Berlin полностью

While ostmarks disappeared into mine shafts, to join the Reichsmarks abandoned there in 1948, the Berlin Wall—that is, most of what was left of it after the Mauerspechte (Wall-peckers) had had their way with it—was dismantled by cranes. Eighty-one colorful sections were sold at an auction in Monte Carlo in 1990; some of them fetched as much as 40,000 marks. Most of the rest were ground up for paving material. A block was presented to former President Ronald Reagan, who just three years before had urged Gorbachev to tear the structure down. Belatedly realizing that the Wall had value as an historical artifact, not to mention as a tourist attraction, city officials earmarked a 212-meter-long section at Bernauer Strasse for preservation. To protect it from the voracious peckers, a wire fence was built around it. The decision to create a permanent memorial there “to the victims of the German division” was delayed for a time because of resistance from the Church of St. Sophia, whose cemetery lay next to the Wall. The memorial that was ultimately installed, a dazzlingly clean section of concrete bordered by two bronze slabs, bears little resemblance to the original barrier. Aware of this deficiency, the city government under Eberhard Diepgen toyed with the idea of reconstructing a section of the “border defense system” in all its former horror—a kind of Disneyland of the Cold War.

“Wall-peckers” at work on the Berlin Wall, November 1989

As the Wall came down, so did all the additional trappings of the former border regime: watchtowers, guardhouses, dog-runs, light stanchions, and signal systems. The guards’ hut at Checkpoint Charlie was removed in a special ceremony on June 22, 1990. British foreign secretary Douglas Hurd took this occasion to declare that, “at long last, we are bringing Charlie in from the cold.”

The Checkpoint Charlie hut, which eventually went to a museum, proved easier to relocate than the thousands of guard dogs that had once patrolled the Berlin Wall and the inner-German border. After months of negotiation between East German officials and representatives of the West German Animal Protection Association, it was agreed that 2,500 former guard dogs would be sent to new homes in the West. News of this decision provoked howls of protest in the West German media, which warned that dogs raised under Stalinism would be unable to adjust to peaceable conditions in the West. Undoubtedly they would treat the mailman like a would-be escapee. The West German Shepherd Dogs Association, meanwhile, worried that a flood of East German Schäferhunde on the Western market would force down the price for locally bred dogs. East Germans were outraged over these complaints, insisting that their dogs were just as civilized as Western dogs. They agonized over stories that some of the dogs shipped to the West were being purchased by pimps looking for “killer beasts,” or by New Yorkers who wanted trophy animals for their Fifth Avenue apartments, or, much worse, by Asians who regarded the pups as dinner items. The Wall dogs, East Germans said, were “the last victims of Stalinism.”

Other signs of the changing times in the summer and fall of 1990 included the elimination of the restricted air corridors into Berlin and the dismantling of the American listening posts along the inner-German border. It is significant that these measures were undertaken by the Western powers, for it was they, and their former Russian allies, who had the final say on the question of German unification and the status of Berlin. The Germans could take some important steps toward unity on their own, but they could not become a fully sovereign and unified state without the acquiescence of the powers that had defeated them in 1945.

In February 1990 the powers agreed to a mechanism for negotiating the unity question: the “Two Plus Four Talks,” involving the two Germanys along with the Americans, British, French, and Soviets. It soon became apparent that Britain and France were coming around to an acceptance of German unification, a development for which Helmut Kohl deserves most of the credit. To gain French approval, Kohl promised to push for a single European currency, a pet idea of Mitterrand’s. At every opportunity the chancellor stressed the idea that German unification would be accompanied by—and be cocooned in—greater European unity. Just as West Germany had rearmed in the mid-1950s as an integral part of NATO and the Western European Union, so the two Germanys would now come together “in Europe’s name.”

Rotes Rathaus (Red City Hall), the seat of government for Greater Berlin