In the first of a series marking the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Green Line, the old border separating East and West Germany, Derek Scallybegins his journey south from the northernmost point, at the seaside town of Travemünde
IN A SILENT green wood, a concrete monster lurks among the trees. Rainwater and ivy are going about their business, wearing away the speckled concrete facade of the watchtower that hasn’t served its purpose for 20 years and, slowly, is returning to nature.
This is the northernmost lookout point of the inner-German border that wound its way south like a giant snail track through 1,400km of woods, fields and villages, dividing the country and the world for three decades.
From the tower, guards could watch the starting point of the border on the nearby beach of the Priwall peninsula in Travemünde, on Germany’s Baltic coast.
Pictures from the 1970s show a demarcation in three steps: a series of poles linked by a plastic red-and-white chain, followed by Halt signs and then a tall wire-mesh fence.
Today the only warning sign is for the nudist section: at the point that was once the end of the western world, a few elderly, leathery Germans are letting it all hang out.
“We used to hang our towels on the chain, that’s how unthreatening it all was,” says Travemünde-born Holger Walter, now head of the cultural office in the nearby city of Lübeck. “We couldn’t see the mines, we simply had no idea what came after the border. It might just as easily have been a sheer cliff face.” After the fence came watchtowers, spotlights and guards. Then came snapping dogs, barbed wire, and tripwires triggering automatic spring guns. Beyond that was the tiny village of Pölenitz and then the empty rural landscape of Mecklenburg.
Travemünde, a pretty seaside town of red-brick Hanseatic buildings, has been attracting tourists for a century. It features in Thomas Mann’s first novel Buddenbrooks (1901). Pictures from the time show a smart tourist resort with spotless villas, a race track and even an international airport on the Priwall peninsula, a three-minute ferry ride away.
Then came the war and the ban on civilians on the peninsula; soldiers followed, as did a new submarine harbour. In 1945 came the British soldiers, patrolling up to the point where their zone met that of the Soviets.
Although it stuck out into the highly militarised Baltic Sea, the Priwall peninsula was of little strategic importance. The divide sliced the head of the peninsula – West German territory – off from the East German mainland.
THE BORDER, just a few hundred metres wide, ran along the old historical border between Schleswig-Holstein and Mecklenburg.
It didn’t tear apart as many families and friends as the Berlin border. Half of the people in this region were wartime refugees from further east. As locals say, they had enough to do integrating the new arrivals without worrying about the people behind the border in Mecklenburg.
That much was clear in the autumn of 1961, when Lübeckers raised a flag at half mast in solidarity with their “brothers and sisters behind the border of shame”. They were referring to the Berlin Wall, 300km southeast, and the border in their own back garden.
It was an indication of things to come: nearly half a century after it was erected, the Berlin Wall has become the symbol of Germany’s division.
The barrier that turned west Berlin into an island in the communist east has supplanted in popular memory the other, inner-German border, even though that was created almost a decade before, in 1952.
Its first iteration was a metre-high barbed-wire fence, designed to stop the flood of people from east to west that would top 2.5 million people by 1961.
As in Berlin, this border was fortified continuously, first with landmines, and then, in 1966, with wire-mesh panels that would eventually rise as high as four metres.
The border fortifications stretched across a band at least 200m wide. A five-kilometre-wide restricted area was created on the eastern side. Residents within this zone were given special papers to show every time they came and went. Visits were highly restricted.
Anyone considered “politically unreliable” or likely to flee was removed from the restricted zone in two waves of forcible resettlement, in 1952 and 1961.
Nearly 50,000 East German guards were charged with watching – day and night – what East Berlin termed the “anti-fascist protection wall” (although all fortifications were directed against the east) and, later, the “state border west”.
On the other side, another 20,000 West German border police and customs officials monitored the “zone border”, a name reflecting Bonn’s official line of refusing to officially recognise the division or the other German state to the east.
When the two states signed a “basic treaty” in 1972, the basis for chancellor Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik, the border was rechristened the “German-German border”. But the divide remained, and was made even more impenetrable with the passing years.
It was around this time that the notorious automatic spring guns were introduced: mounted on the fence and triggered with tripwires, they sprayed would-be escapees with tiny metal splinters.
The first recorded death on the inner-German border is journalist Kurt Liechtenstein, shot in 1961 after crossing the border, reportedly to interview East German farmers about conditions.
Another 370 deaths would follow, until the East German authorities caved in to popular protest and opened the inner-German border on November 9th, 1989.
Two decades on, memories are fading fast about the 1,400km border, memories historians suggest were lopsided to begin with.
“For westerners the border was not part of their own culture but the embodiment of the other,” writes Maren Ullrich, author of Divided Views, a history of the border.
“In the east, meanwhile, there is no image of the border in people’s minds because of the exclusion zone. How can there be a memory if there is no image?” As a result, she says, the popular memory of the inner-German border is exclusively a West German one, and often confused with the history of the Berlin Wall.
As in Berlin, little physical trace of the border remains: in their euphoria, Germans up and down the border area tore down the fence and the watchtowers in 1989.
BACK IN TRAVEMÜNDE, local historian Rolf Fechner produces old albums of photos and documents of the border. The history of his hometown – in particular the Cold War era – is one of his two passions in life. The other is the music of Rory Gallagher.
Flicking through the photo albums, it’s extraordinary to see how, by the late 1960s, tourists ignored the Cold War divide and returned to Priwall.
“It was completely normal on the beach, with people as far as you could see. Then it just stopped,” remembers Fechner. The eastern beach was completely empty and untouched while, in the west, the nudist beach went right up to the border.
“This lookout post was very popular with the eastern border guards,” jokes Fechner. “Occasionally teenagers would get drunk and wander over the border, between the chains the fence, until they were warned by guards over loudspeakers to go back.” Westerners became so used to the beach border that it took Travemünde four months after the Berlin Wall was breached to get around to opening its own border crossing.
Even then, the euphoria was short-lived: three months after the first easterners headed west in Trabants belching out petrol fumes from their two-stroke engines, westerners took to the streets to complain about the air pollution.
City officials in Lübeck dreamed of a chance to shake off regional obscurity, uniting the divided regions of Schleswig-Holstein and Mecklenburg. Today, the states remain separate, and local officials laugh at the grand plans of 1989.
“Politicians thought unification would make Lübeck the Queen of the Baltic but all we got were 20,000 yokels from the Mecklenburg countryside,” laughs Holger Walter in his Lübeck office.
As the 20th anniversary looms, the former exclusion zone has been rechristened the Green Band, a nature reserve of 17,000 hectares that, in some cases, has been untouched since 1949.
“The section of the Green Band in Priwall comprises 150 hectares of untouched countryside,” says Thomas König, a nature reserve ranger here. “It’s home to cormorants, wild geese and many other rare species.”
In recent years a cycle lane has been installed through the territory and, slowly, Germans are rediscovering the forgotten border as a glorious green lung running through the middle of their country.
Along the way are tiny border villages such as Rüteberg, cut off from the world for 30 years, or Mödlareuth, Germany’s answer to Spike Milligan’s Puckoon, where the inner-German border ran through the centre of town.
Here in the north, Travemünders are blasé when asked about the division. “I really never registered the border,” says pensioner Klaus Gropig on the ferry from Priwall. “Some people from the old east come over here to work but, besides that, I can’t say I see the two sides growing together much.” He was annoyed to see Travemünde lose its West German border-town subsidies in 1989, particularly when Mecklenburg received 20 years of extra funding.
“I suppose we had our time getting money, then they had their subsidies,” he says. “Now I’m old enough to know that things always even out in the end.”