Berlin — Somehow KFC is at the epicenter of Berlin’s history. The white and red sign of the Kentucky food chain looms in the background of all the pictures I took at checkpoint Charlie. No matter the angle, it found a way into the shot with its strategic placement, right next to the “You are now leaving the American sector” sign at the former border crossing. Where KFC stands today, on Friedrichstr. 45, JFK once gave an address in June 1963, just five months before his assassination. What is impressive here is not the American president’s emphasis on the universality of freedom and human rights, but the fact that KFC managed to successfully lobby the state government and snatch the property from its rightful owners, the döner industry. It is quite clear that Western Capitalism won the Cold War.
The walking tour this morning “walked us through” the history of Berlin. The memorial of the murdered Jews of Europe and the remnants of the SS headquarters at the Topography of Terror stood as reminders of the Nazis and the Holocaust. Seeing an outdoor display of “Trabis,” the GDR staple cars that required a five-year period between order and delivery, made one think just how sustainable supply chains in Soviet countries were.
Jokes aside, the stories our tour guide shared, especially about Berlin’s post-war days of the Wall, were shocking. The one that hit closer to home was that of Peter Fechter. Fechter was born in Berlin in January 1944. A little over a year later, on August 2nd, 1945, USSR General Secretary Joseph Stalin, UK Prime Minister Clement Attlee, and US President Harry Truman signed the Potsdam Agreement, dividing the German capital into four occupation zones, each administered by one of the Allied powers. The Fechters ended up in the Soviet-controlled Eastern sector where they spent the early years of the Cold War. But the conflict eventually heated up, and from the rubble of the breached trust among “allies,” the Berlin Wall was built.. In 1962, Fechter, by then nineteen years old, was hired to lay the bricks of a second wall, an additional barrier between West and East. Realizing that he was erecting the bars of his own cell, he took a tragic leap of faith. On August 17th, 1962, as he tried to defect to the American sector, he was caught in the barbed wire of no man’s land, the neutral territory between the two walls, and bled to death. “Er wollte nur die Freiheit,” he only wanted freedom, reads the inscription of his memorial. Peter Fechter is just one of hundreds who died trying to escape the authoritarian surveillance state of the GDR. Fechter’s memorial stands in what used to be West Berlin. He had finally made it.
After the tour, a couple of us walked to the Bundestag to attend a demonstration of Yazidis facing deportation. Many Yazidis came to Germany after their community was persecuted by the Islamist militants of ISIS. Despite the recognition of the Yazidi genocide in January, the German government has now sent thousands of deportation notices to members of the community all around the country, from Dortmund to Düsseldorf and Munich. “We have no home in Iraq,” some of the people at the rally told us and mentioned how cruel it would be to force “children who have been born and raised in Germany” to move to a country they have never known, while others pointed at the atrocities that women and children endured in the hands of ISIS to prove that the government’s decision to send them back is “unexpected and unfounded.” One is left to wonder what is driving the government’s hand. We will be out tomorrow to investigate.
