50 years after dividing city, the Wall still looms large for Berliners

Working in teams with rolls of barbed wire and breeze blocks, Communist zealots began sealing the border of East Germany street by street, block by block, family by family.

By nightfall on that hot August day the Berlin Wall was a reality. But what started out dividing a city ended up dividing a world, standing for 28 years, two months and 27 days. It would see heroic escapes over it, under it and through it.

And it would also exact a terrible price in blood: close to 300 people died trying to breach it, most of them gunned down by border guards of the communist state who received bonuses for every scalp.

Its construction came nine years after the East German politburo decided to close the border and to build up a frontier area between East and West Germany and between West Berlin and East Germany in a bid to stem the flow of citizens leaving for a better life.

Now, 50 years on, residents will gather across the city at many places where the 103- mile long wall snaked through, remembering the dead, the divided families, the flashpoints of a cold war that could so easily have turned hot at any time.

Erika Kruegel is among those who will be among those gathering at the Brandenburg Gate to remember the day. She was a nine-year-old schoolgirl who crossed into the east from her home near Berlin Zoo the night before for a birthday party for her cousin.

"I remember my mother and I going down the road to cross back home and we were met with barbed wire and men with guns," she recalled. "We went to several places but all the roads were sealed off. There was no way back.

"We had to go back to my cousin's flat and stay the night. It was a week later that the Red Cross got us out. After that I became a smuggler for my family, wheeling my little doll's pram across the border with sausage and nylons and cigarettes hidden in it. The guards didn't think to check a little girl.

"My cousin got out ten years later. But my aunt and uncle were trapped until the end. It was the story of Berlin and Berliners, a story of relationships curtailed along with everything else."

Goetz Friedenberg, now 64, was a schoolboy in the west when the wall was built."People on the street were frantic," he said. "The wall buzz was everything. I set off with my pals to the Brandenburg Gate. And then I saw tanks blocking the way.

"I didn't realise the dimensions of what was happening then. I don't think anyone did. But as a child, I knew then that our lives had changed forever."

Ulrich Pfeifer, an engineer who worked on four escape tunnels under the Berlin Wall to retaliate against a regime that locked up his girlfriend, told how a normal night out 50 years ago ended in anything but.

He lived in the east, his girlfriend in the west. After a night out on her side of the city they returned to his apartment.

"When I woke up the next morning, a Sunday, and listened to the news on the radio, I was absolutely appalled. I thought there would be a protest movement like June 17," - the 1953 worker uprising in East Germany in which more than 50 people were killed.

"So I went to the Brandenburg Gate with my girlfriend, but there was no demonstration, just a lot of troops and tanks on the streets. People were too intimidated to do anything.

"We thought about jumping over the barbed wire, but coudn't find the courage. We went home and spent the next few weeks looking for ways out."

He managed to flee through the sewers with five others that September. But the group was limited to just six people, so his girlfriend had stayed behind and prepared to join him with another team a few days later.

Ulrich is among those horrified by the "Disneyfication" of the wall - the tourists at Checkpoint Charlie who pose in Russian and East German uniforms, the little chips of alleged "real Berlin wall" hawked to visitors all over the city.

But then few can agree on how the wall should be remembered in the city. Die Mauer steht noch in den Koepfen - "The wall still stands in the mind" - is a phrase that still resonates in the German psyche, showing how one nation still remains two for large chunks of the population.

Many easterners still feel aggrieved at what they felt was the "colonisation" of their country by western carpetbaggers when the German Democratic Republic fell. One in five of them in a recent survey said they wished the wall still stood.

This is not a statistic politicians will dwell on today as they move through the crowds in Berlin, spouting the usual stuff about freedom, loss and the triumph of the human spirit. But it will probably take another generation at least for the wall that runs through people's minds to disappear.

Now, 22 years after the wall came down, there's another irony. From a tourist point of view Berlin authorities made a huge blunder when they tore it down; most travellers are disappointed to find so few traces of it in existence, and city promoters desperately play up, and frantically preserve, the pathetically few bits that still remain. Huge chunks of the fallen wall were shipped abroad.There are bits in Washington, New York, Paris, Budapest and many cities in Africa and Latin America. Former German chancellor Helmut Kohl even has a piece in his garden.

This week the Galeries Lafayette department store in Berlin has an original panel standing in the shoe department for shoppers to ogle. The real thing exists in just small parts, no more than a few hundred feet in length in three or four places. Most of it was broken and used as rubble for new autobahn construction.

Entrepreneurs bought some of the steel-reinforced concrete, and there is a roaring trade near where the wall stood among souvenir sellers hawking chips of what they say is the real thing.

There is even talk of rebuilding part of it, just to keep the tourists happy. Today, it would cost 400 million to build.

As Berlin is a bankrupt city, no longer enjoying the lavish subsidies it enjoyed when there were two Germanys, any Berlin Wall that is rebuilt will almost certainly be very small indeed.