East Germany and the Frontiers of Power

1Introduction: The Frontiers of PowerFew historical changes occur literally overnight. Yet, in the early hours of Sunday13 August 1961 a new landmark appeared on the Cold War’s frontline. Inthe darkness between East and West Berlin, jackhammers tore up roads andpavements, while tramlines and railings were welded into temporary barriers,followed by cinder blocks, barbed wire, and concrete. Its builders, the EastGerman communist party, called it the ‘Antifascist Defence Rampart’, while therest of the world knew it as the Berlin Wall, or simply ‘the Wall’. Its iconicimages still influence our mental picture of East Germany: a fleeing East Germanpoliceman frozen in mid-air above a barbed-wire entanglement; a tug-of-war overan elderly woman dangling from an apartment window; US and Soviet tankspoint-blank at Checkpoint Charlie. Viewing platforms soon permitted westerntourists a glimpse of the sandy no man’s land between the front and rear walls,raked clean by day and floodlit at night, known as the ‘death-strip’. No trip toWest Berlin was complete without a visit to the Haus am Checkpoint Charlie,filled with escape memorabilia and dioramas of the beleaguered demi-city. TheWall was merchandized on postcards and T-shirts; it formed the backdropto John le Carré and Len Deighton’s spy thrillers; legions of graffiti artistsspray-painted it; and Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols met his nihilistic matchin it.¹I myself encountered the Wall in the mid-1980s when I lived for a year inWest Berlin. Checkpoint Charlie was like a macabre version of the wardrobein C. S. Lewis’s Narnia stories: you began in one world, filled with neon andprimary yellows, only to emerge in another, seemingly set in sepia, where theair smelled of brown coal and two-stroke petrol. Part of the Wall’s fascinationis that it was a primordial, almost fairytale solution to a modern problem,more akin to the Brothers Grimm than the late twentieth century. Of course,humans have always marked boundaries with ditches, fences, and walls, aroundhomesteads, fields, and fortifications. The first recorded walled city was Jericho,10,000 years ago.² Six thousand years later Chinese warlords began immuringwhole territories, culminating in the sixteenth-century Great Wall of China.¹ The Sex Pistols, ‘Holidays in the Sun’, Oct. 1977.² Felipé Fernandez-Armesto, ‘This Story Doth a Wall Present’, Index on Censorship (Writing onthe Walls), 33/3 (2004), 41.