The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories

by Edward Hollis

  Who is aggravating the situation?

  The wall? It stands there quite calmly.

  Is the wall a gymnastic apparatus?

  The wall is the state frontier of the German Democratic Republic. The state frontier of a sovereign state must be respected. That is so the world over. He who does not treat it with respect cannot complain if he comes to harm.

  So that was why the line had been drawn. It protected the Socialist Workers’ Paradise of the German Democratic Republic from the rest of the world.

  ACCORDING TO UTE, the Socialist Workers’ Paradise wasn’t that bad. There were libraries and swimming pools, holiday resorts and good public transportation. There were protected rents, and safe jobs, and secure pensions. Life was predictable. In fact, Ute’s family had moved to the GDR in the late 1950s of their own volition. Her grandfather had been one of those communists who’d held out against Hitler throughout the Nazi years, and he had persuaded them all to come and join him in the democratic republic they were building out in the East.

  “There’s everything you need,” he’d said, and so there was, in the village where Ute and her sister grew up. It was the things you wanted that took more time. If you wanted a car or a TV, you put yourself on a waiting list for about ten years, and you saved. If you wanted bananas, you went to the town square once a year and queued up for them all night. Ute and her sister were taught to make do, to expect little, and to be satisfied with what they had. They weren’t satisfied, though, and they decided they were going to do something about it.

  HAGEN KOCH’S PATH ran through Berlin like a herald with a bell. It ran over the pile of rubble that had been the Gestapo headquarters in Niederkirchnerstrasse. It ran past the wasteland under which lay the remains of Hitler’s chancellery and the department stores of Potsdamer Platz. It ran under the bombed-out ruins of the Reichstag and the Brandenburg Gate, and through the quiet war veterans’ cemetery at Invalidenstrasse. It ran down Bernauerstrasse, turned the corner by the old railway station at Schedtwerstrasse, and then came out to the bridge over the tracks at Bornholmerstrasse.

  As it passed them by, the residents of Bernauerstrasse woke up to find that the wall between their flats and the street outside—the one they’d just repapered, the one with the window with net curtains and flower boxes, the one with the front door that jammed a little every day—yes, that wall—had become the Wall.

  They were taken by surprise. “There are no plans to build a wall,” their president had said just a few weeks before. The tenants of Bernauerstrasse saw their lives stretch out before them, and they knew what they had to do. They hurried to their windows on the first floor, and the second, and the third. They opened the casements and they jumped, and their bodies rained down onto the capitalist paving stones of the West below them. They had to be quick to beat the guards running up the stairs. Some people were too scared to jump, and spent the rest of their lives as citizens of the German Democratic Republic. Others were too bold and jumped too soon, smashing their bodies on the cobbles. Others were not quite quick enough.

  There is a photograph in which a woman hangs from a window. She is in her fifties, her hair dyed black and set neatly in a perm. She is wearing a long dark coat. East German police or soldiers are leaning out of the window, holding her arms so that she cannot fall; but this isn’t a rescue operation. Bystanders—her relatives who have already escaped, perhaps?—are on the ground outside. They are gripping her feet, trying to pull her down into the West.

  Perhaps she lived happily ever after. The Wall stood there quite calmly, aggravating no one, guaranteeing world peace, and preventing skilled workers from being lured into a life of capitalist wage slavery. But the woman and her neighbors jumped out of their windows rather than stay at home in paradise.

  No wonder the government felt the need to get everyone out. The inhabitants of Bernauerstrasse were evacuated, and the doors and windows of their flats were hurriedly bricked up. The streets that ran between the buildings were barricaded with whatever came to hand: a jumble of concrete blocks, curbstones, and bricks, garnished with unruly coils of barbed wire.

  UTE AND HER sister moved to Berlin as soon as they were old enough. According to Ute, the capital of the Socialist Workers’ Paradise wasn’t that bad. You could go anywhere you needed—to the shops in Alexanderplatz, to the Pergamon Museum, to the rallies in Marx-Engels-Platz. You could visit the fine hospitals and the opera houses and the libraries. You could take an elevator to the top of the impressive TV tower, and from the round café at the summit you could see all the way to the western horizon.

  It was going where you wanted that was more difficult. There were some streets that didn’t seem to lead anywhere; all that could be seen at the end of them was some empty ground and a concrete wall. If you tried to get a closer look, guards would appear and turn you away. “It’s dangerous for you here,” they’d say. “Go back home.” And that would make you want to walk down there all the more.

  There was a clock in Alexanderplatz called the Welt-Uhr, the world clock, which showed the time in all the capital cities of the world. Ute always looked upon it with irony. “What’s the bloody point of knowing the time in all these places you’ll never visit?” she’d say. Her knowledge of geography is still terrible.

  A FEW MONTHS after Hagen Koch’s walk with his paintbrush, a young man found his way into number 44 Bernauerstrasse. He crossed courtyards that moaned in the autumn wind and climbed up empty staircases that creaked and squeaked under his weight. He wandered around the vacated homes, his shoes echoing on the bare floorboards. He made his way into one of the attics, and then he climbed out onto the roof.

  It didn’t take long for the border guards to spot him and give chase. They climbed up the vertiginous little iron ladders on the sides of chimneys, ran past urns and statues and balustrades, and tripped through gutters that squelched underfoot. Dislodged tiles fell to the street below, and Bernd Lünser’s plans and dreams fell away with them. He reached an ornate cornice, and then there was nowhere else for him to go. He jumped.

  The Wall stood there quite calmly, guaranteeing world peace and protecting socialist workers from a life of wage slavery. But Bernd Lünser jumped to his certain death rather than enjoy its protection.

  No wonder the authorities knocked down the old flats along Bernauerstrasse. There is a photograph of the street taken a little later, showing what at first glance looks like a boulevard or a park. On the East side, gigantic windowless walls rise from the grass. The peeling wallpaper, the empty holes left by the floor joists, the marks where pictures had once been, and the mantelpieces suspended high above the ground all indicate that until recently these walls had been inside the rooms of people’s homes.

  On the other side of the expanse there are two smaller walls, standing very close to each other. One, brand-new, is made of H-shaped concrete posts set firmly into the ground at uniform centers. Prefabricated sections of concrete slab have been set vertically between the posts, topped with a rounded concrete pipe and a coil of barbed wire. Next to it, standing closest to the inhabitants of West Berlin, is a crumbling, rambling structure about six feet tall. Plants sprout from its shattered masonry, and all the ornamental good manners of pilaster and caryatid are flaking off the brickwork. Look carefully, and you can still just see the front doors and the parlor windows, hastily sealed with crude blockwork.

  In between all these walls the ground is empty, except for thousands of gray rabbits. It is known as No Man’s Land.

  ACCORDING TO UTE, things weren’t that bad until her sister disappeared. Then the police came for her and told her all about it. Her sister had gone over to the fascists, they said. It was Ute’s fault, they said; and then she found out what happened to people who went behind that concrete wall at the end of the road. The police locked her up, and they tortured her for six months. She was made to sit in pools of freezing water for hours, for days, until she couldn’t even shiver anymore. She was forced to crouch naked on a mirror a
nd urinate, while the guards stood over her and pointed and laughed. She listened to the horrible cries that echoed down the corridors from God knows where. She didn’t sleep; the lights were always on, and she didn’t know whether it was day or night. After a while her hair and her teeth started to go, her periods stopped, and her body began to wither away. The police tried to make Ute say that she had helped her sister, but she said nothing. She still won’t say what she knew.

  THE YEAR AFTER Hagen Koch had painted his line, a teenage boy managed to climb into the empty expanse. Peter Fechter made a dash for it, but as he reached up to grab the top of the wall on the other side, the border guards shot him in the back.

  He lay there for three hours, screaming for help, but nobody knew what to do. People poked their heads over the wall from the West and looked at him. Some of them threw bandages down to him, but he was too weak to pick them up. The border guards just stood and watched. He had brought it all on himself, they said. Eventually they released a smoke bomb, and when the air had cleared the guards and the body of Peter Fechter were gone.

  The Wall was aggravating no one, guaranteeing world peace, and protecting the socialist workers against the neo-Hitlerites in the West. But still Peter Fechter made a dash for it across No Man’s Land and died in the sand rather than stay at home.

  No wonder the authorities felt the need to improve the Wall. Year by year it evolved, and by 1975 it was perfected. There is a diagram of Grenzmauer 75, as the structure was officially known. It looks like some magical fortress designed by a child, with its strange perspective, its absurd, fantastic multiplication of defensive devices, and its sketchy little Alsatian ready to attack.

  Each prefabricated concrete slab of Grenzmauer 75 was L-shaped, precisely twelve feet, one inch tall. The vertical outer face of the slab faced the West, and the inner angle of the L faced the East. The inner angle was carefully curved, so that it was impossible to gain a foothold on it. The top of the slab was covered with a rounded concrete pipe, so that it was impossible to gain a handhold on it. The concrete itself was smooth and slippery.

  These concrete slabs formed the western face of Grenzmauer 75. Behind them there was a row of tank traps. Behind the tank traps was a ditch. Behind the ditch there was a patrol track for vehicles, and then a marching track for infantry. Behind the column track there was a row of street lamps, and behind the street lamps was a row of watchtowers. Behind the watchtowers was a barbed-wire corridor inhabited by attack dogs, and then a low-tension electric fence. Behind the electric fence was a “fakir’s bed” of nails that protruded from the ground, and another concrete wall. Behind this rear wall was a border area cleared of buildings, which the citizens of the German Democratic Republic were not allowed to visit. And behind the border area was an entire society that had been told nothing of the true nature of the Wall.

  THINGS WEREN’T THAT bad after Ute was finally allowed to go home. Her sister was gone forever, and Ute thought of her as if she were dead. She mourned her, she grieved, but she went back to work and saw her friends. It would have been madness to do otherwise. Life went on.

  Then one day she received a message: “Come to Bernauerstrasse, and I will see you there.” So Ute went and peered over the rampart. She saw a figure standing on a little steel tower, waving at her. And because it was dangerous even to approach Bernauerstrasse, Ute had to drop her hand, turn on her heel, and walk away—as if she had seen nothing, not even an apparition waving from the other side. “It was the bitterest day of my life,” she says. She wishes she’d never gone.

  GÜNTER SCHABOWSKI LIVES happily ever after with a modest career behind him as the editor of a local newspaper in Hesse. But once upon a time he was the minister for state propaganda in the Democratic Republic of Germany, and one day he’d made a mistake at work.

  It was the ninth of November, 1989. Schabowski had been called to a news conference. There was a crisis: what had once been a trickle of escapees over the Wall had become a flood, and no one knew how to deal with it. He had just returned from his holidays, and he was exhausted, but no one else would speak to the press that day—they’d left it up to him. No one had told him what he had to say, so he improvised.

  We know about this tendency in the population, this need of the population, to travel or to leave the GDR. And (um) we have ideas about what we have to bring about . . . namely a complex renewal of the society (um) and thereby achieve that many of these elements . . . (um) that people do not feel compelled to solve their personal problems in this way.

  We have decided today (um) to implement a regulation that allows every citizen of the German Democratic Republic (um) to (um) leave the GDR through any of the border crossings.

  The room erupted. Would people need visas or passports to leave? When would this regulation come into force? “It comes into effect,” adlibbed Schabowski, “according to my information, immediately.” “That has to be decided by the Council of Ministers,” an aide murmured, but he was not heard above the hubbub. The subsequent questions were inaudible, but Schabowski repeated four times: “I haven’t heard anything to the contrary.”

  The press conference was broadcast live on GDR stations, but no one watched them in those days—not if they wanted to know what was actually going on. Four hours later, a West German news program reported the press conference under a sensational headline.

  This ninth of November is a historic day: the GDR has announced that its borders are open to everyone, with immediate effect, and the gates of the wall stand wide open.

  It wasn’t quite what Günter Schabowski had said, but that didn’t stop anyone. The people of the GDR got up from their sofas, put on their coats, and walked out to the gates of the Wall, expecting to find them wide open. The queues at the Bornholmerstrasse checkpoint were soon overwhelming, and the guards didn’t know what do to do. They telephoned their bosses, and their bosses reminded them that the Council of Ministers had in fact recommended nothing more than a review of travel restrictions. Headlines on the West German news did not constitute official East German government policy, they said.

  Except that this time they did. No matter what the guards said, the people refused to go home. At about half past eleven, as if prompted by some hidden signal—or perhaps just because they didn’t know what else to do—the guards began to wave people over the old railway bridge into the West. They marked their papers with an “exit with no right of return” stamp, as if they were sentencing them to death. But from that moment, the Wall ceased to be the Wall and became a wall. It ceased to be the boundary between states and ideologies and hemispheres and became a length of concrete, twelve feet tall and only a few inches thick.

  UTE, TOO, HAD been listening to the West German news that night. She rose slowly from her chair, went into the bedroom, and opened her suitcase. She packed some underwear, a few shirts and trousers, and a sweater, because it was cold. She switched off the light, tiptoed down the stair, crossed the courtyard, picked her way to the front door, and dropped the key as her shaking hands felt for the lock. She made her way to her workplace and left a note on the little roll of paper hanging by the door that people used in the absence of telephones. She apologized: she wouldn’t be back for a while.

  One day later, Ute was sitting on the doorstep of her long-lost sister’s house in West Germany, waiting for her to come home from work. They didn’t talk about the Wall. They had dealt with quite enough history for now.

  VOLKER PAWLOWSKI LIVES happily ever after in Bernau, the town outside Berlin for which Bernauerstrasse is named. He is the proud owner of a building yard, a huge silver Chrysler cruiser, and U.S. patent number 6076675, issued to him for

  a presentation and holding device for small-format objects that has at least two transparent joinable halves that form a hollow body when fitted together into a corresponding opening in a presentation surface, such as a picture postcard. The hollow body is effectively used to contain an object which has some connection with the motif presented on the pic
ture postcard.

  Once upon a time, Pawlowski was a construction worker in East Berlin, but he slipped a disk around the time when the gates of the Wall were opened. Stuck at home, he came up with the modest device that has made his fortune. Pawlowski’s invention is only half the secret of his wealth, for it is the specific motif presented on the picture postcards he sells, and the “small-format objects” that have a connection with it, that lend patent 6076675 its awesome power.

  Every so often, Volker Pawlowski drives his truck into Berlin and picks up sections of the Wall. Then he brings them back to his building yard, where they are unloaded and showered in bright spray-paint to make it appear as if they have been covered in graffiti. When the paint has dried, workers chip away at the slabs until there is a pile of little concrete shards on the ground. These are sorted into different sizes; and then, in accordance with patent number 6076675, they are attached to postcards of famous sections of the Berlin Wall in its heyday.

  In pieces pinned to postcards, the Wall is taken back into town. Alongside old Russian army uniforms and GDR badges, it is piled up on souvenir stalls around Checkpoint Charlie, the Brandenburg Gate, and Potsdamer Platz. At the height of his success, Pawlowski was shifting between 30,000 and 40,000 postcards a year. That’s a lot of wall. “It’s worthless,” he says, “but people seem to want it, and who am I to complain?”

  Pawlowski isn’t the only one to profit from the destruction of the Wall. The very morning after Günter Schabowski’s mistake, bulldozers turned up in Bernauerstrasse. Although the gates of the Wall had already been thrown wide open, they forced a new opening in it. Then the giant machines rumbled away, and left the people to continue their work.