The Wall

Stasi prison August 20, 1985

After work we browsed through the papers of last week.

Horrible plane crash in Japan, 524 dead, biggest ever.

Unemployment rate for doctors in the West +40%.

Gorbachev is interviewed about the nuclear disarmament treaty.

And all the targets are exceeded again by farmers and workers.

One column though finds our attention and it’s not pleasant.

It’s the column from August 13th titled: 

‘For Peace and Socialism’.

About the wall.

The GDR is openly and publically defending and celebrating the erection of the wall. No word about the killings and atrocities this geo-poitical move created.

‘GDR took control over border 8/13/61 and it was long overdo.

Nationalistic, revanchist incitement against the first socialist state on German soil, the German Democratic Republic had reached an unprecedented peak... Mass media of West Germany announced the imminent arrival of the Bundeswehr with bands playing through the Brandenburg Gate… This had to be prevented… On August 13th 1961 we ensured peace for the world…’

Having put up that fence, separating millions of Germans, families, friends.

Killing or incarcerating anyone who tried to overcome that wall.

And claiming protection from the hostile West.

While it was obvious to the blindest man that they needed to stop the bleeding of talent as people wouldn’t put up with mismanagement and political tyranny.

And fencing everyone in was the only option to keep building this totalitarian system that we all want to escape from.

Debates and anger well into the night.

Today it’s good that the guards don’t show.

Or that there are no ‘Schuberts’ in this piece of the communist machinery.

*Testimony -> Start. This blog entry is part of a linear narrated testimony of the contemporary witness Jens Thieme who was imprisoned 1985-1986 as a political prisoner in various GDR prisons by the GDR Ministry of State Security. Stasi prison, Stasi jail, Stasi detention.