Travel Maven blog

Germany, the revolution of candles and prayers

Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and end to Germany's Iron Curtain, David Molyneaux returns for the celebrations. This is his seventh blog.

Eastern Germans remember 1989 as the year of the big surprise.

Decades had rolled by without much reason for hope of democracy. Then, in a matter of months, the old East German regime fell apart, and freedom arrived overnight.

Most of the world did not know in 1989 that the Cold War of more than four decades was crawling toward an end. The Soviet Union -- a collection of countries tied forcibly to communist Moscow after World War II -- was collapsing economically, though that, too, was kept under wraps.

Meanwhile, the people of Soviet-dominated countries such as East Germany, kept taking baby steps toward freedom.

Germany, secrets of the dreaded police in Leipzig

Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and end to Germany's Iron Curtain, David Molyneaux returns for the celebrations. This is his sixth blog.

Folks who live in Leipzig, Germany, are proud of the museum dedicated to the horrors of the old  East German secret police, the Stasi. Truth gains value after you live in a world of lies for four decades.

The Stasi Museum in Leipzig is operated by a community group that continues to work at   saving old records and keeping the past alive -- making certain, they say, that nothing from the secret days remains hidden from the public.

During the past 20 years -- since the end of the Iron Curtain across Germany and the decrepit East German government -- wives and husbands have found out about spouses who were spying on them for the Stasi.

Parents discovered their children kept tabs on their anti-government feelings. Neighbors learned of sneaked peeks when window shades were not drawn, when, perhaps, families were breaking the law by watching television shows from the west.

Germany, lies and dreams east of the Iron Curtain

Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and end to Germany's Iron Curtain, David Molyneaux returns for the celebrations. This is his fifth blog.

Behind old enemy lines, Germans have stories to tell. 

Delightful cities of music and religious history, such as Eisenach and Leipzig, offer also a journey through the old East German world of hidden bunkers, secret police and a life so fearful that  citizens didn't dare let their children talk at school about family time at home. They feared any talk might lead the police to arrest them for social violations or government taboos, such as watching television shows beamed from the west.

"We lived a lie," said Ralf Paesler, an environmentalist in Eisenach, about 170 miles southwest of Berlin. 

Paesler said that in East Germany, when you walked out your door, talked on the telephone, wrote a letter or discussed anything in public, you presented yourself as a good, enthusiastic citizen in the repressive society of the German Democratic Republic (the GDR). 

Wartburg Castle, above, has dominated Eisenach for nearly 1,000 years.

Paesler must have been persuasive, as he tested government authorities when he claimed he was a conscientious objector to war -- this in a country that didn't recognize objections of any kind. 

Somehow, said Paesler, he managed to get through more than a year in the army without touching a weapon. He said he learned the concept from what he heard about America during the Vietnam war.

Germany, when East met West on peaceful soil

Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and end to Germany's Iron Curtain, David Molyneaux returns for the celebrations. This is his fourth blog.

In late October 1989, when there were two Germanies, The Plain Dealer of Cleveland, Ohio, sent me to West Germany to write articles for the Travel Section. Dour East Germany, behind the  Soviet Iron Curtain, was not much of a vacation destination.

During the first week of November 1989, I wrote that some residents along the Iron Curtain believed that the border fences, in place for more than than 40 years, would fall by Christmas.

Molyneaux in Berlin, November 1989

Folks I interviewed said citizens on both sides were ready to cross the border, and they believed that security personnel would not stop them. Before my story was published in Cleveland, German wishes came true.

On Nov. 9, Berliners scaled the hated wall. On Nov. 10, Germans on both sides of the Iron Curtain demanded that highway gates be opened and began tearing down border fences where country roads once met. Not a single border guard fired a shot. 

On Saturday, Nov. 11, I joined thousands of Germans who streamed through new holes in the fences to find neighbors and villages they had not visited in decades.

Germany, along the old Iron Curtain

Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and end to Germany's Iron Curtain, David Molyneaux returns for the celebrations. This is his third blog.

For today's young travelers who zip around Europe, where borders of countries sometimes seem irrelevant, Germany in the 1950s, 60s, 70s and 80s may be difficult to comprehend.

Germany was two countries. Down the middle of what we now know as Germany, for 865 miles, was a highly militarized border with fences and walls, dogs and soldiers, cameras and machine guns. The border -- marked by what nations of Western Europe called an Iron Curtain and the Eastern Soviets called anti-fascist protection -- was the result of the end of bloody World War II. 

On both sides of this border, armies with tanks and missiles prepared for World War III.

Today, the border is gone, and Germany is unified as one country. Travelers can gain a sense of the past along the old border, in an area about 100 miles west of Berlin. These Cold War sites are an easy day trip from Berlin, Germany's capital, and most can be reached by train. 

Germany, poking about the Berlin Wall

Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and end to Germany's Iron Curtain, David Molyneaux returns for the celebrations. This is his second blog.

With its museums, theaters, outdoor cafes, fine restaurants, youthful atmosphere  and thriving cultural life, Berlin has reclaimed its position as one of the great cosmopolitan cities of the world.

But for 44 years, after the end of  World War II, Berlin was an international enigma.

The entire city -- with West Germans living in West Berlin, East Germans living in East Berlin -- was geographically inside East Germany, about 100 miles east of the border with West Germany. That meant that West Berliners had to travel through 100 miles of East Germany to get to the rest of  West Germany. It was a journey through enemy territory.

At the end of World War II, Berlin -- the strategic planning center for the Nazi war machine and the massacre of Europe's Jews -- had been divided by the four allied conquerors.

At right, Berlin's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe  

The United States, Great Britain, and France turned their portions over a new free West Germany. The Soviet Union kept its portion as part (and capital) of East Germany.

Sometimes the Soviets closed the route between Berlin and West Germany, but other times West German residents could travel relatively freely back and forth.

That's why post-war West Berlinwas full of clandestine representatives of every major country in the world. It was a cloak and dagger hangout at the crossroads of Cold War political intrigue.