The Berlin Wall (38 page)

‘I had learned how to do it at the Jump Derby in Hamburg,’ Leibing explained. ‘You have to photograph the horse when it leaves the ground and catch it as it clears the barrier. And then he came. I pressed the shutter and it was all over.’

It is the picture of a lifetime, taken right at the beginning of a young photographer’s career. All the more remarkable because his camera had no motor-drive. It was the only image Leibing had time to shoot.

Within hours the photograph appeared on the front of page of
Bild
. It found its way into scores of newspapers throughout the world and remains an iconic image.

Less famous—though in its way more revealing—is the photograph Leibing took of young Schumann once he got out of the police car in West Berlin. Bare-headed and with his collar loosened, Schumann looks suddenly like a bewildered small-town teenager, a little frightened and
shocked at his own temerity and the attention it has suddenly brought him in a world he doesn’t yet understand.

The two images gave the world two views of the GDR’s youthful servants. One, the obedient Private Koch, ‘drawing the line’ of history; the other of the reluctant dissident, Corporal Schumann, who crossed it in one great, eternally remembered ‘leap to freedom’.

All Schumann ever said, then or later, was that he hadn’t wanted to shoot anyone. Going West was a way of avoiding a moral dilemma. Western interrogators were astonished at how poorly prepared the East German
Vopos
were from a psychological point of view. Schumann was the first ‘deserter’ but by no means the last. During these first thirty-six hours, nine more border guards would flee to the West, jumping the wire, crawling under it, or in one case scaling a factory wall.

Koch, by contrast, never had to worry about the kind of stuff that disturbed soldiers on the ‘sharp end’. He was a privileged ‘back-room’ type, who spent the rest of that afternoon—while the bewildered Schumann was adjusting to a double-edged fame in the West—travelling onward, by boat and foot and jeep to the southernmost limit of the sector border. His main concern was resting his blistered feet, the result of taking that long, long hike in his smart (but tight) new boots.

The result of the inspection tour in which Koch took part was to define the border, and the result of that definition was the building of a more permanent structure, the so-called ‘extension of the military engineering measures’.

At 1.30 a.m. in the morning of Friday 18 August, six crane trucks arrived on Potsdamer Platz, Berlin’s Piccadilly Circus or Columbus Circle, south of the Brandenburg Gate. They unloaded dozens of concrete slabs of the kind hitherto used at checkpoints to control traffic. Some forty minutes later, a column of fire engines, concrete mixers, and a ‘work brigade’ of bricklayers arrived. Guarded by
Vopos
, they began to build a barrier across the entire square. Shortly after five, as dawn broke, they withdrew, leaving a concrete wall topped by two rows of cavity blocks, altogether just over five feet high, topped by metal staples suitable for the threading of barbed wire. At one point, this Wall (it feels legitimate to capitalise it from now on) ran inches from an entrance to the Potsdamer
Platz subway station, one of the few on the Western side. West Berlin police and early commuters watched in astonishment.

Of course, the big station below the Potsdamer Platz was closed, though subway trains still passed through without stopping on a line that emerged from West Berlin, going north through East Berlin, and then went back into the West again. Passengers noticed armed and uniformed
Trapos
on the underground platforms. No civilians were to be seen. The other former trans-sector subway line through Potsdamer Platz, running West to East, was now truncated in the East and started at Otto-Grotewohl-Strasse.
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It ended on the Western side at Gleisdreieck, a few hundred metres short of where it would once have crossed the sector boundary or—before 1945—crossed no meaningful boundary at all.

So the lifelines of old Berlin were cut. Hagen Koch’s white line, a piece of local defiance by a keen Communist officer, was like the indicator mark for a surgical operation. It told the world that the nerve network of a great city, which carried buses and trains, sewers and telephone lines, was to be sliced, snipped and capped.

Berlin was a city of steel, stone, brick and wood. It was not alive in the literal sense, so it could not bleed or feel pain. But its people lived, and they felt intensely.

The day after a Wall first appeared across Potsdamer Platz, President Kennedy’s high-level representatives arrived in West Berlin.

Forty-eight hours before, Vice-President Johnson had been sitting in a restaurant in Washington, bitterly bemoaning attempts to wrench him from his familiar political habitat. Now the tough Texan was landing at Tempelhof Airport in an airforce Lockheed Constellation on the afternoon of Saturday 19 August 1961, bracing himself to play a game in which an extraordinary variety of roles was demanded of him: protector and admonisher, idealist and realist, cheerleader and diplomat.

The Vice-President and General Clay had first flown across the Atlantic in a Boeing 707. They were accompanied by a high-powered State Department party that included Charles Bohlen and various high-ups from the German Department (including Frank Cash and Karl Mautner) plus Johnson’s press assistant, George Reedy, and Jay Gildner of the US Information Agency. There were also some young women,
inducted at Johnson’s insistence for stenographic purposes, and a press party that included Marguerite Higgins. The ‘Berlin Mafia’ was strongly represented.
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The story went that the normally quite reticent Clay spent the trip telling stories about his experiences in ‘beating’ Stalin during the blockade and emphasising how tough they had to be with Russians now, just as they had been then. If Truman had allowed him to send an armoured column down the autobahn in ’48, then the whole airlift wouldn’t have been necessary. In fact, they could probably have avoided the Korean War into the bargain. If, Clay maintained, he were president, he would tear the Wall down right away. And, just as in 1948 ‘Chip’ Bohlen had opposed fighting for Berlin, so now, in the cabin of the 707, he interjected that this sounded to him like a pretty good way to start World War Three.
Plus ça change
…

Unusually for Johnson, he did a lot of listening during that journey.
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They didn’t fly directly to Berlin. Protocol considerations and 1960s technical limitations demanded a stopover at the Bonn/Cologne Airport. Here they were received by the American ambassador, Mr Dowling, and the West German Foreign Minister, Dr Heinrich von Brentano. This group accompanied them into Bonn, the modest university town where the West German government had been housed since 1949. There would be discussions and lunch with Chancellor Adenauer.
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The time since 13 August had not been Adenauer’s finest hour. Far from leaping on a plane to Berlin, the Chancellor had merely carried on with his duties and his election speeches. Some of the public had started to ask why he hadn’t visited Berlin in its hour of need. By way of contrast, since 13 August Brandt had achieved an uncomfortable amount of television and press exposure. Almost a week after the border was closed, Adenauer was finally persuaded by his aides that he had been a little lax on the Berlin issue, and that this might affect his poll numbers.

In the light of his recent realisation, what Adenauer really wanted was a lift in the Vice-President’s plane to Berlin, a political coup that would enable him to score some points over the photogenic West Berlin Mayor. Adenauer was, naturally enough, too proud to ask outright for such a favour, and so chancellery aides had already been in touch with the US embassy about the lift-to-Berlin issue.

The possibility of such a request had been discussed in Washington, and the answer decided upon in advance. It was ‘no’. To say ‘yes’ would risk appearing to take sides in the election. During the previous contest, Eisenhower’s Republican administration had indeed expressed support for Adenauer’s conservative CDU, souring relations with the SPD. President Kennedy had no intention of repeating such an elementary diplomatic mistake.

It was not until the very end of lunch that ‘Chip’ Bohlen was detailed to break the bad news, via Foreign Minister Brentano. Adenauer accepted the refusal in his habitual impassive manner. But he proved in no hurry to let Johnson depart. Clay had to muscle in on an ‘unscheduled after-lunch conversation’ between Adenauer and Johnson with the plea that ‘there are a lot of Berliners waiting for us’.
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The Vice-President and General Clay must, it had been decided, land at Tempelhof Airport. This was in the American sector, close to the Mayor’s headquarters at Schöneberg Town Hall, and had heroic associations with the airlift. However, the runway at Tempelhof was too short to receive the 707 in which they had crossed the Atlantic. The American party was therefore split up for the fairly short trip from Bonn to Berlin. The heavyweights flew to Tempelhof in a turbo-prop Constellation while the other ranks re-embarked on the 707, landing at Tegel, which lay in the French sector, an inconvenient distance north of the city centre.

Johnson and Clay’s arrival proved impressive, moving, and, in the way of such things, also slightly comical. The two big names were greeted by a 21-gun salute and the playing of both country’s national anthems. The reception committee consisted of Mayor Brandt and his leading aides. It also, to considerable surprise, came to include Adenauer’s representative, Foreign Minister Brentano. At the chancellor’s firm behest, he had also flown to Berlin, managing to arrive ahead of the Americans. Brentano then hurried over to the apron in time to join the party—and to ensure that Brandt and his SPD colleagues didn’t have the entire vote-catching encounter entirely to themselves.

But the real surprise to everyone, most of all the American visitors, was the mass of Berliners who turned out to greet them on that August afternoon. The people of West Berlin turned away from their preoccupation with the barbed wire and the armed
Vopos
surrounding their half-city
and flocked to the route that was to take the motorcade via the Potsdamer Platz to Schöneberg Town Hall.

Brandt and Johnson rode together in one of the American Mission’s open Cadillac limousines, followed by Clay and then the others, with motorcycle outriders to clear the way. The trip to Potsdamer Platz, to see the atrocity of the new concrete Wall, which should have taken five or six minutes, stretched out to twenty. The convoy repeatedly came to a halt in the crush. There were at least 800,000 West Berliners in the streets, maybe a million. They cheered. They sang and chanted the American VIPs’ names. They threw huge masses of flowers.

Clay, his aquiline profile known from airlift days, garnered special adulation. He, even more than Johnson, promised a successful resistance to the Communist threat. ‘
Der Clay ist hier! Der Clay ist hier!’
Berliners cried in awe. As it crawled through the streets, the general’s limousine was bombarded with bouquets, including a bunch of red roses, tossed through the window with such violent enthusiasm that its thorns scratched his face. So many Berliners insisted on shaking Clay’s out-stretched hand that American commandant general Albert Watson, seated next to him, insisted he pull it back inside.

Johnson, though foreigners were not really his thing, decided that these were actually his kind of foreigners. Ignoring his security people’s advice, he got out of his car—which in any case was moving painfully slowly—and worked the crowd like the professional he was, embracing, shaking hands, kissing available babies and even patting a dog. The veteran politician was in his element. And, of course, the Vice-President knew that everything was being filmed and that in a few hours, once the footage could be flown back to the States, everything would be on the morning TV news. ‘Campaigning already’, as Brandt press aide Egon Bahr noted wryly.

They never made it to Potsdamer Platz. Johnson ordered the visit to be abandoned. Everything was behind schedule, and maybe his instincts told him that a direct confrontation at the dividing line between the two hostile world-systems might not serve much purpose. It wouldn’t calm things down the way the President wanted.

As it was, by the time the VIP motorcade got to the grey stucco Schöneberg Town Hall, with hundreds of thousands packed into the
square in front and the surrounding streets, they were seriously late. Speeches were made, freedom invoked, and, although even Berliners who knew English sometimes found it hard to decipher the Vice-President’s Texan drawl, they cheered him until they were hoarse.

Inside the town hall, Johnson addressed the West Berlin parliament. Like ordinary Berliners, the members of the city’s assembly were over-joyed to have these two symbolically powerful Americans as their guests. They applauded incessantly throughout Johnson’s speech. The Vice-President might be uttering jewelled phrases hand-crafted by Dr Walt Rostow, but to them all that mattered was his presence here, with the famous General Clay alongside. They showed America cared. Or perhaps, to be pernickety, that America didn’t
not
care.

Heinrich von Brentano then spoke on behalf of the Bonn government. He sounded the only slightly sour (and exaggerated) note, claiming that the right of full self-determination was ‘denied to no people in the world save the Germans’. But then, there was an election on. Willy Brandt delivered the final oration. Given his own anti-Nazi credentials, he could and did tell his guests that ‘we will not bend our necks beneath the yoke of a new dictatorship, irrespective of the colour in which this dictatorship has decked itself out’.

A lavish banquet followed. Everyone got to bed late. They didn’t necessarily get to bed where they thought they would. Ambassador Bohlen, aide to Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower, found himself, it is said, shifted out of the bedroom he had been assigned at Ambassador Dowling’s residence in bosky Dahlem. This was now to be occupied by Vice-President Johnson’s senior secretary.
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