Three Berlins by David G. Marwell, Ph.D.
The following is an excerpt from a commencement address delivered by the author in 2009 to the graduates of Truro College, Berlin. Its title is borrowed from the example provided by Professor Fritz Stern’s memoir, The Five Germanies I Have Known, and it attempted to provide the new graduates with an example of how witnessing and remembering are important responsibilities and opportunities.
Berlin has played an extraordinarily important role in my personal history. The two periods of my residence in Berlin and my countless visits there over the years have contributed meaningfully to my life story. In chapters, paragraphs, and phrases, Berlin has helped to form the narrative of my adult life and is evident in the syntax and grammar of how I understand the world. And I am not simply talking about personally enriching experiences and professionally rewarding activities, of which there were many. My times in Berlin were punctuated, literally, by epoch-changing events, by world-historic happenings. I would like to share something about my thirty-something years of connection to this most incredible city. . . .
German Autumn (1977-1978) I arrived in Berlin for the first time in early September 1977 to begin a year’s fellowship in Germany conducting research for my doctoral dissertation; the first stop was Berlin, where my wife and I enrolled in the Goethe Institute. We were to spend the next four months in Berlin and another ten months in Munich, where I visited archives and interviewed Zeitzeugen related to my research into the history of the Third Reich. The topic of this complicated history was always at the front of my mind as I encountered people and observed German life.
Berlin and the Federal Republic of Germany were so different then, as we processed through Checkpoint Bravo at Dreilinden late on a Saturday night and made our way to a friend’s apartment, not too far from the Kudamm, before moving into a Studentenheim in the Iranischestrasse in Wedding, close to the Jewish Hospital. Although we did not know it then, we arrived in Berlin at the beginning of the so-called German Autumn, the Deutscher Herbst. This period was marked by the climax of the activities of the Baader-Meinhof Gang and the Red Army Faction (RAF).
A few days after we arrived, the RAF kidnapped German industrialist Hanns-Martin Schleyer, murdering his driver and three police officers in the process. The RAF demanded the release of three of its jailed members. When it became clear that the release was not going to happen, a Lufthansa airplane was hijacked to Somalia on October 13, and its captain was murdered. On October 18, the passengers and surviving crew were rescued by a team of German commandos. That same night, the three imprisoned RAF members whose release had been sought were found dead in their cells under still-debated circumstances.
The next day, the body of Hanns-Martin Schleyer was discovered in the trunk of a car in the Alsatian city of Mulhouse. Needless to say, the experience of living in Berlin during this period made a deep impression on me. The provocation of terror and the response by the state created a frightening atmosphere of high tension. I recall a visit to the foreign ministry archives in Bonn at that time and remember clearly the sandbagged gun emplacement at the entrance to the ministry. I remember thinking about how the activities of the RAF signaled a kind of generational challenge. I observed the brittle tension between the search for security on one hand, and the guarantees of liberty on the other -- a theme that has emerged again acutely in our present day.
When I returned to the States, I decided to put the task of completing my dissertation aside when I had the opportunity to work with the Nazi War Crimes prosecution unit of the US Department of Justice. I started as a historian and completed my tenure—some nine years later— as Chief of Investigative Research. This job brought me often to Germany to research cases in Ludwigsburg and Berlin, to meet with German prosecutors, and occasionally to interview witnesses. I got to know well a number of German prosecutors and police officials and saw first-hand how these professionals dedicated themselves to the pursuit of justice in the case of Nazi crimes. Working within the confines of German criminal law, which was and is a relatively dull weapon in the prosecution of Nazi war crimes, these men and women worked hard to help set right a grievous wrong, while at the same time confronting issues in their own family histories.
The Berlin Document Center (1988-1994)
One of the places I visited often for my government work was the Berlin Document Center. The BDC was one of the most interesting institutions that had been created by the US Army in the immediate postwar period. Later, administered by the US State Dept, and situated on a very quiet street near Krumme Lanke in Zehlendorf, in a huge, primarily underground, facility, the BDC was the repository for an estimated 25 million Nazi-era records that had been captured or seized by the US and its allies during and immediately following the war. Originally an important source for the Nuremberg trials and denazification, the BDC became an archive of crucial importance for scholars and others working on the history of the Third Reich.
Although I would never have predicted it, I was appointed the deputy director of the Berlin Document Center in the fall of 1988 and arrived in Berlin in early December. By the time I arrived at the BDC, not only was it an important archive and source of information on the Third Reich, it had become, as my predecessor, perhaps unwisely, mentioned once in a press interview, a political “hot potato.” Housing, as it did, the central membership files of the Nazi Party, as well as personnel-related files of Nazi Party organizations, like the SS and the SA, the BDC, was a place of intense interest to the German population. We were the keeper, in a sense, of the national memory of a disturbing past and, of course, also the repository of family secrets. We held evidence that clearly had the potential for affecting political careers, not to mention relationships between children and their parents, who might have hidden their past from their families. It was no wonder that in Berlin, I was often regarded with suspicion or anticipation. Very often, I was taken aside and quietly asked about the possible existence of a record on a family relative.
We had, of course, strict access policies, but occasionally it was possible for individuals to discover some important facts about a father or grandfather. More than once, I witnessed either great relief when an individual discovered that there was no file on their father or grandfather at the BDC or the disturbing confirmation of a deeply held fear when a record actually did exist.
During my first week on the job, I attended the trial in Moabit of the four men who had been charged with the theft and sale of thousands of documents from the BDC. The four were convicted, but the scandal that had resulted from the theft brought intense scrutiny on the BDC and had led to my being hired in the first place. Within ten months, I was appointed the director.
My family joined me in Berlin shortly after New Year’s Day, arriving at the very beginning of the year, 1989. It is hard to imagine a single year that was such a confluence of potentially history-changing events as occurred in 1989. The year did not start happily in Berlin. In January, Erich Honecker boasted that the Wall would still be standing in “50 or even in 100 years.” On February 6, Chris Gueffroy, a 20-year-old East German, was shot dead as he tried to cross the Wall. On the same day, the communist regime in Warsaw began talks with the Solidarity trade union and its leader Lech Walesa. Also in February, the Soviets pulled their last troops out of Afghanistan. In March, Winfried Freudenberg fell from the sky and died in a garden in Zehlendorf as he was attempting an escape by hot air balloon from East Berlin.
In April 1989, Solidarity gained legal standing in Poland, and students in China marched in Tiananmen Square. By May, there were demonstrations in more than 400 cities in China, until martial law was imposed. In June, the Ayatollah Khomeini died, marking the end of the beginning of the Islamic revolution.
During the summer of 1989, East Germans, free to travel within the East bloc, flocked to Hungary where they then crossed into Austria and gathered in the compounds of the West German Embassies in Prague and Budapest. Tens of thousands left. In September, the Hungarians let 14,000 East Germans pass through in a single week.
During the autumn of 1989, large crowds demonstrated in Leipzig and other cities. In the midst of all of this, the East German government held a celebration to mark the 40th anniversary of the foundation of the German Democratic Republic. The heads of state from the East bloc countries attended — Ceausescu and Honecker, of course. Within months, one would be dead by firing squad and the other out of office.
The second part will be posted next week.
by David G. Marwell, Ph.D.
Author of the book: Mengele: Unmasking the "Angel of Death"
You can find more information about the Berlin Document Center here: https://mjhblog.blogspot.com/2007/06/berlin-document-center.html
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