrike with a broad grin.
‘And why not, on a night like this?’ asked Benedict good-naturedly. ‘It’s the duty of every decent Berliner to be drunk on a night like this. You see, my friends, this thing, the thing that is happening around us is now official: Hans J. Friederichs, no less, has just been on his television show Tagesthemen to say that the Wall is wide open. That’s what he said. The Wall is wide open. So, come along and help me get your comrades out of their beds.’
Rosenharte placed a hand on his shoulder. ‘If you don’t mind, Herr Benedict, we three have come a long way for this. We’ve been waiting all our lives for this moment, so we’d very much like to go and see it all for ourselves. But we may need your help because there are people pursuing us.’
‘The Stasi?’ said Benedict excitedly. That was the difference with Westerners. They had no fear because they didn’t understand the reality of the Stasi. ‘I’ll bring my friends over here. We’ll all go together to the Brandenburg Gate. People have climbed on top of the Wall.’
He whistled to a group across the street. Soon six eager students had joined them and they headed for the intersection with Friedrichstrasse where they paused in a darkened part on the north side of the street. It was with a grim lack of surprise that Rosenharte spotted Zank standing like a sentinel about seventy yards away on the other side of Unter den Linden. He was scanning the crowds that were making their way to Checkpoint Charlie down Friedrichstrasse. As far as he could tell, there were now just a couple of men with him. Their body language betrayed shiftiness and a certain bewilderment rather than menace. But nonetheless Rosenharte was convinced that he, Ulrike and Kurt had become a kind of symbol to Zank and the waning powers of the dark energy. If they could be prevented from crossing the Wall, the Wall would not fall.
He consulted Benedict. Three of the young students agreed to set up a diversion while the remainder of the party would crowd round and convey them across the intersection, then to the Brandenburg Gate. Rosenharte knew this was their only hope. With their new British passports they could pose as Western revellers, and if arrested they stood a very good chance of being ejected into the West.
The diversion worked well. Rosenharte saw the three young men approach Zank and begin to caper around him with a bottle, slapping his back and insisting he pose for a picture with them. He had to call for his men to get rid of them but his attention was drawn long enough for them to have moved out of sight and begin the final walk towards the Brandenburg Gate.
Cut off from the East by the barriers and in the West by the most massive and impassable stretch of the entire Berlin Wall, the Brandenburg now stood stark against the white haze of TV lights hurriedly set up on the other side. The dark hero of the Cold War, so remote to the people of both Germanys for so long, was now illuminated like an opera set. The few guards visible from the East moved between the six Doric columns like stagehands. Rosenharte was now aware of a gentle murmur in the air, the rise and fall of the crowd’s voice, which resembled nothing so much as the sea breaking on a distant shoreline. As they got closer, the constituent parts of the sound separated into cheers, cat-calls, song, laughter, the thud of a drum and a loudhailer.
They covered the open ground between the end of the Boulevard and the Gate feeling desperately exposed. Rosenharte put his arm round Ulrike and glanced back several times but Zank was nowhere to be seen. They came to a low metal fence, which ran from one side of the street to the other. Though a relatively simple affair without the barbed wire, alarms and automatic guns that could be found along the rest of the Berlin Wall, this barrier had effectively denied Easterners contact with their own landmark since August 1961. It was easily climbed and after Kurt was lifted over they pushed on across another stretch of tarmac. Now they could see that the Wall was lined with people silhouetted against the TV lights. A thousand people or more had taken Gunther Schabowski’s faltering announcement to its ultimate conclusion. Some were even dropping down from the lit world of the free West into the shade of the death zone immediately in front of the Gate. Ulrike stopped and gasped at the sight and raised her hands to her mouth.
Rosenharte put his arm round her shoulder and spoke into her ear. ‘It’s amazing, but let’s get over the other side.’
‘They’ve been using water hoses,’ shouted Benedict enthusiastically, pointing to pools of water on the other side of the gate. ‘Let’s go and join the party.’
Until now they had attracted little interest from the Grepos who were all turned to face the West, but when they got to within fifty yards of the Gate, two dozen troops appeared from the guard houses either side of them, formed up and shouted for them to go back.
‘Shit, they don’t seem too pleased to see us,’ said Benedict. He called out to them. ‘Lads, come and join the party. We’ll have a drink and we can find you some good West Berliner girls.’
Rosenharte turned to Ulrike and Kurt. ‘What we have to do now is seem as drunk as Benedict and his friends. Remember, we’re from the West. We’ve come through Checkpoint Charlie and we’re on our way back to the West. Okay?’ Kurt nodded. ‘Remember that you’re British subjects. Act with an air of entitlement.’ He winked at them.
Benedict
turned to them. ‘Well, are we going?’
Rosenharte nodded. They passed through the unblinking line of guards without one of them raising his gun. ‘You,’ a young officer shouted at Kurt, ‘what’s the matter with your leg?’
‘Some bastard slammed it in the door,’ Kurt replied, and hobbled on.
Halfway under the Gate, an officer ran to them holding up his hands. What were they doing there? Where had they come from? Benedict became their spokesman again. ‘We’re exercising our right ashhh citizens of free Berlin to walk under shish monument of peace.’ He was perhaps slurring his words more than was necessary. ‘Shish emblem of peace was built by Friedrich Wilhelm II exactly two hundred years ago. You know that the maiden driving the four horses on top of this pile of beautiful neo-classical shit is carrying an olive branch? A shymbol of peacsh. Not an Iron Cross as she did for Nazis, but an olive branch. Do you hear me, shir? That’sh why we’re here - to toast peace on the anniversary of the conshtruction.’ He gave a rather drunken bow at the end of this speech.
The officer lost patience. ‘You’d better get back to the other side or there’ll be trouble for you damned Western agitators.’ With this he hurried back to the line of troops, ordering them to move forward to the fence to prevent further encroachments from the East. But he was too late for Benedict’s friends, who had just crashed through their cordon.
They emerged on the other side of the Brandenburg and found themselves not in the death zone, but a playground. A man performed a stunt on a bicycle. People wandered around, chatting up the guards, swigging from beer and champagne bottles and kissing and hugging each other randomly, without the slightest sense of their trespass. Suddenly about thirty of them formed a chain and began to dance in a huge circle. A painting by Goya depicting exactly the same insane joy flashed into Rosenharte’s mind. To his astonished ears came the sound of a nursery rhyme.
‘On the wall, lying in wait, sits a tiny little bug.
Take a look at the tiny little, the tiny little bug . . . take a look . . .
On the Wall, on the wall, lying in wait . . .’
The Berlin Wall was falling to the sound of a children’s song; the death strip had been irrevocably breached and demystified. The spell was broken.
Ulrike clutched Rosenharte’s arm and shouted above the roar of the unseen crowd on the West side. ‘My God, are we seeing this? Is this really happening? I can’t believe it.’
Rosenharte turned from the jubilant faces and looked up at the Gate where the shadows of the people on the top of the Wall were projected like a huge Chinese lantern show. He would never know what made him look down and through the columns. Perhaps it was his habit of remembering a scene by consciously imprinting the image in his mind. At any rate, just in the eastern lee of the gate he saw Zank gesticulating to the officer who had stopped them a few moments before. He took Ulrike by the arm and rounded up Kurt and Benedict. ‘We’ve got to get out of here. Come on.’
Benedict was too far gone to pay any attention. He shook his head. ‘You go,’ he shouted. ‘I’m shtaying here.’
They hurried into the shadow of the Wall, which now seemed every bit as forbidding as a cliff face. Rosenharte crouched with his back against the Wall and cupped his hands in front of his knees. ‘You get up first,’ he shouted to Ulrike. ‘Then help Kurt.’
She placed one foot in his hands and he hoisted her bird-weight with little difficulty to a height of about nine feet. The hands of the people on top came down to meet hers and she was pulled the last few feet. He passed Kurt’s stick to her and then crouched again. From the corner of his eye, he saw Zank with the officer coming towards them. The officer seemed hesitant and was making gestures of hopelessness. ‘Okay, let’s get you up there,’ he shouted. Kurt placed his left foot in Rosenharte’s hands. Rosenharte lifted him four or five feet then turned and, placing one hand against Kurt’s rump, pushed upwards. Kurt yelled as his ribcage connected with the concrete and his injured foot pawed the surface trying to get some hold. Eventually strong arms hoisted him to a point where he could scramble over the edge.
Rosenharte turned round, panting. Zank was within a few feet. ‘You must arrest this man,’ he was shouting to the officer. ‘This man is an enemy of the state - a spy. Arrest him now. Or I will.’
‘You have no authority here,’ the officer told Zank, before turning to Rosenharte. ‘Who are you?’
He proffered the passport. ‘I’m a British citizen. It’s my first time in East Germany.’
‘Nonsense. This man is a spy. He’s a traitor to the state. He must be arrested.’ Spittle flew from Zank’s mouth.
This all seemed very much beside the point to the Grepo officer and he threw out his hands in despair. ‘I leave it to you.’
Then someone on top of the wall aimed the beam of a powerful flashlight at Zank. At the same time Kurt started up a chant of ‘Sta-si! Sta-si! Sta-si!’ Soon hundreds on this section of the Wall had joined in. Zank put up his hands to shield his eyes from the light, and his arm reached for something in his breast pocket, but then he seemed to think better of it and backed away a little, his gaze never leaving Rosenharte. ‘You think you’ve won,’ he shouted. ‘But you haven’t.’
Rosenharte moved a few paces towards him, at which point the baying of the crowd became deafening.
He gestured upwards at the crowd. ‘These people have won, but I haven’t. I lost my brother - remember? If I had obeyed my instincts last night, I’d have killed you there and then in Hohenschönhausen. That’s where you deserved to die, you piece of shit.’ He was right up close to him now. He could smell his breath and see the hatred in his eyes. ‘But you’ll live to see everything you believe in crumble; everything that your cowardly, brutal, limited being has worked for will disappear. That’s good enough revenge for me.’
He didn’t wait to hear Zank’s retort, but turned and ran to the Wall and, using one foot to power himself upwards, he stretched and found the hands reaching down to grab hold of his arms. There was a moment when it seemed as if he would slip back into the death zone, but two of Benedict’s friends gave him a mighty shove from below and he clambered up and rolled over the edge just as he had done on the sea wall in Trieste all those weeks ago. Then he was on top, dusting himself off and looking down at the sea of happy faces on the other side.
Ulrike’s eyes were filling with tears. ‘Is this true?’ she asked. ‘There’s never been a moment in history like this. Are we dreaming?’
He shook his head very slowly and bent to kiss her.
39
The Cafe Adler
An hour later they approached Checkpoint Charlie from the western side. The only part of the crossing that remained visible was the little cabin set up in the middle of Friedrichstrasse by the Americans. Across the white line, painted by a young East German officer named Hagen Koch twenty-eight years before, was a vast crowd of young people who had filled all but one of the three lanes leading to the passport and customs control of the GDR. They had swarmed over the first pillboxes in the East and were now standing on or hanging from anything to get a better view of the people coming through from the parallel universe on the other side.
The East Berliners making the trip in the middle of the night were no longer just the pushy, the foolhardy or the young. Entire families were coming over, and they were bringing their babies in pushchairs, their dogs and their elderly relatives. Strangers hugged each other, lovers kissed as they crossed the line and some people simply looked up and cried to the heavens in disbelief, tears of joy welling in their eyes. Few of them took the time to consider the accumulation of accident, daring and political will that had brought the crowds from both sides of the Wall to overrun all seven crossing points by midnight on 9 November. And that, perhaps, made the evening seem all the more miraculous.
Watching these scenes with Kurt and Ulrike, Rosenharte found it very hard to absorb what he was seeing. Shaking his head he followed Kurt and Ulrike into the Cafe Adler. Robert Harland was si
tting at the corner table by the window on Zimmerstrasse. Opposite him were the Bird and Jamie Jay. All three wore the standard expressions of the night’s incredulity.
They ordered champagne and brandy chasers on the British government and made toasts to Berlin, freedom and, in the case of the three Germans at the table, to a united Germany. Harland told them the story of Schabowski’s gaffe, and how it had taken the journalists a few minutes to realize what he had said.
‘Was it planned?’ asked Kurt, through Ulrike. ‘Surely, he knew what he was doing - an experienced Party official like that?’
‘Who knows, who knows,’ said Harland, ‘but here we are in a new world. The things that mattered on November the ninth don’t even figure on November tenth.’ He looked at his watch. ‘We’re twenty minutes into a new day and a new era. What’s happened tonight is irrevocable. Without the Wall, there’s no East Germany, at least not one that will function as a viable state. The game is up.’
For a further half-hour they sat huddled round the table, but then Ulrike’s cough and Kurt’s obvious discomfort made Harland insist that they go and get the medical attention that had been arranged. He rose to his feet, but not to usher them from Cafe Adler. The Bird and Jamie Jay stood also. ‘I would like to offer you three a toast - to your indomitability, your courage and endurance. What you did is very important and will remain so, even in this new era of ours.’
Rosenharte looked at his two companions. ‘I know I speak for us all when I thank you each for your role in getting us out. Without your help, Mr Avocet, my friends here would still be in Hohenschönhausen. We thank you from the bottom of our hearts for this deliverance.’ The Bird’s utterly English features began to redden from the neck up. ‘Before this extraordinary night is over, I want us to toast Ulrike, one of the true founders of the revolution. She is one of those who have made tonight possible.’ He raised his glass to her. The others followed suit.
