He has just turned 19 and is the son of peasants. He has arrived in East Berlin a few months ago and has experienced, like all his fellow citizens, the horror and helplessness of confinement. Two days earlier, on August 13, 1961, at night and without prior notice, a barbed wire had completed the physical division of the city. You can no longer go to the other side. The boy’s name is Hans Schumann, he is a border guard and the subject of a photo that will go around the world. There he is seen in a graceful jump over the wire fence, as if he were flying. In the previous two days, more than 800 people, including entire families, had dared to overcome the obstacle, cross the Berlin Wall risking prison or death. They would be the first of a long list that ends in March 1989, eight months before the fall of the fence, when the engineer Winfried Freudenberger built a homemade hot air balloon and perished trying. He was the last victim of the Wall.
The balloon thing gives the measure of the imagination with which the flight was faced. There were all kinds and conditions, but perhaps none was as charismatic as the tunnel that, just one year after the construction of the Wall caused 29 people to leave behind the so-called death strip. That was a border as physical as mental in which German totalitarianism, with the support of the Soviet Union, developed a security team, including guards, weapons, tanks and sniffer dogs, which came to cost almost two billion euros a year. . In addition to an all-powerful secret police, the Stasi, which with its extensive network of informants knew where all the citizens of East Germany worked, read and with whom they slept. Disrupting breakout projects was something they managed 99% of the time.
Let’s go back to the tunnel. It saved a distance of 135 meters and it was neither the longest nor the one that made it possible for more people to flee. But yes the one with the best story. It has been written by the British journalist and broadcaster Helena Merriman in ‘Tunnel 29’ (Salamandra) who has already triumphed with it in the podcast format for the BBC and which has reached more than 6 million downloads. The book will be in bookstores from the 5th. If that tunnel became world famous was because a team from NBC contacted the courageous group to make a documentary as they secretly excavated from the western part of the city. The television filming of these works, which forced young people to dig the earth upside down in a space of just under one meter by one meter, helped finance the project. A controversial connection since suspicions of CIA interference, not proven, have always accompanied that adventure.
The initiative came from two Italian students in West Berlin, Mimmo Sesta and Gigi Spina, who in turn contacted the absolute hero of Merriman’s book, Joachim Rudolph – an engineering student from the GDR who had decided to flee before of the raising of the fence. Rudolph today is 80 years old and has an extraordinary sensory memory of those works. He is one of the numerous witnesses – another would be the Sternheimer couple – that the journalist interviewed for the book, in addition to having access to documents and of course to the ominous and obsessively precise files of the Stasi, a mine for any journalist. Now, after the parenthesis caused by the pandemic, Merriman has returned to the German capital to show in situ where and how those underground events took place. Such has been the interest aroused by the subject that the book itself offers the locations that the reader can visit to recreate those events.
“I’m not too passionate about data from the history books. I take them into account, of course -he says- but I think that the history of Tunnel 29 is not understood if the dirt and mud that the excavators faced are not visualized and Joachim was fundamental in explaining that. In addition, with his stories, he helped me understand how a child grows up in the GDR, how a new socialist state is built, between 45 and 61, a period for which there is not much documentation. I was able to evoke from the ingenuousness of his eyes how people built their radios out of galena or how tanks acted in demonstrations & rdquor ;.
The street under which it all happened, the Bernauer Strasse, measures a kilometer and a half. It has become famous because when the wall was built, the interiors of the houses were part of East Berlin, while the sidewalk belonged to the West. At first, to cross the line, the neighbors only had to open the door and go out. Until the ‘democratic’ authorities evicted them and boarded up doors and windows. Only the neighbors on the upper floors were allowed to stay. Looking out the windows, many took advantage of the situation. This was a good place to drop written notes on the other side or show the babies to the grandparents who had stayed behind. A couple got married in the middle of the street, while the bride’s parents watched them from the high windows.
Today, just around the corner from Bernauer Strasse, there is a museum where all that is remembered and the famous tunnel has been rebuilt. Visitors can climb down the ladder and crawl through the site. Every year, coinciding with the anniversary of the escape, the survivors of that adventure have gathered in that place and each one has provided the details they remembered so that the copy was one hundred percent reliable. “Now they haven’t come for a long time because of the pandemic. They have to be very careful because they are very old & rdquor ;, comments the guide.
Veterans like to remember how they managed to sneak under the most heavily guarded border in the world. How they used machinery that did not produce noise. How they managed to see in a tunnel without light and breathe when there was no air. How they reduced the groundwater that made the underground unusable several times because the city rests on wet sand that oozes. They laugh particularly when they remember how they placed that sign that paraphrased the one on the surface: “You are leaving the American sector of Berlin & rdquor ;.
The book contains a handful of subplots: loves and heartbreaks, fidelities capable of overcoming the cruelest separation and prison, without forgetting the activities of a very effective infiltrated spy who, however, this time failed to disrupt the plans. The material has become the perfect target for the television series being prepared by the producer of the series ‘Chernobyl’, with a script by Georgia Pritchett, one of the scriptwriters of ‘Succession’. The thing promises.
The feat of Joachim and his friends was not just a miniature odyssey. It could have precipitated one of the biggest conflicts of the cold war, had NBC reporters and cameramen been gunned down by border guards. It was not so. However, the influence of the documentary did manage to transform some things. It moved President Kennedy to tears, who demanded to view it before his screening for fear of reactivating tension against the Soviet Union, which had already reached its peak during the missile crisis in Cuba. Furthermore, Merriman maintains that the ‘Ich bin ein Berliner!! (‘I am a Berliner’) with which he greeted the city on his first official visit a few months later was a direct consequence of that emotion. But above all, the documentary changed Americans’ perception of what it meant to live behind the Iron Curtain.
Related news
“The cold war and television were born practically at the same time –explains Merriman-, unlike radio you could see what was happening, and that creates public opinion in a very direct way. It is not very different from what is happening in Ukraine now, but it could be said that that documentary changed the television news model & rdquor ;.
The author establishes another link, not very obvious, between the Berlin wall and the current war that has revived the old ghosts of the Cold War. She shows Vladimir Putin in December 1989, just days before the fall of the wall. The Russian president was then a KGB officer. Stationed in Dresden and before a German crowd enraged by the newly released freedom – they had stormed the Stasi headquarters and were threatening the headquarters of the Soviet secret service – the young Putin confronted the people, managed to get them to leave by threatening to shoot and asked help the Soviet authorities. “She only received three words from a liaison officer: ‘Moscow is silent’ –recalls the author-. Many analysts believe that at that moment that revenge obsession that now moves him was conceived. Putin would not be Putin without that German experience”.