It was not until a few hours late that Manfred Graulich heard in the morning what had happened during the night. Thousands of people had flowed from East to West Berlin, Trabis had driven over the Kudamm. The mayor of the small town of Teltow near Berlin completely missed the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989 after a hard day's work.
On that 10th of November Graulich did not come to rest. At four o'clock in the afternoon he hardly trusted his ears when the council of the district of Potsdam called him. Within a few days, a new border crossing was to be built in Teltow.
At the time, Bernd Blumrich had been working as an independent photographer in Kleinmachnow for years. The morning after the fall of the wall, he also wanted to drive his car to West Berlin. At the border crossing Dreilinden he had to wait in a long line. "There was a huge traffic jam, the border guards were completely overwhelmed," he recalls. "All you had to do was show your identity card, no one asked for a visa anymore, which seemed incredible."
photo gallery
16 pictures
Photographer Blumrich: Honecker in the toilet bowlWhen the whole world was looking to Berlin at that time, Blumrich and his camera noticed how suddenly people from the East and the West met on the periphery of the event. On his succinct black and white shots you can see that there were gaps in the walls and fences. You could now wave to each other from one side to the other. Border guards, who until then had had to shoot so-called Republic refugees, put down their weapons and received flowers as presents.
On the following day, 11 November, Gert Lohß, commander of the Border Regiment 42, stated that authorities and the military acted largely uncoordinated shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. From the imminent construction of the new border crossing at Philipp-Müller-Allee in Teltow, he learned in the morning from the newspaper.
Battle group deployment? "Then we have civil war"
"Neither my staff nor my superiors knew about it, so I drove there, and oddly enough, I met people from the passport control and customs departments who were making plans about the type of dispatch facilities," journalist Juergen Stich quoted him in a photo book created in collaboration with Blumrich "Mittelmärkischer Bilderbogen 2009". "It was like a bad thriller for me at the time."
In the night of 9 to 10 November Lohß had still received the order to put his troops in "increased combat readiness". At the crossing points in Mahlow and at the Rudower Chaussee in the south of Berlin, many people were already crowded, the situation was threatening to come to a head. At that moment, Lohß alone made the decision not to use force. He ordered the soldiers not to fire even if someone wanted to cross the border.
Horst Grade, the last head of the Central School for Combat Teams in Schmerwitz in Brandenburg, behaved in a similar manner. There were trained commanders of the paramilitary units, whose official task was the protection of public property. The armed volunteer associations with a total of around 200,000 members, like the border troops, were subordinate to the Ministry of the Interior. In 1989, they had been put on standby for demonstrations in the run-up to 9 November.
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Bernd Blumrich
Line infidelity: Potsdam, Kleinmachnow and Teltow from 1989 to 1990
Publishing company:
Lukas Verlag for art and intellectual history
Pages:
188
Price:
EUR 24.50
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A few hours after the fall of the Wall, a representative of the SED Central Committee called for "fighting groups to be provided for the protection of the state". Grade refused and immediately had to justify his actions in Berlin: "I told them that if we make the state of emergency, then the army, the police and the fighting groups break up, and then we have civil war." At the time, the wall could have been closed, she still stood, explains Blumrich. If one had placed a hundred combat groups in front of a border crossing, nobody would have got through.
Fortunately, escalation did not happen. Blumrich drove to his brother on November 11 in West Berlin and observed from the other side, as border troops in Teltow with the construction of the new transition began: "Around 12 clock cut out in the middle of the road the expanded metal fence on It looks like someone zips up. "
Spontaneous drink at the new border crossing
Already on November 14, the new border crossing between Teltow and the district of Berlin-Lichterfelde was opened. "For me it was incredible, because we were still in the Cold War, theoretically the Russians could have intervened militarily," recalls Blumrich. In order to make passable the road intersected by the border, even civil engineering work was necessary, because under the earth ran a sewer line.
At the end of December 1989, the government of the GDR decided to demolish all border installations at the inner-German border. However, the decommissioning was not completed until the mid-1990s, long after reunification.
The night before the opening of the transition in Teltow Blumrich photographed there the last preparations. "Around 7.30 am, unarmed border guards were stationed there, they tiptoed along the freshly demarcated demarcation line and looked west, and somebody quickly arranged champagne bottles, glasses, and wallpaper for an impromptu reception."
The usual cheers for the fall of the wall, however, do not interest Bernd Blumrich. "Such pictures are just the foam on the wave, the power is under this foam." Being close to people has always been the decisive factor for me as a photographer "(here is Bernd Blumrich's picture archive).
He finds a shot of Graulich particularly urgent when the mayor with his staff rushed to the demarcation line (see photo gallery) . "His facial features are extremely tense, he does not know what to expect, are they biting me now, the bad capitalists?"
Shortly afterwards, Manfred Graulich met for the first time his colleague Klaus-Dieter Friedrich, mayor of the West Berlin district of Steglitz. At that moment, obviously all tension from him fell off. "When they joined hands, he beamed and laughed and suddenly seemed as free and relaxed as his counterparts," says Blumrich. Incidentally, at Graulich's house, sparkling wine was consumed until late at night, and they both formed a friendship that lasted until Frederick's death 16 years ago. "