The House by the Lake

by Thomas Harding

  Despite the frustrations of living so close to the Wall, the Kühnes soon settled into a routine. In the evenings, after supper, they often watched television in the living room6. There were two domestic channels available, DDR1 and DDR2, and the family gathered each evening to watch the news and the variety show Ein Kessel Buntes. Of more interest were the shows broadcast by the West German channels – ARD and ZDF – which they could pick up from the antenna tower positioned five kilometres south-east of the village. Their favourite shows were Am Laufenden Band, similar to The Generation Game in the UK, and Einer wird gewinnen, a quiz show with contestants from around Europe. They also watched a lot of sport, particularly football and Formula One. Whenever the West German shows had finished the family made sure to switch the TV back to a DDR channel in the unlikely event that someone stopped by.

  By the late 1960s, many more people had television sets in the village. Teachers at Bernd’s school would often quiz the children on their family’s viewing habits. One trick was to ask the children which clock was showing on the TV news. If they replied with ‘rectangle’, then the teacher knew that their parents were watching Aktuelle Kamera on DDR at 7.30 p.m. But if they said the news had a circular clock, then the teacher would know that Tagesschau was being watched, an 8 p.m. news programme carried by the Western channel ARD, and the child’s family would be reported to the authorities.

  And then there was the radio. Like most of Berlin’s population, Bernd’s favourite station was RIAS, which since 1946 had been broadcasting American culture into West Berlin and beyond. He liked to listen to the weekly chart show, singing along to the popular British and American songs then unavailable on East German radio.

  On 13 June 1967, when Bernd was seven years old, he and his family attended Groß Glienicke’s seven hundredth anniversary celebrations. The local party bosses had decided to use the event, held over three days, as an opportunity to highlight the benefits of socialism. The programme ran to six pages and was printed on glossy white paper. At the village sports hall there were games for children and, for the adults, an exhibition entitled ‘From feudalistic village to a socialist community at the border to West Berlin’. Down the road at the Drei Linden, they were holding ‘a forum for intelligence’. At the beach bar, party officials gave awards to ‘outstanding citizens’. Later, there was dancing, accompanied by a Soviet music ensemble. There was also a forum where women were educated about ‘socialist health policies and the healthy development of our children’.

  At the Drei Linden event, Johannes Sieben, one of Bernd’s teachers and the editor of the Chronik, captured the mood of the day. At the end of a long speech about the village’s history, he said, ‘The leading men of the capitalist industry have been chased away, so that they cannot stretch out their hands for profit any more, and we now have this barrier to West Berlin to stop future capitalists.’ As people clapped, Sieben concluded, ‘We have been good citizens, we have done it right because we the people of Groß Glienicke are very happy with getting along with the border patrol guards, and support their work protecting our borders.’

  In the years since the Wall was constructed, the number of people who crossed the border from East Berlin to the West had fallen from over 200,000 in the first seven months of 1961 to a few hundred per year. By 1965, seventy-seven people had died attempting to cross the Wall, ranging in age from eighteen to eighty. Most had been shot by DDR border guards as they attempted to escape. Typically, the government-controlled DDR media did not cover the story of those who died while trying to escape across the Wall. The exception was if a border guard died while on duty, they were then lionised for their patriotic service. When the government was unable to conceal civilian deaths, they were justified by the DDR media as a legitimate defence of national borders. On the other hand, the Western media widely covered these deaths, prompting protests and condemnations, which in turn damaged the DDR’s reputation and fuelled anger towards its leaders.

  By now, the Wall had become the most prominent symbol of the ongoing Cold War, a physical reminder of the conflict between the two global powers. To the East German government and the Soviet Union, it represented an assertion of their independence from the West, as well as a practical barrier against emigration. To the USA and its allies, it embodied the servitude suffered by the people of Eastern Europe, an affront to Western ideals of democracy and freedom.

  The drama, complexity and fraught negotiations of the Cold War were played out on a small scale at the so-called ‘Bridge of Spies’, where captured Soviet, American and British intelligence agents were swapped. Spanning the River Havel, the bridge formed a border crossing between West Berlin and Potsdam in East Germany, and lay only three kilometres south of Groß Glienicke. The first exchange took place on 10 February 19627, six months after the Berlin Wall was erected. From one end of the bridge, the USA released Colonel Vilyam Genrikhovich Fisher, who five years earlier had been found guilty of running a spy ring in New York. From the other side, the Soviets sent over Francis Gary Powers, an American pilot who had been captured two years earlier when the Soviets shot down his U2 spy plane as it flew over its airspace. A second exchange took place in 1964, when Konon Molody, a Soviet agent who had acquired British military intelligence, was swapped for Greville Wynne, a British intelligence officer captured in Budapest. While celebrated in the West, such exchanges were not covered by the DDR media. Officially, the only news items available to Bernd Kühne and his family were the one-sided stories circulated by the East German newspapers and radio: accounts of how Fisher had thwarted the US government and was being feted as a hero in Moscow; and of how Gary Powers had been shot down as the result of a Soviet pilot’s superior skills; how Greville Wynne had confessed at his trial in Moscow and had been sentenced to death.

  Yet the escapes from East Germany and the spy swaps were not the only border crossings taking place at this time. For some, life in the DDR appeared more attractive than that in West Germany.

  Surprisingly, perhaps, this was true of a few British soldiers working at Gatow. By the early 1960s, a section of Britain’s Gatow military base had been transformed into Britain’s most important intelligence gathering operation in central Europe. Officially known as Royal Signals Detachment RAF Gatow, this unit monitored communications traffic between East Berlin and Moscow. To handle the sheer volume of data that needed to be translated and analysed, the British recruited hundreds of young linguists through their Russian Intelligence Corps, most of whom had little or no military training. One such example was the writer Alan Bennett; another was future TV producer Leslie Woodhead. During long shifts, the teams listened to the airwaves, seated in rows of desks situated in a secret bunker towards the back of the base. Another of these young recruits was a certain Brian Patchett, a scruffy-looking, long-haired, twenty-five-year-old who had grown up in Coventry.

  It was on 9 July 1963 that Brian Patchett’s name first appeared in the British newspapers. Under the headline ‘BRITISH CORPORAL DEFECTS TO THE EAST’, The Times reported that Patchett had requested asylum, giving the reason that he was ‘no longer prepared to work for the revanchists who are preparing for war’. The soldier had been missing since 2 July, the paper said, adding that an army spokesman confirmed that he had not taken any secret documents with him. An investigation by the British Army was quickly launched and it was soon discovered that Patchett had fallen in love with a twenty-one-year-old German girl, Rosemarie Zeiss. Zeiss had grown up in East Berlin but, hoping to study law, she had crossed into West Berlin a few months before the Wall was built. Her parents still lived in the DDR, where they ran a state-controlled restaurant. Patchett had met Zeiss at Gatow, where she had worked for a short time at one of the base’s shops and had been devastated when Zeiss had ended their relationship because it ‘was becoming too serious’. In a letter to Zeiss dated 21 June 1963, Patchett had confessed that he didn’t like working at Gatow and was frustrated that his requests to be relocated to another base had not been accepted:
‘the army refuses to move me out’, he wrote. Anxious lest he be trapped on the base, he concluded: ‘I’ve only got one way to run.’

  In a confidential memo to the British Cabinet, the War Office concluded that Patchett was a ‘lone wolf with no particular friends in the unit’, and that ‘there is no evidence that the defection was a steered operation’. In a final report, the director of Military Intelligence, Marshall St John Oswald, wrote that the cause of the defection was a combination of an unstable psychiatric history, a poor home background, unhappiness about his posting as well as his girlfriend breaking up with him. On 7 November 1963, following a series of inquiries from a Member of Parliament who had been pressing the government to return Patchett’s belongings to his family, Oswald wrote that ‘it is obviously desirable from the army point of view to let the Patchett case die a natural death if possible’. The items would be returned to the family ‘and held on Patchett’s behalf’.

  Brian Patchett was one of only twenty-three members of the British Army based at Gatow who defected to the East, at a time when tens of thousands of young people in East Germany were considering fleeing in the opposite direction.

  24

  KÜHNE

  1970

  Berlin Wall with view of Groß Glienicke Lake and islands

  DESPITE LIVING IN the shadow of the Wall, with all its extraordinary features, the local residents tried to establish a normal life. By the start of 1970, the Kühne family had developed a firm daily routine.

  The first task of a winter morning was to light the oven in the kitchen. This was Bernd’s job. At 6 a.m., the ten-year-old would be woken by his alarm. Climbing out of bed and wrapping himself in a warm jacket, he would venture outside to grab an armful of wood from the stack by the chicken shed. Back indoors, he fanned the embers in the grate before carefully adding the logs. Once the fire was roaring, he added a few lumps of coal from the metal scuttle standing next to the stove. It was dark outside and the windows in the kitchen were covered with ice; he could not see through them.

  When the stove was warm, Irene would begin breakfast, typically toast and scrambled eggs. The smell of the food would wake the others and before long the family was sitting around the kitchen table. Everyone drank tea poured from a large yellow urn. If there was enough time, Irene would tell her four children, often still in their pyjamas, that they could go back to bed for a few minutes if they wanted.

  On their way to school, the kids had to pass through the barrier at the Potsdamer Tor. Bernd, his brother and sister Marita would not stop, but his sister Rosita would normally slow down enough to say good morning to the soldiers. Since they learned Russian at school, rather than English or French, it was an opportunity to practise. Sometimes she brought the guards a slice of cake, a boiled egg, or a piece of bread with honey that she had been given by her mother – she felt sorry for these young men so far from home, and was always rewarded with a nod and a smile. Once she was even given an old Red Army medal.

  With the kids at school, Irene went about her chores. She cleaned the kitchen – the breakfast plates, the pots and pans. She washed clothes in a tub in the bathroom, hanging the wet items on a rack in front of the fire. Then she would sit in the living room and knit. Each year she made a fresh set of jumpers, hats, gloves and scarves for her children, from the same dark red wool, all that was available at the village shop. While Bernd and Hartmut gladly wore their home-made woollens, their sisters refused. They didn’t want people to think that they were wearing their brothers’ clothes.

  Irene spent the afternoon shopping1. There were two main stores in the village. Konsum Shop Number 422 was part of a national grocery cooperative and was located on Wilhelm-Pieck-Straße, the road which ran behind the church and was renamed after the DDR’s first president. It was here that Irene could buy soap and powder, vegetables and pasta, margarine and beer. This shop was run by Ingeborg Tauschke, a tall, friendly woman and an active member of the Socialist Unity Party. Despite the puff pieces in the newspaper – in which locals declared that Frau Tauschke ‘has good opening hours and you are served very well’, and ‘the shelves are clean and always full’, and ‘there is as much choice as in Potsdam’ – the truth was that Irene and the rest of the villagers knew that you could buy the same goods in Konsum 422 as you could in any other shop. After all there was only one brand of washing powder and, one brand of toilet paper, one brand of sausage, one brand of cigarettes.

  The village’s other big store was known as ‘HO’ for Handelsorganisation, a state-run general store located next to the Drei Linden on the Potsdamer Chaussee. Here Irene could buy nails and glue, hooks and planks of wood, insect spray and bleach. There was a butcher in the southern part of the village, which Irene rarely needed to visit, thanks to the chickens and pigs they kept at home. As with most shops in the DDR, the trick was knowing when to turn up. The best time seemed to be just after the deliveries were made, at three o’clock in the afternoon or so, but even this was no guarantee that the shelves would be stocked.

  When Frau Tauschke renovated her shop, the local newspaper ran a full-page story; a sign, perhaps, of how significant the shop was in village life, and how little else was going on – at least that the authorities would allow to be published. As part of the celebrations, the local schoolchildren were asked to write a poem about the improvements2, the best of which was published in the paper.

  Most happy are the saleswomen

  They have less stress now

  Because they don’t have to serve any more

  They have time to smoke a cigarette.

  The family’s evenings were filled with cooking dinner, more cleaning up, watching television and bathing. As darkness fell early for most of the winter, the children were typically in bed by eight, allowing Wolfgang and Irene some time to themselves.

  Often, Wolfgang would go out for a beer at the village pub with friends, or even with one of the border patrol guards. On one occasion, he spent an evening with a colleague who also lived in the security zone next to the Wall. They met at the Drei Linden and after a few beers they had become fairly drunk. On the way home, they passed through the barrier at the Potsdamer Tor and chatted good-naturedly with the guards. At one point, filled with alcoholic exuberance, Wolfgang’s friend grabbed one of the soldier’s Kalashnikov and started messing around, pointing it at the sky, pretending to shoot.

  Within seconds the situation grew tense. The soldier snatched the weapon back, while his comrade roughly grabbed Wolfgang’s friend. The drunken pair were arrested and taken to Potsdam police station where they were separately interrogated. Only when it became clear that Wolfgang had played no part in the inebriated antics was he allowed home. His friend was locked up and, upon release, he and his family were ejected from their comfortable house close to the Wall and relocated to a town far from the border, his friends and his job.

  In the summer months, the children played outside while Irene and Wolfgang worked in the garden, growing and harvesting large quantities of beans, strawberries, potatoes, asparagus, cucumbers, lettuce and tomatoes. The chickens did not need much attention and it was the children’s task to collect the eggs and feed them. They also cultivated honeybees, who swarmed around a cluster of hives near the apple orchard. The honey and eggs were so plentiful, and so good, that Irene sold what they did not need to the local shop.

  The family was not wealthy, by any stretch, but rarely wanted for anything. Wolfgang found steady work transporting groceries to the soldiers at the NVA barracks, and although it did not pay well, it won him the respect of the border guards – a relationship that was vital if he and his family were to remain in the house by the Wall.

  Late at night on 19 March 1970, Bernd Kühne was awoken by shouts from next door. Slipping on a pair of shoes and a coat, he ran to the fence and saw, to his horror, that the Munks’ old weekend house was on fire. The Wißgotts, the tenants who had been living there since the 1950s, were standing near the Wall, pleading with the border patrol g
uards for assistance.

  Wolfgang soon joined his son outside, and seeing that the guards were refusing to help, instructed him to run to the fire station that stood on the other side of the Potsdamer Tor. While Bernd was gone, Wolfgang grabbed a hose and drowned his roof with water to protect it from the sparks now cascading from the neighbours’ property and blowing in the night breeze across towards his ‘villa’.

  At the fire station, Bernd pressed the alarm button. A few moments later, a fireman came outside and told him that the fire engine was unable to come because it was experiencing technical problems. Instead, they sent word to the Potsdam fire station who took another forty minutes to arrive. By then it was too late. The Munk house had burned to the ground.

  Wolfgang and Irene invited their now homeless neighbours to stay the night. Over restorative glasses of schnapps they were told that the fire had started in the chimney, which had not been cleaned for years. Glad that he had improved the ventilation of his own chimneys, Wolfgang vowed to clean them out regularly.

  The next day, the Gemeinde found a new place in the village for the Wißgotts to live. Once the ruins had cooled, Wolfgang dug up the old bricks that had formed the walls of the Munks’ kitchen, cleaned them of soot and mortar, and used them to build a small wash-house next to the lake house. With the Munks unseen for twenty years, and with no prospect of their imminent return, why let such good materials go to waste?

  At the age of fourteen, Bernd graduated from the Thälmann Pioneers3, and was inducted into the party’s senior youth movement, the Freie Deutsche Jugend (FDJ), to which 75 per cent of the East German youth belonged. The majority of those who did not participate chose not to for religious reasons. His new uniform consisted of grey trousers and a blue shirt with a bright yellow rising sun emblem embossed on one sleeve, and a red handkerchief around his neck. In the FDJ, Bernd continued to attend weekly lectures on the virtues of socialism, chanting: ‘FDJ members – Friendship!’, and was taught new songs to sing. ‘Being Merry and Singing’ was a typical example.