One day, that wall of shame cracked because the communist world was going downhill, Mikhail Gorbachev He spoke of perestroika and glasnot, internal reforms and transparency in the USSR, because the old Stalinist system no longer resisted in the face of a world that was changing by the hour, and because that enormous wall forty-two kilometers long that separated Berlin in two already Germany in four, was the symbol of an ominous past.
After those first cracks, On November 9, 1998, 23 years ago today, the Germans tore down the wall. With hammers, picks, shovels and a clean hand, the never divided Berliners attacked that stone phantom that had separated families, friends, loves and lives and, on its ruins, they sang Beethoven.
It was then that the stories of those who had tried to flee from East to West Berlin returned from the past, down through tunnels, overhead in hot air balloons, racing in open defiance to the bullets coming from the watchtowers. Few made it. The rest fell in the attempt until the authorities of the German Democratic Republic (DRA), the communist, emptied the surroundings of the wall and opened a great no-man’s-land, with electrified wires, permanent patrols and electronic warning devices to prevent what those few had succeeded: fleeing to freedom.
The first to do so was Private Conrad Schumann. He was also the one who understood the fastest what was coming and what to do. His story, epic and tragic, that of a Greek hero, weighed him all his life and led him to death.
What remains of Schumann today, his legacy if there ever was one, It is a symbolic photo of his desperate leap, half bird, half despair, over the barbed wire that was the cornerstone of the Berlin Wall.
Schumann jumped on August 15, 1961, when the Wall was not even two whole days old. And if there is a photo, and there are many, it is because there was a photographer, mischievous and alert, who caught the exact moment: Schumann seems to climb over the barbed wire lying on the ground of the famous Bernauer Strasse, while with a swift gesture he got rid of his Soviet-made PPSh-41 rifle, lest he fall armed on the other side. Already in the western sector of Berlin, Schumann runs a few meters until he hits the open door of a police van of the Federal Republic of Germany FRG, the western one, which takes him at speed towards his unpredictable destination.
The first German defector from the communist world had gotten away with it.
On August 13, 1961, when East Germany divided Berlin in two and the country in four, Schumann was a 19-year-old boy who was born on March 28, 1942, when Nazi Germany was still at its peak, but perhaps without noticing its long and catastrophic fall. Schumann was born in Zschochau, Bavaria, into a family of sheep herders, and at the age of nineteen he enlisted in the police in the East Berlin sector, dominated by the USSR and led by Walter Ulbricht, a confessed Stalinian who ruled with the hand of iron the miserable destinies of that post-war Berlin.
The Wall was also raised with the approval of the West. The migration crisis from East to West Germany first and Berlin later, had emptied the communist sector of technicians, doctors, teachers, artisans and dozens of professionals who were looking for better pay and greater freedom. Salaries were better in the West than in the East. Those who worked in the West and lived in the East enjoyed a small monthly fortune, much higher than those who lived and worked in the East. It was very cheap for Westerners to buy food in the East and the USSR was forced to feed Berliners on both sides, which infuriated Nikita Khruschev.
In June 1961, two months before the Wall, in a tense conference with the President of the United States, John kennedy, Khruschev had threatened a war for Berlin. Kennedy returned to his country and asked how many American lives a war with the USSR could cost, which would almost certainly lead to an atomic conflict. The calculations spoke of more than a hundred million dead, almost half the country. Kennedy knew there would be no war and Khruschev felt empowered to divide Berlin with a Wall..
Just in case, on Sunday August 13 of that year, the year in which we live in danger, a sea of barbed wire, wooden poles and precarious guard posts were located along the forty-two kilometers of brand-new border. If the West protested, you could always go back. But the West fell silent and, over the months, cement replaced wires.
But that was with the months. Conrad Schumann was one of the soldiers who participated in “Operation Rose”, as the operation to divide Berlin became known. In the next forty-eight hours, together with his young comrades, many like him under twenty, he saw what he had never imagined: fWhole amilias divided, loves and friendships separated, including the young people who had gone on a spree to the West on Saturday night and now could not return home, or could return, but to an unthinkable life; the protests were silenced with gas pumps, or with jets of water while the young guards of the embryonic wall, received insults that made them equal to the guards of the concentration camps of the brand new German past.
Schumann decided his fate in two days. On August 15 he learned that he was going to jump to the other side, that he was going to leave his home and family behind to start over in West Berlin. The morning of the escape, he was seen probing the barbed-wire fence of Bernauer Strasse several times with his boots. He was seen by his comrades and a host of Western mourners, as German and divided as those in the East, struggling to regain what would take thirty-seven years to return, a unified Germany.
On the other side of the barbed wall, was the other part of the story. A boy barely a year older than Schumann whose name was Peter leibing and that he made a living as a photographer for the Conty Press agency in Hamburg. He had left for Berlin, almost two hundred and fifty kilometers, with the spirit and thirst of twenty years and the certainty of the great professionals: I was looking for an image that would make history. Leibing saw Schumann feel the barbed fence several times with his boot, so he wandered the area without losing sight of him and with his camera ready, light and distance, for whatever was to happen.
It was as if the whole world had known what was going to happen. A West Berlin police van pulled up near where Schumann was patrolling and suddenly saw his comrades disappear from sight around a corner. Chance or premeditation, they left him alone. Leibing didn’t even think about it, he took his camera and focused on Schumann who, at four o’clock in the afternoon that Tuesday, threw down his cigarette, started running forward, barely stepped on, in the middle of the jump, the barbed wire, got rid of his rifle and fell almost into the arms of the Western police.
It was a few seconds that Leibing captured, photo by photo, with the frozen hand of great artists. “I didn’t think of anything. Or almost. His mind was blank and only one thought: ‘I don’t want to die here, running.’ It all lasted four or five seconds, ”he would recall, or would say recall, years later.
Schumann was no longer who he was to become a symbol of the Cold War. Leibing’s photo went around the world, won awards and medals. There is a very short film that shows Schumann’s escape and his happy ending, which would perhaps be the last happy ending of his life. He settled in West Berlin, met his wife Kunigunde, had a son and was lost in history.
Brought him back to fame Ronald reagan. On June 12, 1987, with his back to the Wall and in front of the Brandenburg Gate, Reagan challenged Gorbachev with a speech that bore the stamp of his speech chief Anthony Dolan: “Mr. Secretary General Gorbachev, if you seek peace, If you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and for Eastern Europe, if you seek freedom, come to this Gate, Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall! ”. Schumann immediately returned from the past and was photographed with the US presidential couple.
He then admitted, when interviewed as a hero of yesterday and a living symbol of the Cold War, that had been into alcohol for a dozen years, who had been a bricklayer, a nurse and an employee of the Audi car factory in Ingolstadt. He then photographed himself in front of the Wall still standing, with the enlarged photo that Leibing had made famous and that Schumann had in the dining room of his house in Bavaria, next to the one that showed him next to Ronald and Nancy Reagan.
He said that he had never regretted that jump: “I am proud of what I did,” he told Corriere della Sera, “I was in great danger, I broke with my past and began to endure intense pressure.”
But it is never easy to break with the past. His parents had written him dozens of letters imploring him to return to East Berlin. When Schumann finally did so, after the Wall had fallen, he discovered that those family letters had been dictated by the Stasi, the fearsome communist secret police. Back on his land, he discovered something else, and more painful: “When I returned, I discovered that my gesture had never been accepted by some relatives and old friends who no longer wanted to talk to me. But the truth is that it was only since November 9, 1989 that I felt really free. “
Schumann could never cope even with the emptiness of his friends, who reproached him for his betrayal of the communist world, nor the reproach in similar terms made by his parents and brothers, whom he doubted to visit in the old family home in Saxony. Something had been broken in him before, during or after his legendary escape and the fall of that stone ghost that had shaped his life in a very special way.
June 20, 1998 They found him hanging from a tree near Riesa and from the city of Kipfenberg, in Upper Bavaria, almost on the banks of the Elbe. He was 56 years old.
His leap to freedom is today a national monument in Germany.
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