From the S&S archives: Tapeworm wall divides Berliners

BERLIN — Drab and ugly are the most common appellatives assigned to that gray structure which winds through Berlin like a tapeworm.

The Berlin Wall is the Iron Curtain incarnate, and 65 people have been shot dead trying to cross it.

It is a thing that instills distrust, fear and spite. Throughout man's troubled history, he has erected cumbersome, and sometimes elaborate, barriers at his frontiers, but always for the purpose of keeping an enemy or potential enemy at bay, never to contain his kinsman.

That alone may make the wall unusual enough to warrant its current status as one of the city's main tourist attractions; sightseeing buses cruise along the wall in the Western Sector of the divided city and stop at intervals to disgorge visitors who mount the wooden platforms that enable viewers, to peer into the Communist-controlled territory beyond.

Little to Be Seen

There is little to be seen — an occasional grassy plot as well-tended as a putting green, multiple barriers one after another providing a monotonous symmetry. On the far side of the succession of barriers is an occasional strolling border guard of the German Democratic Republic, and closer to the wall are the spaced guard towers, every bit as simple and crude as the wall itself.

Most U.S. visitors to the wall summon to mind the lines from Robert Frost's "Mending Wall" that "Something there is that doesn't love a wall" and that "Before I built a wall I'd ask to know — What I was walling in or walling out."

The Communists knew what it was they were walling in. They were restraining the professionally trained, their skilled and their young who had, with their families, been heading toward West Berlin and thence to Western Europe at the rate of 100 persons an hour before barbed wire, brick and mortar stopped the flow.

Although the wall is viewed from the West as a symbol of shame and a subject of contempt, the Communists can say proudly, "It worked." The pent-up workers unloosed their energies on production and today East Germany is the most prosperous of the Communist countries of Eastern Europe.

For 10 years the wall has divided Berliners as it has divided Berlin, separating sons and daughters from parents, brothers from brothers and friends from firends. While remaining a coarse symbol of communism's inability to satisfy its own people, the wall by its endurance has gained a degree of acceptance. Some Westerners maintain that the wall, after all, is no more than a material barrier reflecting the East-West division that has marked the city since the end of World War II.

East Berlin Restaurant

A U.S. sergeant stationed in Berlin, asked for a good restaurant, replied that he usually takes his wife to a restaurant in East Berlin and volunteered that East Berlin is the best place for buying good cuts of beef at reasonable prices.

The eastern sector of the city has become even more attractive to Americans lately because the East German mark, closely comparable in value to the West German mark, still goes at an exchange rate of four to the dollar.

The East Germans sometimes seem to extend themselves to undo the impression left by the Wall, welcoming through the zigzag portals (a response to East German escapees crashing through the road barriers into West Berlin in armor-plated vehicles) Western visitors, including West Germans, but not West Berliners.

Passing of the Anger

There seems to be a resignation to the wall by West Berliners and a passing of the anger and determination to defeat the structure in its purpose that greeted the wall and extended some years after its creation in 1961.

Near Checkpoint Charlie, the crossing point for Americans entering East Berlin from the U.S. Sector of the occupied city, there is an exhibition, which was set up by students and refugees from East Berlin joined into a loose grouping called the 13th August Study Group. That date signifies the day the wall was born.

The exhibition includes photos, magnified news stories and other memorabilia of the wall such as autos and tunneling equipment used in escapes, children's drawings of the wall and political tracts.

Charging a Mark

A notice on the door informs the visitor that is is now necessary to charge a mark admission because sale of books and other printed material about the wall and private donations have not been sufficient to support the exhibit.

The same notice observes that visitors from nations behind the Iron Curtain will be given free admission.