In The Shadow Of The (Berlin) Wall - Slow Travel Berlin
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In The Shadow Of The (Berlin) Wall
Thalia Gigerenzer meets a Treptow family who were literally hemmed in by the Berlin Wall…
At first glance, Bouchéstraße seems almost identical to any other street in this sleepy, residential area on the border of Treptow and Neukölln. Tall trees line the street on both sides, and the parade of five-story apartment blocks is interrupted briefly by a boxy, bright yellow Edeka that squats in a nondescript parking lot.
Aside from the occasional jangle of shopping carts and muffled laughter coming from the corner shop, it is very still. But there is something a little strange about this seemingly unremarkable street; it feels somehow unbalanced. On closer inspection, the trees on the eastern side of the street are skinny and young and the streetlights ungainly and imposing; on the opposite side, the trees are gnarled and thick, and the sidewalks are lined with stately gas lamps.
The houses, too, seem ever so slightly out of sync: the apartment blocks facing west have been repainted a frenzy of pastels—blue, yellow and orange—while those facing east are a faded, staid motley of West Berlin brown tones. A cursory glance at the brick trail running through the asphalt reveals that these tiny discrepancies are not coincidental. They are, in fact, the only remaining traces of the street’s prior division by the Berlin Wall.
From 1961 to 1989, for the two-block stretch between Heidelberger Straße and Harzer Straße, the Wall cut right through the middle of Bouchéstraße. Almost overnight, this sleepy, tree-lined street became the so-called death strip—and residents on both sides literally had the Wall on their doorstep.
The Wall stood a mere 1.5 meters from the Neumann’s front door. Photo taken ca. 1989 by Herbert Neumann.
While it remained an abstract, political symbol to many Berliners, for those confronted daily with its physical apparatus—160 kilometres or so of concrete slabs, mesh wire fencing and barbed wire—the Wall had a very different meaning. And no one knew the intricacies of the Wall’s architecture better than the Neumanns, whose front door stood a mere 1.5 metres from the Hinterlandmauer (the wall on the eastern side), for almost 30 years.
Moving In
When they first moved into their apartment on Bouchéstraße in the spring of 1961, the Neumanns were no strangers to claustrophobic living conditions. They had spent the last three years stuck in a cramped apartment in Adlershof with Frau Neumann’s family, desperately waiting for their Wohnungszuweisung (apartment allocation), which, due to the shortage of living space in East Berlin, could take a very long time.
After Herr Neumann (born 1934) finished his studies to be a camera technician, the Neumanns were married in 1958, though since he had studied at an institution in West Berlin, he struggled to find a job in the Soviet sector.
The apartment block the Neumanns would move into was from the Arbeiterwohnungsbaugenossenschaften (AWG), a housing collective for employees of various firms that required every resident to contribute a certain amount of hours to the building of the apartment block. After months of long construction shifts, the Neumanns were overjoyed when they finally moved into the brand-new, tiny apartment they helped build. Sure, the walls were slightly crooked if you looked closely—but they finally had a place of their own.
That summer, the Neumanns took a trip over to West Berlin to buy building materials and other items for their new apartment that were not available in the East, including speakers bought from an American soldier and light switches, both of which remain fixtures in the apartment today. ‘Our Trabi was jammed to the brim with all this stuff,’ laughs Herr Neumann, before adding somewhat soberly, ‘thank God we made that trip in time.’
A Volkspolizei car pulls up across the street on August 13, 1961. Photo by Herbert Neumann.
On Sunday morning, August 13th, 1961, Herr and Frau Neumann awoke to a strange scene outside their study window. A large Volkspolizei car was parked across the street, and police were patrolling the street; a rudimentary barrier of wooden logs had been laid along the sidewalk in front of their building. Herr Neumann, who took his first photographs with a handmade camera as an 11-year-old in 1945, immediately grabbed his camera and started taking photos. For the rest of the day he barely moved from his perch at his study window, documenting the gradual fortification of his own home.
The logs were quickly replaced by barbed wire;...