KPLU Local News
(2009-11-09)
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KPLU's Bellamy Pailthorp in Berlin, a few days before the fall of the wall.
Bellamy Pailthorp photo.
At the time, I was a Fulbright Scholar in Berlin. I got a call from a desperate foreign correspondent. He needed an interpreter. Chris Hedges had been sent to Berlin very suddenly by the Dallas Morning News. He was on his way to Afghanistan, to cover the Mujahedeen's war against the Soviets. But his editor noticed the enormous demonstrations taking place in East Berlin and changed his itinerary.
"It was the day of the largest anti-communist demonstration in the history of East Germany and Alexanderplatz. My editor called me after midnight. And so I didn't even look at the airline schedule, threw all into suitcase by noon the next day was at Alexanderplatz. I had gone through Checkpoint Charlie."
Checkpoint Charlie was the border crossing in West Berlin's American sector. It was easy to get visas to go to the east for a day. So Chris Hedges and I spent the next two weeks traveling back and forth. I remember those daily trips felt a lot like time travel. West Berlin was full of the bright colors and counterculture of the 80s, epitomized by the graffiti on the West side of the Wall. The east was drab and run down.
"I mean there were whole sections of East Berlin that had not been renovated or repaired since World War Two. You could go to subway stations and they were completely pock-marked with I suppose Russian and German bullets."
On November 9th, 1989, we were working on a story about the role of the protestant church in the peaceful revolution that would lead to the wall's opening that day. Only, it was such a surprise to everyone involved that we had no clue. We hired an east German taxi driver to take us to appointments at several churches. After we finished our interviews, Chris asked the driver to show us something that tourists might not normally see. He took us to a ruined building to meet his 16-year-old daughter, Karen Zetsche.
"And so there you were in front of my door and I was totally surprised, you know?"
Karen is 36 now, a single Mom who still lives in East Berlin and works as a kind of alternative tour guide. We've been friends since we met 20 years ago. She was part of the opposition movement then - a rebellious teenager who had left home to squat in that abandoned apartment house. In those days in East Germany, you had to be married to even get on a waiting list for apartments, which were used as incentives to grow the dwindling population of the GDR. Her Dad, our taxi driver, decided we needed to see another side of that story - her dilapidated home.
"Young people couldn't get regular apartments, you know. They were occupying apartment houses, which were kind of ruins, you know?"
The same bullet marks we saw in the old subway stations pocked the crumbling corridors of her apartment. Shared toilets were in the hallways and the heat came from ovens that burned briquettes of grimy brown coal.
When we arrived, she was on her way to one of the churches Chris Hedges was writing about. She and her Dad took us along to the Gethsemenekirche. We did more interviews with people there who had been part of the fight against the communists, and then Karen and I exchanged addresses. I thought I might come back and visit her some day on my own, or at least send a Christmas card. She was more skeptical, because East Germans had to be retired and over 60 to travel to the west.
"I said okay, maybe when I'm retired, you know?"
Chris Hedges and I went back to West Berlin and learned only after dinner what had happened during a government press conference that was later broadcast on the evening news. Politburo spokesman Guenter Schabowski mistakenly told the capital press corps in East Berlin that the border would open, effective immediately.
And open it did.
Chris Hedges and I took a taxi to the bridge crossing at Bornholmer Bruecke, where border guards without clear orders sat in their booths, heads in hand, waving people through and watching stone-faced as some began chipping away at the wall. Champaign and hugs were all around, people danced in the streets and the party continued for days. The West German government handed out "greeting money" to any East German who went into a bank in the west: 100 West German marks to get them started. Fruit vendors ran out of bananas and lines formed not just in front of the banks, but also at a famous store for sex toys, Beate Uhse.
Chris Hedges says those church leaders and peaceful protestors were naive in their fight to create a better East Germany. They may have helped dismantle the Berlin wall with their courageous protests. But it was consumerism that won the cold war.
"Because what the mass of East Germans wanted, and we saw it on the night the night fell, was to drive over in their tie-dye jeans in these little Trabant cars and - it was sort of sad and poignant at once - standing outside the big display windows, of the department stores in Berlin, they wanted those mass-produced goods."
As it turned out, my friend Karen Zetsche used the address I gave her the very next morning. I still have the note she left. I wasn't home, so she took a subway to the center of West Berlin, bought a newspaper and a huge bread roll. That roll was the first of many disappointments with the West - she says it looked delicious, but was overpriced and had no flavor. After German unification, though, she traveled the world and says she wouldn't trade those experiences for anything.
As for me, the rare days covering the fall of communism in Berlin 20 years ago were what got me hooked on journalism. My first big story a few months later was about gangs of graffiti artists looking for new places to paint after the fall of the Wall.
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