Bilfinger Berger Magazine 2/2009

20 YEARS AGO THE BERLIN WALL CAME DOWN. AUTHOR PHILIPP MAUSSHARDT RECALLS THE TIME HE HELPED A FRIEND ESCAPE FROM THE GDR.

On the day the Wall came down, the roasted chestnuts seemed to lose their flavor.

This might be my last chance to tell this story. Who knows if anyone will still be interested ten years from now? On the 50th anniversary of the day the Wall came down, they’ll probably roll me into the assembly hall at some local elementary school. “This is old Mr. Mausshardt,” the principal will announce to the children, “he’s going to tell us what it was like back then.” Back then, on November 9, 1989, to be precise, I was sitting in front of the fire with my friend Axel. The phone rang and when I had hung up, the chestnuts seemed to lose their flavor. Yes, that’s what it was like back then.

The idea of helping get Axel from East Germany to the West occurred to my girlfriend and I the first time we met him in Dessau in ’88. Such a nice guy and such a wicked regime—not exactly a match made in heaven. Friederike offered to marry him, I agreed, but a lawyer skilled in such marriages of convenience advised against it: It would take years. “The trunk?” I asked Friederike. “The trunk,” she agreed.

Those who remember the controls at the German- German border will understand why we chose to take a detour. The gruff customs officials with their rustic accents would have had no trouble discovering our stowaway. The Hungarians, on the other hand, were the smooth operators of the Socialist world, “egészségedre!—cheers, let’s have another.” The GDR, however, had so little faith in Axel as one of its citizens that they weren’t prepared to give him a visa—not even for Hungary.

Our efforts appeared in vain until the early summer of 1989 when a friend wrote to say that Axel had a visa for a vacation in Romania. Romania staunchly toed the party line. But the train to Romania had to pass through Hungary! “Operation T” was on. “T” as in trunk. I took the car apart and stowed two walkie-talkies behind the door trims. I’m not sure any more just what we were supposed to do with them, but when you’re planning an operation like that for the first time, you do the oddest things. We were, after all, new to the game of smuggling people out from behind the iron curtain in the trunk of a car.

We met at the railway station in Budapest. Axel was feeling a little uneasy. So were we. Since Axel didn’t have a visa, we spent the night in a wooded area. The next morning was hot and sunny. We packed Axel in the trunk and covered him with dirty underwear, rank sleeping bags and clutter. On top we placed a few ice-cold cans of Coke.

Hungarian customs officers are only human and as they started to rummage through the chaos in the trunk on such a hot day, their hands quickly encountered the cool cans. “Please, help yourselves,” I said, indicating they should keep these thirst-quenching cans as a gesture of international friendship. They immediately stopped rummaging and passed us through with a friendly wave. It was that easy. When Axel’s head next appeared from beneath the chaos, we were in Austria.

That was July, four months before the Wall came down. On November 9, Axel and I were relaxing at a farmhouse in Tuscany. In the hearth a fire was blazing and we were roasting the chestnuts we had gathered earlier in the woods. The phone rang. It was Axel’s sister in Dessau. The border was open, she said, now anyone could come across. Just like that.

Bilfinger Berger Magazine 2/2009