A joyous legacy of the GDR's collapse is the nature reserve that runs along the old border, writes Derek Scally
FOR NEARLY 40 years, the most common sights along the inner-German border were barbed wire, wire-mesh fences and watch towers.
Now, 20 years after the 1,400km border lost its meaning, the most common sight I saw travelling by foot, car, bicycle and steam train from north to south were butterflies.
Huge, colourful butterflies – hundreds of them – seemed to react with surprise and then delight at my intrusion, accompanying me on the former border patrol path now open to all, running from the Baltic coast to the Bavarian border with the Czech Republic and beyond.
This so-called “Green Band” has been designated a nature reserve and is perhaps the most joyous legacy of the collapse of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Anyone who comes this way will rejoice at the return from behind the Iron Curtain of the Harz mountains to the Thuringian forest.
This is Germany at its most German, from the classical city of Weimar, where Goethe and Schiller were at home, to the jewel-box town of Wernigerode with timber-framed houses and a fairytale hilltop castle.
There are so many stories here and so many eloquently expressed views of history from people who lived through it. Accounts that bear no resemblance to what you read in German newspapers or history books.
On a hike around the Cold War hotspot of Point Alpha, guide Helmut Henkel said he was happy to see the back of the regime, but yet he missed the grey tones in Germany’s often black and white debate about the socialist state.
“It’s true that the state was paranoid and watched everyone, but not everyone in the state has a blemish from birth because of it,” he said.
His wife, Betina, said that, 20 years on, Germany still has found no way of acknowledging the moral maze of life in the GDR. “So much in the GDR depended on a person’s character, how individuals reacted in individual situations,” she said.
Their 27-year-old daughter Riccarda barely remembers the GDR. Now studying history in Leipzig, she likes to think her generation will put the divisions behind them – if the Stasi’s poisonous paper legacy doesn’t get in the way.
“The facts in files often don’t tell the full story,” she says. “People forget that and rush to judge people in circumstances they know nothing about.”
It was a week of moving stories, like that of Bertold Dücker who was just 16 when, on a sunny August day minding cows in 1964, he decided to flee.
He was lucky: two years later, the simple barbed wire double fence was replaced with an impenetrable metal mesh.
After snipping the lowest wire with wire cutters, he slipped into a metre-wide minefield. To this day, Dücker says he must have had a “whole series of guardian angels” guiding him.
“I remember using a hand not a foot to feel my way forward because I thought to myself: ‘If I trigger a mine, I want it to take my head, not rip off a leg and leave me lying there, bleeding and helpless’.”
Creeping through the no-man’s land, heart pounding loudly, he lost his glasses and ripped his clothes but eventually made it to the second fence and West Germany.
It was six years before his mother was allowed visit him in the West and his first visit home, in 1975, was for her funeral, days after he had been refused permission to visit her on her death bed.
How Germans remember the inner-German border today depends largely on where they come from.
Then as now, many former West Germans dismiss it as an alien construct from a foreign regime.
In the former East, the carefully enforced 5km exclusion zone meant that only a tiny proportion of the population ever saw the fortified border.
“If you lived near the border, you will never forget it,” said Harald Peggau, a printer in the eastern border village of Diesdorf, near Wolfsburg. “But friends from Saxony, while they knew the border existed, didn’t know anything about the shootings or the mines – and many still don’t believe it today.”
Two decades have passed since the East German border designed to lock in its own population came down. Conservative estimates suggest between 300 and 400 people died trying to cross it. For those who did get away, the families they left behind were punished.
“It’s a crime,” says escapee Bertold Dücker, “that, in the middle of Europe, people were put in a situation where the had to risk their lives just to be free.”
It’s a sobering thought, and one for every visitor to ponder as they travel through the new, united Germany down the Green Band: from death strip to life line.
Series assistant: Joanne O’Dea Series concluded