Thursday, August 11, 2011

The Berlin Wall and the laughing God

By Uwe Siemon-Netto

Perhaps the most compelling aspect of the Berlin Wall story, which I covered for the Associated Press 50 years ago, is its spiritual dimension. I did not realize this then, on August 13, 1961, when the East Germans began building this monstrous structure to stop the mass exodus of its citizens to the West. I was a lukewarm Christian at best and had therefore little hope that this abomination would disappear in my lifetime. That God is the ultimate Lord of history is not something I fully understood when I was a 24-year old junior reporter.

The Wall that split not just the city of Berlin but also its Catholic diocese and territorial Protestant Church into two halves reduced the flow of fugitives to a trickle. But by then 2.6 million people had already fled from the Communist-run part of Germany. By and large they represented its elite – “elite” in the sense of skill and education. They were highly qualified craftsmen, scientists, engineers, professionals and farmers. Such was their impact of their flight on the economy that entire branches of East German industry had ceased to function.

On the other hand, these refugees generally belonged to the social strata that had been the mainstay of the Christian Church in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), and their disappearance suited party leader Walter Ulbricht’s ideological ends. Ulbricht was intent on establishing a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” and the proletariat had long been alienated from the Church, especially its highbrow Lutheran branch whose very cradle this part of the country was. By relegating the former upper and middle classes to an inferior status and driving them out, Ulbricht created the main cause for the decline of church membership from some 95 percent of the population in 1945 to one quarter at the time of the GDR’s collapse in 1989.

The persecution of Christians began well before the GDR was established in the Soviet zone of occupation in 1949. I remember it well from my childhood in Leipzig. A Marxist teacher had taken over our class. Every morning he admonished his 80 pupils: “There are three Christian swine among you who still go to church. Go beat some sense into them after school”. The three of us, one Catholic and two Lutherans, learned to outrun our roused classmates; eventually my mother had me smuggled across the border to the British zone of occupation, where I ended up in a boarding school.

In the East Germany, young Christians were denied access to higher education, unless they joined the Communist youth movement and subjected themselves to a ceremony called Jugendweihe, a Marxist substitute for confirmation. Some did this, for example Angela Merkel, a pastor’s daughter, who was allowed to study physics and later became chancellor of reunified Germany. Others made no such concessions. They fled or accepted discrimination at school and work in order to live a life of faith.

The three daughters of my uncle Horst Persing, a Lutheran minister, accepted this fate. In 1976, Rev. Oskar Brüsewitz made an even greater sacrifice. He immolated himself in front of the parish church of Zeitz in protest against “the suppression of our children in school.” His sacrifice was one of the first steps toward the popular protest movement that eventually brought down the Wall in 1989.

One day as I was covering the Berlin crisis in the autumn of 1961, East German police stopped me at the Heinrich Heine Strasse border crossing to question me about the source of a highly sensitive story of mine they had read on the AP wire. I did not give them her name. A few weeks later my grandmother sent me a poppy seed cake from Leipzig. Inside I found an aluminium tube with a message warning me against travelling again to the GDR. A well-meaning neighbour who was a “people’s prosecutor” had tipped her off that I would be arrested for espionage if I tried to do so.

I was now cut off from my East German relatives forever, or so I feared. “Eternity” turned out to be short, though. In 1975, the Helsinki Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe ended many travel restrictions in Germany. To my amazement the GDR granted me an unrestricted six-month visa. I drove to my uncle’s parsonage near Leipzig where I first found out about of an awakening among young East Germans. One of its many centres was the Church of St. Nicholas (Nikolaikirche) in Leipzig, which later became the fount of the peaceful revolution that toppled Communism.

For weeks I travelled from church to church, monastery to monastery, parsonage to parsonage, trailed by secret police. Later I discovered that they considered me a religious crackpot, albeit a harmless one, which still perplexes me because the focus of my research should have troubled them: a large ecumenical movement luring thousands, including soldiers in uniform, to youth services and eventually providing an umbrella also for non-Christian opposition groups against the East German dictatorship.

I learned that this had begun in 1968 when Ulbricht had the Gothic University Church on Leipzig’s Karl Marx Platz (now Augustusplatz) blown up. It stood an a square that was designated to be a socialist parade ground, and Ulbricht did not want it to be “blighted” by a gracile sanctuary, where both Lutherans and Catholics worshipped.

Twenty days later, an international Bach contest took place in Leipzig. Suddenly in the presence of VIPs from all over the world and of East German party bigwigs an automatic mechanism unrolled a huge yellow banner showing the contours of the murdered church flanked by the dates of its consecration and its death, 1240 and 1968, plus the inscription “Wir fordern Wiederaufbau” (We demand reconstruction).

The authors of this act of defiance were five young physicists and science students. They were captured and imprisoned. But they inspired sympathizers throughout GDR to form what became the nucleus of a “peace movement”, which gradually snowballed into the avalanche that swept away Communism two decades later.

The Nikolaikirche is only a few steps away from where the University Church stood. It became known worldwide as the epicentre of this ecumenical enterprise, arguably one of the most impressive in post-Reformation history. Admonished by Protestant and Catholic clergymen not to resort to violence, tens of thousands marched on Monday evenings quietly around Leipzig’s city centre. Their most momentous demonstration occurred on 9 October 1989.

On that evening, pastors and priests had preached on Proverbs 25:15: “With patience a ruler will be persuaded, and a soft tongue will break a bone.” Then a crowd of 70,000, chanting hymns, set off on a procession that softly felled a 40-year tyranny. Had they given the Communist authorities the slightest provocation, it might have resulted in a Peking-style massacre. The regime was certainly ready.

From the side streets their workers’ militia had their guns trained on the protesters. Local hospitals cancelled the leaves of their medical staffs. Ample amounts of coffins and body bags had been brought into town. A concentration camp had been set up in Markkleeberg, south of Leipzig. Later lists with the names of intended inmates were found. They included pastors, priests and Kurt Masur, the conductor of Leipzig’s famed Gewandhaus orchestra.

But the demonstrators remained peaceful, as did the peace marchers who emulated them in many parts of the GDR. We know what happened next: The Wall opened in the following month. The GDR ceased to exist one year later. In the interim, Christians temporarily assumed positions of power in East Germany. Rainer Eppelmann, a Lutheran pastor and pacifist from Berlin who had done time in a Communist prison, became the GDR’s last minister of defence.

It is now 50 years since I saw the Wall go up and 22 since it came down. The Christian movement in eastern Germany seems to have collapsed. When Germany was reunited on 3 October 1990, most Protestant churches did not even ring their bells in gratitude, in contrast to Catholic churches, which did. Once again, eastern Germans are turning their backs on the Christian faith in droves. Next to the Czech Republic, the former GDR is the most secularized region in Europe, and Berlin is its most godless capital.

What happened here is a phenomenon well knwn from Scripture – the continuum of human ingrate forgetfulness of God’s mercy. Theologically speaking, this was a manifest expression of Original Sin in the sense of man’s innate inability to believe and trust in God; but at the same time it confirmed of Martin Luther’s brilliant insight about cloudbursts of the Holy Spirit that suddenly soak one area richly, and then inexplicably move on. This is what we have witnessed after the collapse of the Wall.

But it would be foolish to believe that this is the end of the story. History is always open to the future and the Holy Spirit, the creator of life and faith, always good for surprises. There is also an amusing side to this drama about this interface between faith and politics. To prove to the world that he was the greatest, Ulbricht had built the tallest structure in Berlin, a 1,200-foot television tower with a glass bubble containing a rotating restaurant at its top.

When the tower was finished in 1969, it turned out that the sun reflected on this bubble in the shape of a huge cross. Ulbricht was so furious that he refused to invite the tower’s architects to its inauguration. His regime spent huge sums of money to remove this symbol of the Christian faith – in vain: Regardless of whether you approach Berlin from the East, the West or the South, the first thing you can see from afar on a clear day will be the Cross.

The God Christians believe in is the God of Israel, and if they have read their Bible well they know that He is a God with a Jewish sense of irony about whom we read in Psalm 2:4: “He who sits in the heavens laughs; the Lord holds them in derision.”

Uwe Siemon-Netto, the former religious affairs editor of United Press International, has been an international journalist for 54 years, covering North America, Vietnam, the Middle East and Europe for German publications. Dr. Siemon-Netto currently directs the League of Faithful Masks and Center for Lutheran Theology and Public Life in Irvine,

And the wall fell down flat

Uwe Siemon-Netto


(From The Tablet, London, August 12, 2011)


Exactly 50 years ago, work began on the construction of a lethal barrier dividing Berlin that was to last nearly three decades. Years of protests by East German Christians led to its destruction and that of the Communist regime which tried to contain the faith of its people.


On August 13, 1961, a Sunday, the Associated Press sent me to Berlin where East Germany had begun building a Wall that morning to stop the mass exodus of its citizens to the Western sectors. Fifty years later, I recognise that this turned out to be not just a reporting assignment for me but the beginning of a long story of faith.

I was 24 then, myself a refugee from Leipzig. From what I saw I did not expect Germany to be reunified in my lifetime. Yet it happened 28 years later, in large part thanks to a peaceful Christian resistance movement. This is actually the most important story about the Wall; it is a tale of hope.


I flew from Frankfurt to Tempelhof Airport and drove to Bernauer Strasse, a street dividing the French and Soviet sectors. On the eastern side, people were roping themselves down from windows, while Communist cops stormed their buildings from the backyard. Some refugees jumped into nets spread out for them by firemen, some fell to their death.


I watched East German workmen render the Protestant Church of Reconciliation inaccessible with barbed wire. Located on what became known as the death strip, it symbolised Christianity’s condition in divided Berlin, where both the Catholic diocese and the regional Protestant church were split into two halves.


I observed workers’ militiamen open fire on a fugitive family of nine prompting a French lieutenant to blast off warning shots from a machine gun mounted on his jeep. “Stop shooting or I’ll shoot you,” he yelled. The escapees made it across the border. I accompanied them to the Marienfelde refugee camp, the central stage of this drama in the heart of Germany. Of the 2.6 million fugitives thus far, 1.5 million had been housed here before being flown to West Germany. By the time East German leader Walter Ulbricht ordered the Western sectors of Berlin sealed off, up to 2,500 left his country every day. Its economy was about to collapse. Entire branches of industry no longer functioned because their skilled workforce had run away.


Ironically, the flight of highly qualified craftsmen, of scientists, engineers, professionals and farmers, was not just a catastrophic loss to the Communists but also had a religious dimension. These refugees belonged primarily to the social strata that had been the Christian Church’s mainstay. Ulbricht’s regime was intent on establishing a “dictatorship of the proletariat”, relegating the former upper and middle classes to an inferior status, and driving them out. This was the main cause for the decline of church membership from some 95 percent of the population in 1945 to one quarter at the time of East Germany’s collapse in 1989.


The persecution of Christians began well before the German Democratic Republic (GDR) was established in the Soviet zone of occupation in 1949. I remember it well from my childhood in Leipzig. A Marxist teacher had taken over our class. Every morning he admonished his 80 pupils: “There are three Christian swine among you who still go to church. Go beat some sense into them after school”. The three of us, one Catholic and two Lutherans, learned to outrun our roused classmates; eventually my mother had me smuggled across the border to the British zone of occupation, where I ended up in a boarding school.


In the GDR, young Christians were denied access to higher education, unless they joined the Communist youth movement and subjected themselves to a ceremony called Jugendweihe, a Marxist substitute for confirmation. Some did this, for example Angela Merkel, a pastor’s daughter, who was allowed to study physics and later became chancellor of reunified Germany. Others made no such concessions. They fled or accepted discrimination at school and work in order to live a life of faith.


The three daughters of my uncle Horst Persing, a Lutheran minister, accepted this fate. In 1976, Rev. Oskar Brüsewitz made an even greater sacrifice. He immolated himself in front of the parish church of Zeitz in protest against “the suppression of our children in school.” His sacrifice was one of the first steps toward the popular protest movement that eventually brought down the Wall in 1989.


One day as I was covering the Berlin crisis in the autumn of 1961, East German police stopped me at the Heinrich Heine Strasse border crossing to question me about the source of a highly sensitive story of mine they had read on the AP wire. I did not give them her name. A few weeks later my grandmother sent me a poppy seed cake from Leipzig. Inside I found an aluminium tube with a message warning me against travelling again to the GDR. A well-meaning neighbour who was a “people’s prosecutor” had tipped her off that I would be arrested for espionage if I tried to do so.


I was now cut off from my East German relatives forever, or so I feared. “Eternity” turned out to be short, though. In 1975, the Helsinki Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe ended many travel restrictions in Germany. To my amazement the GDR granted me an unrestricted six-month visa. I drove to my uncle’s parsonage near Leipzig where I first found out about of an awakening among young East Germans. One of its many centres was the Church of St. Nicholas (Nikolaikirche) in Leipzig, which later became the fount of the peaceful revolution that toppled Communism.


For weeks I travelled from church to church, monastery to monastery, parsonage to parsonage, trailed by secret police. Later I discovered that they considered me a religious crackpot, albeit a harmless one, which still perplexes me because the focus of my research should have troubled them: a large ecumenical movement luring thousands, including soldiers in uniform, to youth services and eventually providing an umbrella also for non-Christian opposition groups against the East German dictatorship.


I learned that this had begun in 1968 when Ulbricht had the Gothic University Church on Leipzig’s Karl Marx Platz (now Augustusplatz) blown up. It stood an a square that was designated to be a socialist parade ground, and Ulbricht did not want it to be “blighted” by a gracile sanctuary, where both Lutherans and Catholics worshipped.


Twenty days later, an international Bach contest took place in Leipzig. Suddenly in the presence of VIPs from all over the world and of East German party bigwigs an automatic mechanism unrolled a huge yellow banner showing the contours of the murdered church flanked by the dates of its consecration and its death, 1240 and 1968, plus the inscription “Wir fordern Wiederaufbau” (We demand reconstruction).


The authors of this act of defiance were five young physicists and science students. They were captured and imprisoned. But they inspired sympathizers throughout GDR to form what became the nucleus of a “peace movement”, which gradually snowballed into the avalanche that swept away Communism two decades later.


The Nikolaikirche is only a few steps away from where the University Church stood. It became known worldwide as the epicentre of this ecumenical enterprise, arguably one of the most impressive in post-Reformation history. Admonished by Protestant and Catholic clergymen not to resort to violence, tens of thousands marched on Monday evenings quietly around Leipzig’s city centre. Their most momentous demonstration occurred on 9 October 1989.


On that evening, pastors and priests had preached on Proverbs 25:15: “With patience a ruler will be persuaded, and a soft tongue will break a bone.” Then a crowd of 70,000, chanting hymns, set off on a procession that softly felled a 40-year tyranny. Had they given the Communist authorities the slightest provocation, it might have resulted in a Peking-style massacre. The regime was certainly ready.


From the side streets their workers’ militia had their guns trained on the protesters. Local hospitals cancelled the leaves of their medical staffs. Ample amounts of coffins and body bags had been brought into town. A concentration camp had been set up in Markkleeberg, south of Leipzig. Later lists with the names of intended inmates were found. They included pastors, priests and Kurt Masur, the conductor of Leipzig’s famed Gewandhaus orchestra.


But the demonstrators remained peaceful, as did the peace marchers who emulated them in many parts of the GDR. We know what happened next: The Wall opened in the following month. The GDR ceased to exist one year later. In the interim, Christians temporarily assumed positions of power in East Germany. Rainer Eppelmann, a Lutheran pastor and pacifist from Berlin who had done time in a Communist prison, became the GDR’s last minister of defence.


It is now 50 years since I saw the Wall go up and 22 since it came down. The Christian movement in eastern Germany seems to have collapsed. When Germany was reunited on 3 October 1990, most Protestant churches did not even ring their bells in gratitude, in contrast to Catholic churches, which did. Once again, eastern Germans are turning their backs on the Christian faith in droves. Next to the Czech Republic, the former GDR is the most secularized region in Europe, and Berlin is the most godless city.


What happened? A manifest expression of Original Sin in the sense of man’s innate inability to believe and trust in God; but at the same time a confirmation of Martin Luther’s brilliant insight about cloudbursts of the Holy Spirit that suddenly soak one area richly, and then inexplicably move on. This is what we have witnessed here.


As for me, this amazing story still gives me huge hope. For it has reinforced my faith by confirming, on a secular level, the maxim that history is always open to the future and the theological truth God is the ultimate Lord of history that the Spirit always good for surprises.


Dr Uwe Siemon-Netto, a former foreign correspondent from Germany and a lay theologian, is director of the Center for Lutheran Theology and Public Life at Concordia University in Irvine, California, where is also a professor of journalism.

Tuesday, August 2, 2011

I was there when they built the Wall

By Uwe Siemon-Netto

Early Sunday morning the telephone rang in my Frankfurt apartment. „Off to the airport,“ my managing editor instructed me. Drowsily I asked, „To Leopoldville?“ For weeks I had been waiting for my marching orders to the former Belgian Congo to cover its civil war for the Associated Press. „No,“ said “Schmitti,” my boss. „You are going to Berlin. Ulbricht is building a wall.“

That was on August 13, 1961. My longest working day ever lay ahead of me: 36 hours. I took a PanAm DC-6 to Tempelhof Airport in West Berlin and then drove in a rented car to Bernauer Strasse, a street dividing the French and Soviet sectors. On the eastern side, people roped themselves down from windows, while Communist cops stormed their apartment buildings from the backyard. Some refugees jumped into safety nets spread out for them by Western firemen. Nine days later, Ida Siekmann missed a net and dropped on the sidewalk, becoming the first casualty of the Berlin Wall.

For the next three months Bernauer Strasse became my most important place of work. I was there when East German workmen unrolled bales of barbed wire and later replaced it with a wall; when they rendered the Protestant Church of Reconciliation inaccessible; when workers’ militiamen opened fire on a fugitive family of nine prompting a French lieutenant to blast off warning shots into the air from a machine gun mounted on his jeep.

“Stop shooting or I’ll aim my gun at you,” he warned; to my knowledge these were the only shots fired by an allied soldier in the 1961 Berlin crisis. The refugees made it safely across the border. I took them into an “Eckkneipe,” as Berlin street corner pubs are called. I bought the adults a round of stiff drinks, and raspberry sodas for the kids; then I accompanied all of them to the Marienfelde processing center for escapees.

The emergency camp in the Berlin district of Marienfelde was at that time the central stage of this drama in the heart of Germany. Of 2.6 million refugees thus far, 1.5 million had been housed here before being flown to West Germany. By the time the East German leader Walter Ulbricht ordered West Berlin sealed off, up to 2,500 left his country every day.

These were university professors, professionals of every field, engineers, scientists, farmers, technicians, craftsmen, and hundreds of thousands of skilled laborers. The collapse of East Germany’s economy seemed imminent. Entire branches of its industry could no longer manufacture anything because most of the working elite had “voted with their feet,” as the saying went; they had run to freedom.

Things did not look good for the West either, though. With the support of Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, Ulbricht demanded an instant end to this drain of manpower. He was determined to gain control of the access routes from West Germany to West Berlin, a city still under the sovereignty of the victorious four powers of World War II. Fortunately, this would never happen.

In June, the Associated Press had sent me to Vienna to reinforce its local staff during the summit meeting between Khrushchev and U.S. President John F. Kennedy. We found out that Khrushchev regarded Kennedy as immature, calling him a “boy in short pants” whom he could intimidate, which he accomplished masterfully.

In those days the President had “no sympathy for the Germans,” retired diplomat R.W. Smyser wrote in his book, “Kennedy and the Berlin Wall.” His indecision and indifference were fueled by the counsel of the liberal “eggheads” in his immediate entourage. These were academics such as Secretary of State Dean Rusk, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy and speechwriter Ted Sorenson, whom Kennedy called his “intellectual blood bank.”

John McCloy, the former U.S. high commissioner in Germany, quipped about these men to West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer that in their entire professional lives they never had to make a decision “except which of their fellow professors should get tenure,” according to Smyser who added that Adenauer perceived Kennedy as a weak president and therefore clung to France’s Charles de Gaulle as an alternative.

So, in 1961, Kennedy did not interfere with the Communists as they walled in their own people. His stance would toughen significantly later under the influence of Gen. Lucius D. Clay, the “father of the Berlin Airlift,” whom Kennedy sent to Berlin as his personal representative. In 1963, Clay accompanied Kennedy on his trip to Berlin where JFK made his celebrated “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech. In this speech, which worried his “egghead advisors,” JFK went on to say: "I am proud (...) to come here in the company of my fellow American, General Clay, who has been in this city during its great moments of crisis and will come again if ever needed." To this day, Clay is more beloved in Berlin than any other statesman of any nationality before and after him.

But Kennedy’s vacillation during the summer of 1961 laid the seeds of the insidious anti-American qualms that would so bewilder my friends in the U.S. in the years to come. Egon Bahr, the closest associate and spokesman of Willy Brandt, Berlin’s governing mayor, explained to me that his distrust of the U.S. began with this episode. Brandt numbed his sorrows in a manner causing Adenauer to nickname him Willy Weinbrandt (Billy Brandy); 1961 was an election year in West Germany, and Brandt ran against Adenauer as the Social Democrat candidate. Adenauer won.

Egon Bahr, who is still alive, never overcame his misgivings.

Kennedy’s irresolution was shared by British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan, Smyser writes, but contrasted markedly with the hard-line stance of French President Charles de Gaulle and the feistiness of West and East Berliners alike. While Kennedy dithered, de Gaulle positioned himself as “Adenauer’s protector, not only against Khrushchev but also against pressures coming from London,” according to Smyser.

As for the Berliners, irresolution was definitely not their prevalent mood that summer. Only 16 years after the collapse of the Nazi tyranny they were in no frame of mind to give in to yet another oppressor even if their stubbornness carried the prospect of enduring another armed conflict just when they had rebuilt their town from is devastation in the war.

We journalists, diplomats and spooks congregating nightly at Berlin’s premier intelligence exchange of the day, the piano bar “Inge und Ich” just off Kurfürstendamm, never ceased to marvel at these plucky people; they were a far cry from the irksome characters who gave their town a bad name seven years later. I am talking about those fetid draft dodgers who would soon nestle on the Western side of the Wall; those whining and sometimes violent wannabe revolutionaries demonstrating against the Shah of Persia and the War in Vietnam and chanting “Ho-Ho-Ho-Chi-minh;” those eternal students who would stay enrolled at Berlin’s Free University for 50 semesters because cafeteria meals and public transportation were cheap for their kind. Let it be stated here: Real Berliners they were not!

Back to the summer of 1961: We brash young journalists covering the erection of Ulbricht’s Wall even managed to mine some wacky fun from this distressing assignment. We established observation posts near the border crossings, especially Checkpoint Charlie on Friedrichstrasse, which was reserved for non-Germans and Communist bigwigs. Mine was a bedroom above Café Kölln, a sleazy beer bar in the building where now the “Mauer-Museum” (Wall Museum) is located. This room had a wonderful bay window affording me a perfect view of the East German control center.

Early one evening I spotted a white Mercedes 220 with East Berlin license plates heading west. The man on the wheel turned out to be “Sudel-Ede” (Smirching Eddie), the most despised Communist television personality. His real name was Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler. He had a propaganda program titled, “Der schwarze Kanal” (the black channel), where he regularly ran clips from western TV shows as “evidence” for his vile agitation against the alleged “neo-fascism,” “militarism” and “war-mongering” of our side.

“Smirching Eddie” was married to Marta Rafael, a striking Hungarian actress who must have been on tour that day for he clearly entered West-Berlin intent on poaching among our lonely hearts, of which there were plenty. So soon after the War, the city was still replete with unattached women in their late thirties whose male contemporaries had died in combat or Soviet POW camps.

And where did they find solace? In ball houses such as the “Resi” in the Hasenheide district, an establishment with dancing fountains, a full orchestra, 200 telephones and pneumatic tubes connecting all tables. That’s where “Smirching Eddie,” endowed with an East German exit permit and plenty of West German currency, directed his Mercedes while his fellow countrymen were locked up behind the Iron Curtain. I alerted my colleagues, and so a howling horde of international reporters chased after him.

Directed to a table, von Schnitzler began scanning beauties in the room but never managed to make contact with any of the scores of available females. For we had positioned ourselves strategically at neighboring tables and now bombarded him with telephone calls and pneumatically posted invitations to waltz and to tango. Puce in the face the frustrated Smirching Eddie stormed out of the ballroom and returned east. We followed him to Checkpoint Charlie and then piled into Café Kölln to celebrate our personal triumph in the Cold War.

It so happened that earlier that year I had befriended a comely East German government official at the Leipzig Trade Fair. She hated the Communist regime. Now as the Wall was being built she found witty ways to tip me off. One item of information she sent turned out to be a present for my 25th birthday. In the middle of the night I received a secret message urging me to rush to the former palace of Prussia’s crown princes in the Eastern sector. There I discovered, probably as the first Western reporter, that more than 30 Soviet tanks had moved into the city. Two days later they confronted U.S. armor at Checkpoint Charlie, which turned out to be the most dramatic point of the 1961 Berlin crisis.

On the following evening I had a date with my friend but was stopped at the border and grilled: “Who was your informer?” I did not tell the investigators but soon discovered that as a result of this incident I was not to see my family in East Germany again for years to come. My grandmother lived in Leipzig. Her neighbor was a well-meaning prosecutor. She warned her that if ever I attempted to enter the country again I would be tried for espionage. Granny slipped this information into an aluminum tube and mailed it to me in a home-baked poppy seed cake.

I was banished from my native region “forever.” But this “eternity” lasted a little more a dozen years. In 1975, the Helsinki Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe ended many travel restrictions in Germany. Only a few weeks later I was issued a six-month visa allowing me multiple entries into my homeland. I raced to the parsonage of my favorite uncle, Horst Persing, a Lutheran parish pastor near Leipzig, who told me about a stunning development – the Christian awakening among young East Germans, which eventually produced the umbrella for the huge resistance movement that would bring down the Berlin Wall in 1989 resulting in Germany’s reunification a year later.

I was in San Francisco when the Wall tumbled. I flew home to rejoice with my fellow countrymen and remember fondly the plucky Berliners I loved so much in 1961. Returning to reunified Berlin now once every year or two is a bittersweet experience, though. Yes, this is arguably Europe’s most exciting city, a throbbing metropolis with stunning new buildings and an abundant cultural life.

But with memories like mine, I find it hard to stomach that a coalition of mainly left-of-center Social Democrats and Communists now governs this marvelous place. I know why the latter are still so numerous. The East German regime had moved all its top functionaries, its military and secret police officers from the entire country to its capital. Now they still reside in the heart of the city, and they vote for a party called “Die Linke” (The Left), which is the successor of the Socialist Unity Party whose leaders had built the Wall.

Most Berliners seem to have accommodated themselves to the shameless misalliance between the Social Democrats – once Willy Brandt’s very honorable party -- and their “dark red” minority partners. But I can’t. I can’t forget what they have done to their people and my country. I can’t forget that they shot refugees like rabbits. I can’t forget that they chopped Berlin into two. And I can’t forgive the Social Democrat-Communist city government its refusal to name a street after Ronald Reagan, who in April of 1987 stood at the Brandenburg Gate appealing to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev saying, “Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate, Mr. Gorbachev, open this Wall!”

This is so disgraceful that I could not bring myself to accede to my British wife Gillian’s wish to move to Berlin. That said, I take consolation in the fact that history is always open to the future and always good for surprises. This is the comforting news I have learned in the 50 years since covering the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961.

Uwe Siemon-Netto, the former religious affairs editor of United Press International, is conducting a lecture tour related to the 50th anniversary of the erection of the Berlin Wall, which he covered as a young reporter of The Associated Press. For information, contact: uwesiemon@mac.com . He has been an international journalist for 55 years, covering North America, Vietnam, the Middle East and Europe for German publications.