BERLIN. THE WALL. I have a friend who was in the U.S. Army, stationed in Berlin when the Wall went up on 13 August 1961. He said when the Russians and East Germans started to put up the Wall they were mobilized and stood all along the line dividing West and East Berlin but they were not allowed to do anything to stop the construction of the Wall, they were there just to make sure the Russians did not go over the line. He said he stood there and cried because he knew the U.S. could have stopped it, and because he knew what the Wall would do to Berlin and Germany and Eastern Europe. On my first trip to The Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) in August - September 1988 we were going to take the train from Frankfurt to West Berlin but the Russian / East Germany authorities had stopped all ground transportation from the West, only flights were getting into West Berlin so I never got to see the the Wall and the growing protest against the communist government. I do remember the day in 1989 the Wall fell, and was so happy and so proud of the German people, the people of Berlin, and so thankful the East German government did not resort to violence to stop the Wall coming down. 9 November 2014 is the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and Germans as well as all free people are celebrating this and the subsequent collapse of the communist governments in East Germany and across the rest of Eastern Europe. Reunification of Germany has not been easy politically, economically and socially and is still a work in progress, but Germany is one, to stay a unified nation forever, and I am proud of what the German people have accomplished and of my German heritage. God Bless Germany and us all! These from +NPR and there are more related stories at the end of this post .....
Bundestag singt die deutsche Nationalhymne - 9-11-1989
Radio Glasnost host Ilona Marenbach in West Berlin
1987. In the final years of the Cold War, the program received cassette
recordings from dissidents in East Berlin and broadcast them back to the
eastern part of the city.
ARD Kontraste/Courtesy of BStU
There was a forum for critical, public debate in the Protestant church, which had a degree of independence from the officially atheist East German state.
In the former East Germany, which was officially known as the German Democratic Republic, or the GDR, the dissidents made cassette-taped messages and managed to smuggle them across the border to West Berlin. There, a makeshift studio that included East German exiles as well as West Germans, broadcast the radio reports back to the east.
The monthly show, known as Radio Glasnost, was broadcast on the alternative West Berlin station Radio 100.
One of the show's founders and editors was Roland Jahn, then a political exile from the east. Today he is Germany's federal commissioner of the archives of the Stasi, the East German secret police.
"It was exactly what I'd always hoped for. We gave the GDR opposition a voice and let it ring out over East Berlin," Jahn remembers.
Roland Jahn was the founder and former editor of Radio Glasnost. Now he is Germany's commissioner for the archive of East Germany's Stasi secret police.
Ronny Rozum/Courtesy of BStU
Punctuated by punk music, the show informed the GDR's burgeoning resistance movement about upcoming demonstrations and meetings. It aired dispatches about the reality of life under Stasi surveillance and covered issues distorted or ignored by the state media in the east and neglected or misunderstood by the mainstream media in the west.
Like the samizdat newsletters, the radio equivalent was imperfect and its reporters were amateurs. But crucially, it was uncensored, hence the show's jingle: "Out of control."
"Some of what we aired was pretty shoddy at times, often unfit for consumption for the average radio listener," Jahn recalls.
No matter how poor the quality, the show's editors in West Berlin never attempted to improve upon or edit the reports they received. They did not want to be seen as another censor or as condescending Western do-gooders.
Jahn says they had to work hard to gain the confidence of the East Berliners.
This map by East Germany's Stasi secret police illustrates their jamming campaign against the dissident radio show, Radio Glasnost.
The Robert Havemann Archive/Courtesy of BStU
Not surprisingly, the Stasi were some of the show's most dedicated listeners, but their activities were not limited to monitoring.
At this time, Gorbachev ceased jamming Voice of America and the BBC in the Soviet Union, yet the East German authorities launched their first jamming campaign in a decade.
But the measure backfired. Radio Glasnost simply repeated the blocked shows, thanking the Stasi for the free promotion.
As the Stasi began to lose its grip on East German society, it gave up jamming the show. Radio Glasnost served as a vital communication channel for the resistance movement for over two years until it was no longer needed. The final show was broadcast just three weeks after the Berlin Wall fell on Nov. 9, 1989.
"I still get emotional now when I think about that last show," Jahn says. "How we all came together for the first time in our studio and celebrated the fall of the wall and the peaceful revolution."
Even today, Jahn — still a broadcast journalist at heart — believes the power of radio should not to be underestimated: "By November 1989, Radio Glasnost had done its job."
"It had contributed to the fall of the wall," he says.
The Berlin Wall fell on Nov. 9, 1989, 25 years ago this
weekend. East Germans flooded into West Berlin after border guard Harald
Jaeger ignored orders and opened the gate for the huge, unruly crowd.
Alain Nogues/Sygma/Corbis
It's a legacy that still makes the former East German border officer uncomfortable 25 years after he defied his superiors' orders and let thousands of East Berliners pour across his checkpoint into the West.
"I didn't open the wall. The people who stood here, they did it," says the 71-year-old with a booming voice who was an East German lieutenant colonel in charge of passport control at Bornholmer Street. "Their will was so great, there was no other alternative but to open the border."
Those people had come to his crossing at Bornholmer Street after hearing Politburo member Guenther Schabowski say — mistakenly, as it turns out — at an evening news conference on Nov. 9, 1989, that East Germans would be allowed to cross into West Germany, effective immediately.
Harald Jaeger in uniform next to the flag of his East German border regiment in 1964.
Courtesy of Harald Jaeger
Jaeger recalls almost choking on his dinner when he heard Schabowski on his workplace cafeteria's TV set. He rushed to the office to get some clarification on what his border guards were supposed to do.
For East Berliners yearning to go to a part of their city that had been off-limits for 28 years, Schabowski's meaning couldn't have been clearer. He was a member of the ruling party, and what he said was law.
Jaeger stands in front of a remnant of the Berlin Wall.
Behind him is a photo from Nov. 9, 1989, when he was the border guard
who opened up the Bornholmer Street crossing, allowing East Germans to
go to the west, the event that marked the fall of the wall.
Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson/NPR
The Berlin Wall was a "rampart against fascism," he recalls. "When it went up on the 13th of August, 1961, I cheered."
A Feeling Of Uncertainty
Twenty-eight years later, on Nov. 9, hours before the Berlin Wall came down, Jaeger felt confused.
He says between 10 and 20 people showed up at Bornholmer Street right after Schabowski's news conference. They kept their distance from the crossing, nervously waiting for a sign from the East German guards that it was all right to cross.
They didn't give any.
The crowd soon swelled to 10,000, with many of them shouting: "Open the gate!"
"I called Col. Ziegenhorn, who was my boss at the time, and he said: 'You are calling me because of this nonsense?' " Jaeger says, adding that Ziegenhorn told him to send the people away. Jaeger says further calls to other government officials didn't help, either.
He insists that East German border guards never had orders to shoot East Berliners illegally crossing into the West on that night or any other. But the official Center for Contemporary History in Potsdam says 136 people were killed at the Berlin Wall during its existence, including people trying to escape, border guards and bystanders.
Jaeger says lethal fire was permitted only if guards felt their lives were threatened.
During the quarter-century he worked at the Bornholmer Street crossing, his guards only fired one warning shot, Jaeger says. But on Nov. 9, he worried that if the crowd grew unruly, people would end up hurt, even if it wasn't from guns.
Cracking The Gate Open
To ease the tension, he was ordered to let some of the rowdier people through, but to stamp their passports in a way that rendered them invalid if they tried to return home.
Their departure only fired the crowd up more, and pressure mounted on Jaeger from above and below to avert a riot. Despite orders from his higher ups not to let more people through, at 11:30 p.m.: "I ordered my guards to set aside all the controls, raise the barrier and allow all East Berliners to travel through," he says.
It's an order Jaeger says he never would have given if Schabowski hadn't given the press conference four hours earlier.
He estimates that more than 20,000 East Berliners on foot and by car crossed into the West at Bornholmer Street. Some curious West Berliners even entered the east.
People crossing hugged and kissed the border guards and handed them bottles of sparkling wine, Jaeger recalls. Several wedding parties from East Berlin moved their celebrations across the border, and a couple of brides even handed the guards their wedding bouquets.
But Jaeger says he refused to leave East Berlin.
"I was on duty," he explains with a laugh. East German officers didn't get permission from their government to cross into the West until just before Christmas, he adds. Red tape involving his travel documents delayed the trip another month.
Making His Own Trip To The West
When he finally did go, Jaeger decided it had to be across his border crossing to the West Berlin neighborhood on the other side.
"I felt like I knew that place after hearing so often about it from people who constantly crossed here," he says. "So I wanted to see for myself what the area was like."
His first impressions of West Berlin weren't very positive, however. He was surprised, for example, to see Turkish immigrants living in conditions as poor as those of East Berlin.
But he also knew from West Germans who came across his border crossing that western goods were better than eastern ones and more readily available. Bananas, for example, were available in West Berlin during the cold winter months, but not in East Berlin, he says.
The West German government gave 100 marks (about $60) to East Germans who came to visit. Jaeger says he bought an air pump for his car tires and gave the rest of the money to his wife and daughter.
Reunification of East and West Germany in 1990 led to the dissolution of the East German border authority, and Jaeger found himself unemployed at age 47. He tried his hand at a number of businesses, including selling newspapers, but he says the ventures never took off.
So he retired to a small town outside Berlin and spends his time giving interviews and traveling with his wife, Marga. He says they love to travel to countries they couldn't go to before 1989, including Turkey for their 50th wedding anniversary.
Jaeger says he has no regrets about what he did on the night of Nov. 9, 1989, nor was he punished by his East German superiors for doing it. He adds that he is looking forward to the 25th anniversary activities this weekend.
The highlight, he says, will be a meeting with one of his heroes — Mikhail Gorbachev. The former Soviet leader has invited Jaeger to his Berlin hotel on Saturday.
Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson is NPR's Berlin correspondent. Follow her @sorayanelson.
Listen to the Story
On Nov. 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall stopped being a barrier
between East and West Germany, ushering in the end of communist rule
across the Soviet bloc.
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ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST: This evening, 8,000 helium balloons lit up the root of what was the concrete and barbed wire barrier known as the Berlin Wall. The installation marks a quarter-century since the wall was breached and thousands of Berliners from the Communist East flooded into the Capitalist Western half of the city. NPR's Berlin correspondent Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson has gone over to the balloon wall to view the anniversary celebrations. Hiya, Soraya.
SORAYA SARHADDI NELSON, BYLINE: Hi, Robert.
SIEGEL: And describe for us what you're seeing there.
NELSON: Well, I'm at Bernauer Street, which of course is a famous part of where the wall was. There is a big mural here on the side of one building that shows an East German soldier who fled to the West as the wall was going up. And as you look down the street here you see this line of balloons, these helium balloons on flexible stands. There's already been one casualty, unfortunately - one less balloon. So maybe we should say 7,999. It's laying here on the side. I mean, it is pretty windy. It's sort of an interesting atmosphere. There's not a whole lot of people. But the ones who are here are taking selfies and looking forward to seeing these balloons released on Sunday.
SIEGEL: I gather to the accompaniment of Beethoven's "Ninth."
NELSON: That is correct - "Ode To Joy." Now, there are of course some questions about whether 8,000 people are going to release 8,000 balloons or exactly how this is going to work. But for this weekend, they'll get to look at this long line - about 10 miles long - of balloons.
SIEGEL: But beyond taking the selfies, Berliners are enjoying the celebration?
NELSON: They are, and they aren't. I mean, there's a lot of tension because of a nationwide rail strike that's affecting city transit, as well, so there aren't as many people here. And the ones who are here, who live here, feel that this is yet just another obstacle, having all these stages and balloons and lights out to commemorate the weekend.
SIEGEL: Now, there actually was controversy in Berlin over what to do with the remnants of the real Berlin Wall. That wasn't an easy question to answer. How did that play out?
NELSON: Well, absolutely. I mean, you were here for when - at the beginning, when there were a lot of people coming who were coming across and on both sides were taking hammers and shovels and whatnot to the wall to try and bring it down. Afterward, there was a lot of discussion about what happens with this thing. And you had developers really wanting property, and this wall was in the way. You had German politicians who really wanted to bury this. They just didn't want to be reminded of how their country was divided so uncomfortably for so many years. And then you had activists who felt the history should be preserved. You even had people coming from overseas like American actor David Hasselhoff, who's actually a popular singer here with a certain generation, and protesting against this. So yeah, it definitely was very controversial.
SIEGEL: Now I want you to talk about one of the most interesting visitors to the celebrations - former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, the man to whom Ronald Reagan addressed that line, Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall.
NELSON: Yes, absolutely. He's here in Berlin this weekend. And he will be meeting with people. In fact, there are posters up around town that say come out and thank Gorby is what the slogan is. I think he will have a positive reception here, shall we say, or popular reception perhaps more so than in his homeland at the moment. But he's also probably going to be generating some controversy. He has indicated in some press conferences in Moscow that he will be defending President Vladimir Putin's actions in Ukraine, that he's blaming Washington for why there are problems now. So that should be interesting.
SIEGEL: So at this celebration marking not just the fall of the wall but the end of the Cold War, a little chill, a little echo of the Cold War from Mr. Gorbachev.
NELSON: Yeah, that certainly seems to be the case.
SIEGEL: Well, NPR's Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson in Berlin. Thank you very much.
NELSON: You're welcome, Robert.
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