My good friend Bea Beyer, on the porch of her Eastern Sierra home
German-born residents have a variety of memories of a divided Germany after World War II, but none could be called fond.
Bea Beyer, born in Berlin in 1941, said the wall existed long before the barbed wire fence went up overnight on Aug. 12, 1961, dividing the communist Russian zone from West Berlin.
“From the time they divided Germany between east and west, there was an ideological and emotional wall. It just wasn’t physical yet,” Beyer said in a recent interview.
Young as she was in those years, Beyer still recalls seeing people shot and killed as they tried to escape to the American sector. “That division existed in spades before the wall was built. It was very scary.”
She and her young parents escaped to the west on the Berlin Airlift in 1948.
By the time the wall came down on Nov. 9, 1989, it had cut East Germans off from their family, friends, country and the rest of the world for 28 years.
Its fall 20 years ago today heralded a worldwide celebration of freedom. “I was amazed and elated,” Beyer said. “It was up 20 years too long.
Beyer returned to Berlin in 2002 for the first time since her birth and saw portions of the wall that were still standing. “It was all so familiar to me. I didn’t remember specifics, but I felt like I knew I’d been there before.”
Indeed, she had. “After the war, life was hell. Germany, east and west, was very poor. You had to hang on to whatever you had because you couldn’t replace it.”
Emigration to the west was very difficult. The family was fortunate because Beyer’s father, Walter, commuted to a job in West Berlin. His work permit and friendships with American officers enabled him to arrange escape from the communist sector in 1948. He had found an emigration sponsor in Joe Laufer, a Jewish lawyer who participated in the Nuremburg trials.
On the day of the family’s departure on a streetcar into West Berlin, Beyer recalls they had to appear as if they were just visiting relatives. She was not even allowed to take a favorite teddy bear (today she has dozens).
The sobering lesson of the Berlin Wall, she says today, is that many other walls still exist across the world – in the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and the one currently under construction at the Mexican-American border: “Walls to keep somebody out and somebody in, whatever side, it doesn’t really matter. It’s that politically we erect walls, and somehow think that’s okay.”
After living in West Germany for several years, her father found work in the film industry in California and the family came to the States in 1952.
Marriage is what brought Beyer to Mammoth in 1971. “I married this Austrian, and he wanted to come to the mountains,” she said.
Marlene Fiebiger and her husband, Dieter, never knew life in East Berlin, but she remembers all about the wall.
“That was something nobody ever agreed with – a divided Germany.”
She and her husband Dieter married in West Germany and emigrated to the United States with $210 to their name in 1958. The fall of the wall means freedom, she says unequivocally today. “It’s Germany again, where you can go wherever you want to go, and you don’t have to sneak in or out.”
Though the Fiebigers didn’t have relatives in East Germany, they had many friends there whom they didn’t see for years after the wall went up.
“Americans, they don’t know what it means, to be next door to a communist country,” she asserted quietly, as a matter of fact.
“Like if I say our president is a jerk, big deal. But if you said that at that time in East Germany, and somebody squealed, you would be in jail. You couldn’t even trust your neighbor or your relatives, because there might have been somebody who was influenced by communism and squealed on you. You were always under suspicion, you always had to look left and right. And the living conditions weren’t good. You were not free.”
The couple moved to Mammoth in 1973 after living in the San Fernando Valley. “We came up here camping and we decided to move up here and open up a repair shop – the Alpine Garage.”
Werner and Marianne Launspach lay claim to being the longest-standing German emigres in Mammoth. They arrived in 1964. “We are almost locals,” quipped Werner in a phone interview.
The couple visited the Berlin Wall just before it came down, but because they were American citizens by then, they felt somewhat on the outside. But the German people were clearly excited about it.
“The wall was intended originally not to let people out anymore, because people in East Germany tried in droves to get to the West,” Werner said. “It was guarded so people couldn’t get out. It was like a prison there. It was just dominated under the communist regime for over 30 years, and then when the wall finally came down, came the rude awakening.”
The two Berlins became showcases of two economic systems: communist and capitalist. After the wall fell, the eastern mark was also demolished. The people of East Berlin felt the pressure to live like West Germans, but did not have the financial resources to do so.
“They had to work themselves up to that standard of living,” Marianne said. “Before, they had all the money in the world, but nothing was in the stores before the wall fell. Now, all of a sudden, they could buy everything in the stores, but they didn’t have the money. It was a real shock.”
Twenty years later, Germany is still subtly divided. “There’s still tax for East Germany to build it up – to bring it up to Western standards. And I think the West Germans didn’t like that at all,” Marianne said.
“We always loved the mountains – in Germany, too – but we never had a chance to make a living in the mountains,” Marianne explained.
They came up to ski in Mammoth from their home in Long Beach and they fell in love with it. Werner found work as an electrician on the Mountain. “At that time, you know, they were just building Chair 4,” Marianne recalled.
