The extraordinary history of West Berlin
The most extraordinary site of the Cold War lies behind a forest on the southwestern outskirts of Berlin. Pierluigi Mennitti's article
The most extraordinary place of the Cold War is located behind a forest on the south-western outskirts of Berlin, a few meters from the famous Glienicke Brücke, the bridge that connects the capital to the old noble annex of Potsdam, known for having been the setting of the exchanges of spies between the two superpowers and of the novels of John Le Carré.
Few know him. While still driving along Bundestraße number 1, before the road bends to the right towards the Havel, you must turn left. You slip further into the forest, following a narrow and straight asphalt road, bordered by tall trees that cast shade even when the sun is high at midday. Then a couple of sharp bends, one here and one there, and you arrive in the Steinstücken area. Low houses with sloping roofs that seem to come out of the ancient fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, clean and tidy gardens enclosed by wooden fences, lots of greenery, some garages for private cars. And the Bvg bus 118, the Berlin public transport service, which connects this lonely corner of Berlin to the Wannsee district and from there to the rest of the city. Today to get there you just need to turn on your car or get on the bus. But for forty years Steinstücken was the most isolated place in all of West Berlin.
One hundred and eighty inhabitants, plus three soldiers of the American armed forces and their commander, imprisoned in the only inhabited enclave of West Berlin in East Germany. There were ten in all. For these historical anomalies, political geography has found a curious name: they are called exclaves, in simple words an enclave of an enclave. But there was very little that was curious. It was a piece of West Berlin detached from West Berlin and stuck in the GDR: a puzzle.
That it must once have been an idyllic place is demonstrated by the fact that the architectural stars of the time, Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus, lived here in the first half of the century, together with a colorful group of artists. But there is no doubt that after the division of Germany into two states it became a – to put it mildly – disadvantaged place.
The one hundred and eighty Berliners of Steinstücken lived practically separated from the world: from the West and from the East. When in 1951 the Soviet authorities imposed a tightening of borders on the GDR, things became really tough for this slice of a lost world. The Russians attempted to annex it, which failed only thanks to the firm protest of the Americans, to whom this area belonged as part of the division of the city between the once allied forces. Then in August 1961 Walter Ulbricht started the construction of the Berlin Wall , closing every passage between the two parts of the city for almost thirty years.
Concrete barriers went up everywhere, but the exclave of Steinbrücken was surrounded only by Frisian horses, known in Germany by the name of Czech porcupine, because they were used by the Czechoslovakian forces in the useless defense of their territory from the attack of the Nazis, all beginning of the Second World War. An obstacle evidently less effective than the concrete barrier, so much so that for a few weeks Steinstücken became the favorite escape point towards the west for citizens from the east: while along the entire perimeter of the city the passage became increasingly difficult, here it was still relatively simple escape. Steinstücken became a hot scene of the Cold War, despite the strengthened controls of the Vopos, the people's police of the GDR. Indeed, the flight to freedom of twenty border soldiers led the regime authorities to replace the Frisian horses here too with a concrete barrier. The Wall now surrounded the entire exclave.
Relief came from the sky, in the form of General Lucius Clay, the hero of the airlift thirteen years earlier. Clay had become accustomed to bypassing the Soviet blockades from above and arrived in Steinstücken by helicopter: to reassure the inhabitants he left the three soldiers and their captain there, bringing the population to 184 souls. The helicopter became, for another ten years, the only means of transport connecting the exclave to West Berlin: a landing area was built and today a helicopter-monument recalls the times when no West Berliner could get to Steinstücken: no friends, no relatives, only doctors, craftsmen for house repairs and firefighters for emergencies, all in helicopters.
The solution came in two stages. The first, eleven years later, in 1971, in the wake of the relaxation produced by Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik which led to the first agreements between the four powers that administered Berlin: it was decided to reconnect the exclave to the western sector, through a long corridor one kilometer and twenty meters wide, squeezed between two long concrete barriers. The Berlin Wall thus had its last extension. The second, eighteen years later, on the night of November 9, 1989, when the Wall fell and Steinstücken was liberated forever, towards the west and towards the east.
The road you travel on now is the same one that was built in 1971. It is the Bernhard-Beyer-Straße but it is difficult to imagine it closed by the kilometer of Wall that ran around it. Today everything is free, the view is limited only by the green barrier of the forest, you arrive in the former enclave and can easily turn left and right, return to Berlin by another route or head south towards Babelsberg or west towards Potsdam . It has a certain effect, even if no one is there. In the first months of 1972, many curious people and tourists flocked along this narrow roadway to rediscover, like improvised anthropologists, the population that had lived isolated for twenty years. Today this history is almost forgotten and tourists of the Wall turn away.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/exclave-berlino-ovest/ on Fri, 10 Nov 2023 06:00:03 +0000.