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The Berlin Wall Comes to Fremont
By Tom Herriman
Michael Ziemann |
The museum accepted two sections of the Berlin Wall for exhibit from Australian businessman Carl Asmus, who bought them from the German government for a reported $500,000. Asmus offered the pieces to History House when it proved impossible to install them next to the Lenin statue on Fremont Place North, according to Zack Price, a spokesman for Asmus.
While the Lenin statue is widely regarded as part of Fremont's kitsch and camp atmosphere, Asmus had a more serious purpose in mind for the wall pieces. "He appreciates what America did in the Cold War in getting rid of communism," Price says. "He wanted to have a memorial to the U.S. servicemen who died during the Berlin Airlift."
Berlin has been a focus of American attention since GIs marched through the Brandenburg Gate in 1945, and American cargo planes kept the city alive for 11 months in 1948-49, during the Berlin Airlift. In the wake of WWII, Berlin was cut into four pieces by the victors, Russia, France, Britain and the U.S.
At first the Russians put up a metaphorical "Iron Curtain" around their piece of the city; later, in 1961, they erected a concrete wall. In 1963 President John F. Kennedy stood with his back to the newly erected Berlin Wall and declared, "Ich bin ein Berliner" ("I am a Berliner") to show American support for the beleaguered city.
This section of the Berlin Wall is on display at History House in Fremont. |
I invited Seattle Pacific University professor Michael Ziemann to come look at the wall and share some of his recollections, as someone who grew up with the wall as a major feature of his life.
In 1961, when the wall was being built, Ziemann was a 17-year-old officer candidate in the East German army. His unit was assigned to guard the engineering battalions building the wall, to make sure they didn't try to escape. A few months later Ziemann and three other young soldiers became the escapees.
Ziemann had resisted the communist regime since he was a child, and was pressured to abandon his Evangelical Lutheran religion to join the Socialist Youth organization. In 1953 his father took part in an uprising of workers that was crushed by Soviet tanks, and he had to flee the country.
As a teenager, Ziemann was sent to boarding school. His mother remained with her parents on the family farm near Potsdam, just outside of Berlin in East Germany. One day government officials knocked on the door and announced that their farm was being collectivized. The Ziemann family could stay on as employees. Ziemann's grandfather sicced the dogs on the bureaucrats, but knew they would be back with guns. The family hastily packed a few belongings and headed for the border.
A few days later Ziemann was summoned to the headmaster's office and told his family had defected. "They are traitors and enemies of the state," he was told. He was watched carefully: he couldn't leave the school buildings by himself, and all leaves were cancelled.
When he was put on active duty, he and five buddies concocted an escape plan. They secretly repaired a junked army truck, then checked out the border for its weakest link. They ruled out trying to scale the wall--too difficult. Instead they chose to cross the border in a rural area adjacent to West Berlin, a two-kilometer-wide strip fortified with barbed wire, electrified chain-link fences, minefields and guard towers every 600 feet, equipped with searchlights and machine guns.
'Just before sunrise, we ran for it'
In full uniform, armed only with daggers, which they used as mine detectors, the six young solders hopped in the truck one day. They headed down a secluded dead-end road toward the border. A patrol stopped them, but let them pass. They abandoned the truck as they got close to the fence, then waited until dark. Ziemann had the wire-cutters.
They crawled through the first barbed-wire fence and entered a minefield. The wooden-case mines were set to go off when they detected a weight of 100 to 300 pounds. They would explode under a person, but not under a deer or rabbit, or under a truck or tank. The escapees crawled across the minefield on their hands and knees for almost three hours, probing the ground with their daggers to locate mines buried just below the surface.
After the minefield they faced another fence, then an exposed "no man's land" within range of the searchlights and machine guns. They hid right under one of the guard towers until just before dawn. Ziemann said the searchlight patterns became more erratic and infrequent as the guards neared the end of their shift.
"Just before sunrise, we ran for it," he says. "Two of the guys were hit by machine-gun fire and captured. Four of us made it across."
Ziemann was reunited with his family, and later went to school in Kansas. He taught at University of Washington, and now teaches at Seattle Pachfic University in Queen Anne, right cross the Ship Canal from History House.
In 1975, when he taught at University of Washington, he led a student group on an exchange tour of East Germany. "When we crossed the border, they let me know they knew who I was by detaining me in a guard shack for two-and-a-half hours. I thought I was going to be arrested, but I guess they didn't want to start an international incident."
Juliane Gust moved to the United States from East Germany in 1995. |
"I'm surprised how tall it is," says Juliane Gust, as we walk into the History House courtyard. She walks over for an up-close look.
"The wall was always there for me," says Gust, born in Dresden in 1978, now a University of Washington student majoring in linguistics. "The wall was built to keep the bad West out of East Germany. I didn't think it was weird or bad--but I was a kid, and I didn't really understand the whole deal."
Gust came to the U.S. as an exchange student in 1995. "I met a guy--now we're married, and he's the reason why I'm here," she explained succinctly.
She says East Germans "were afraid of getting taken over by the West, of losing good things like free childcare. Everyone had a job, even if the job didn't mean much; everyone had an income, a place to live. Everyone was safe in the social net. I felt sorry for the poor people in the West that didn't have jobs and were poor and couldn't afford food, and I thought, 'Why don't they come to East Germany where life is so nice?'"
Gust says, "The system enabled my mother to go to medical school while raising three small children.It would be very much more difficult for someone to do that now. My parents were happy. They could travel and see the world. I just had a really normal childhood ... a normal, eventless life."
No Joking About the Government
But there were down sides to East German life, Gust adds: "There were many restrictions. You couldn't go where you wanted, buy what you wanted, say what you wanted. My parents always warned me not to say things too openly, not to criticize or make jokes about the government. They taught us not to talk about the secret police."
Gust confirmed that huge numbers of ordinary East Germans were government informers. "At least one out of every 20 people. We usually knew who the informers were. They were not highly respected. But I never felt oppressed, because I felt it was good as it was.
"We didn't have religious freedom. There was a lot of pressure, especially on children, to leave the church and join the Youth Movement. Some of my friends that didn't want to join the youth organizations were treated very badly."
Gust's best friend and her family defected to the West in the spring of '89, "just before everything fell apart. I was very sad," she recalls. "I understood why [they defected]--they were very religious, and that was a really harsh thing. "
Gust and her husband live with her in-laws in Everett while going to school. She wants to go to medical school and become a doctor like her mother.
When the wall came down in 1989, Gust says, "Most people were happy and excited. But I was scared of what would happen. I liked my life as it was. But when the protests started I began to think about what the wall really meant to people who were separated by it, and how bad it really was to lock people in or out."
The Berlin Wall Exhibition will be dedicated in a special ceremony on Saturday, March 24 at 10 a.m. at History House, 790 N. 34th Street in Fremont. Call (206) 675-8875 for more information.
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