Beyond the Wall: 'Here Freedom Begins'

For about 100 yards on the East side of the wall extends the "death zone," where anyone seen moving is automatically shot.

A visitor to Berlin inevitably walks along the road to the Brandenburg gate, now lined with rolls of barbed wire and heavily guarded. The old Brandenburg gate stands in its grandeur as a reminder of the transience of power over this great city. The shock and revulsion of seeing its impaired beauty, half hidden by the wall, is tempered by the remembrance of the history it has witnessed. The chariot now astride the gate is the same one which was once borne triumphantly into Paris by Napoleon.

The cross-over point into the Eastern Sector of the city is several blocks from the Brandenburg gate. If one follows the wall (after it leaves the Brandenburg gate it becomes about nine feet high, and it is topped by Y-shaped metal bars covered with barbed wire) Check Point Charlie is not far.

On the Western side of the wall the street is cluttered with signs: "Freedom Must Not End Here," pictures of President Kennedy, of Peter Fechter, killed on the wall, and of an unknown refugee from the East who was shot near Warsaw Bridge. On the house walls are, large blown-up photographs of refugees and of a Russian tank suppressing the abortive East German revolution of 1953, all clearly visible in the East.

The East Berliner's side of the wall is less decorated. A banner proclaiming "Never Again War and Fascism" was, until the middle of August, the only slogan. At that time a large sign was put up facing the Western observation tower which says: Hier Beginnt der Frciheit von Imperialismus, von Revanchismus, von Kriegpolitik; "Here Begins Freedom from Imperialism, from Revanchism, from War-Politics."

For an American, the process of crossing over to the sector of the city which advertises itself as the starting point of freedom is fairly easy. For the East Berliners it has meant some 70 deaths since the wall went up in 1961. This fall restrictions on West Berliners travelling to the East have been loosened to allow some strictly controlled family visiting.

At the cross-over point a visitor must fill out forms stating the amount of currency taken over. (The exchange rate of East German marks for West German marks at the border is 1:1, while East German marks may be bought at any bank in West Berlin for about a third of this rate.) He may be selected for fairly through questioning and searching.

Stepping from the control house into East Berlin itself is a little like stepping into a de Chirico painting. There is an atmosphere of oppression which cannot adequately be depicted by sketching the physical ruin of the city. The number of people on the street drops, the number of automobiles is cut to about a quarter the number in the West, there are empty kiosks, banners ("The State Needs Everyone; Everyone Needs the State"), and wall-murals of workers, farmers, and technicians marching forward under the banner of the German Democratic Republic.

One immediately comes upon the wreckage of World War II. A few blocks across from Checkpoint Charlie is Akademieplatz, a mute monument to the East Berlin failure to reconstruct. Grass is pushing its way through the paving of a square, surrounded by once majestic marble Academy buildings with Corinthian columns. Grotesquely shattered marble figures now lie around the base of the buildings, crumbled columns are scattered on the ground, and the burned and sagging roof has rotted to reveal only its steel skeleton and the wreckage inside.

Beyond Akademieplatz the wreckage continues. The restored Opera House looks naked against ruins, the access to the Brandenburg gate is framed with more ruins, and in many places restored apartment houses are only islands in the rubble. Even on Karl Marx A ee, the town's main street, one has the feeling that the new, tawdry apartment houses are merely a Potemkin Village. They are surrounded everywhere by ruins.

Only on some sections of Under den Linden, where many buildings have escaped bombing or been restored, does one feel some of the grandeur of old Berlin. Walking up Unter den Linden past the City Library (with a large iron plaque informing visitors that V.I. Lenin spent 1895 at work there), past the magnificent old buildings of Humboldt University, past a monument to the victims of Fascism, one comes to the Museum of German History: a very strange museum indeed.

German history funnels through a succession of rooms, depicting capitalist exploitation, proletarian sufferings and unrest, and the active work of various revolutionary groups, to the Marxzimmer where der grosste Sohndes Deutsches Volkes ("the greatest child of the German people"), sculpted in bronze, faces a first edition of the Communist Manifesto on red velvet at the other end of the room.

Skipping quickly to the end of the museum, the defeat of the Nazis by the Soviet Union occupies several large rooms. A small side room devoted to the Normandy invasion points out that "with every gallon of gasoline, with every bomb that fell, monopoly-capitalists were earning money." In the same room is a copy of a New York paper from the day on which Hitler attacked Stalin, with5The Brandenburg Gate is here seen through the barbed wire of the border, for it stands entirely in East Berlin. No one from either side can come close to it, for East Berliners are also kept about 200 yards away.