The Berlin Wall in The New Yorker

Construction of the Berlin Wall started on August 13, 1961. In October of the next year,* *{: .apple-converted-space}The New Yorker* *{: .apple-converted-space}published “Die Mauer” (“The Wall”), a Profile of the Berlin Wall, written by John Bainbridge. Bainbridge travelled to Berlin, walked along the Wall, and collected stories of East Berliners who had tried, with and without success, to escape. Here’s an atypical, but memorable, account of one man’s strategy:

A photographer named Horst Beyer convinced the East German authorities that a good stunt to help publicize the twelfth anniversary of [Walter] Ulbricht’s regime, on October 10, 1961, would be to publish pictures of a few shapely members of a Communist women’s sports club in the act of presenting the guardians of the wall with bouquets. He accordingly took a few athletic beauties to Checkpoint Charlie, and, as the girls presented their flowers to the Vopos [the Volkspolizei], snapped one photograph after another. In posing his group, Beyer moved closer and closer to the white line on the pavement marking the border, and when one of the Vopos helpfully called out, “Be careful that you don’t step across the line!” Beyer turned and ran into West Berlin.

Beyer’s escape happened only two months after the Wall came up, during a time when it was still an improvised structure. It was soon made more permanent. “Die Mauer” chronicles the slow strengthening of the Wall, and the increasingly risky attempts of East Berliners to breach it. It’s one of seven stories that we’ve gathered to commemorate the anniversary of the fall, twenty-five years ago, on November 9, 1989. “Die Mauer” is available to everyone online; the others are available to subscribers in our online archive.

“Die Mauer” (1962): John Bainbridge tells the story of the Wall’s first year.

“Letter from Berlin” (1966): Joseph Wechsberg reports from Berlin, where—five years after the advent of the Wall—“the abnormal is the normal.” “Berlin is almost certainly the only city on earth whose people don’t mind the noise of the jet engines in the sky; they love it.”

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