Fleeing the GDR in a car boot: ‘Inside, I was still on the run’
Veronika Schneider fled the GDR as a young woman – and only realised decades later how long the fear had kept its grip on her.
By Jule Merx (text), Michael Hinz (photos)
A divided Germany – what for younger generations is at most a dull episode from school lessons or a story told by parents and grandparents is a vivid memory for others. Veronika Schneider is one of the people who can tell such a story: a story of an oppressive state and of an escape that did not end for a long time even after she arrived in the West.
‘Everything was still as if the war had only just ended. I more or less grew up in the rubble and played in the rubble,’ Veronika Schneider recalls of her childhood. She was born in East Berlin in 1952, in a street very close to Rosenthaler Platz. As a child she knew the city almost without borders – ‘and then there was the Wall,’ she remembers. In August 1961, when Veronika is nine, the GDR government has the Wall built – the Wall that would separate families for 28 years and seal off the East from the West for good. ‘I saw them build the Wall stone by stone. The police always stood there with their rifles, and my grandmother stood behind it. When the Wall wasn’t very high yet, we always waved to each other,’ she says. Waving from the East to Grandma in the West – just a few weeks later that is no longer possible. A death strip between five and several hundred metres wide separates the East German population from the Wall, the ‘anti-fascist protection rampart’, as it was called in the GDR.
After her former fiancé is interrogated and tortured by the Ministry for State Security, the Stasi arrests her too. She is accused of burglaries she never committed.
Today anyone can approach the former inner-German border without a second thought and cross it – without panic about being caught and ending up in prison, without panic about setting off a spring gun, without panic about attracting the attention of a border guard with orders to shoot, and without panic about stepping on a mine and losing an arm, a leg or their life. Most of the time, crossing the border no longer even registers. In many places along the former dividing line between East and West, little remains to remind you that a deadly swathe once cut through Germany.
But in some places, parts of the inner-German border have been preserved. Concrete blocks, remnants of barbed wire, old patrol tracks and overgrown watchtowers recall a time barely more than three decades ago. Remembering, or trying to understand what you read in history books, is possible in Marienborn, for example, right on the Berlin–Hannover motorway in Saxony-Anhalt. The Marienborn Memorial to the Division of Germany is a place of remembrance for German and European contemporary history. ‘Here we remember the largest German border crossing there ever was – in its day also the largest border crossing in Europe.
This monumental size is, of course, also a symbol of what the GDR actually wanted with this border: to stop its citizens leaving the country,’ explains Felix Ludwig, a historian with a doctorate and acting director of the Marienborn Memorial to the Division of Germany. On the site, which once covered 30 hectares – about 42 football pitches – old huts still stretch out today under yellowed PVC roofs that bathe everything in a yellowish light. Until the collapse of the GDR, people entering and leaving were processed here, customs duties collected, and individual pieces of luggage and entire cars searched.
Inside the huts are the old offices of border officials, complete with typewriter, a portrait of Erich Honecker and an old border troops uniform – relics of a bygone era preserved in a few square metres. Outside the huts, countless tall concrete pillars rise into the air, topped with more than a dozen loudspeakers. On the ground, old road markings hint at how the traffic flowed and how the procedures ran. Everything here seems well structured and organised; as little as possible was left to chance.
A viewing window shows the former Marienborn/Helmstedt border crossing
‘The GDR didn’t want its citizens to know everything that was available in the West – and above all at what low prices.’ If in doubt, luggage was X-rayed.
Zimmer eines Grenzbeamten, Schreibmaschine, Portrait Erich Honecker, Marienborn / Helmstedt
A portrait of Erich Honecker hangs in a border official’s former office.
Archive photos of former border officials at Marienborn/Helmstedt.
Veronika Schneider grew up toeing the party line, as she puts it herself. ‘I was very good at school, was sent to the Pioneer Republic, and when I came back – I’d say today – it was like brainwashing. Until I was 17 or 18, I was a total fan of the GDR,’ she says. But that begins to crumble. Veronika takes her Abitur and goes to university, until she is barred from continuing her studies because she will not join the SED. She is accused of offences she never committed – theft and handling stolen goods. She is interrogated by the police and the Stasi. The problems pile up. ‘Today I’d say it was completely normal that I got into trouble. As a young person, I lived in a state that did not allow independent thought and wanted to severely restrict personal development. A state that divided everything into good and bad – there was nothing else. Good meant being for the state. If you were against it – even if you just had a different opinion – you were bad.’
Veronika decides to escape – in the boot of an Audi 100 Deluxe, a car from West Germany, via the Marienborn border crossing. The 21-year-old and her boyfriend at the time, Joachim*, who flees with her, meet the escape helpers at an agreed point on the transit route. ‘Frank*, our escape helper, had prepared the car so that we could release the backrest from the back seats.’ The two first sit on the back seat of their helpers’ car, set off and watch whether anyone is following them. ‘Then, while we were driving, we crawled from the back seat into the boot,’ she recalls. The two lie on top of each other on the shock absorbers, barely able to move – for an agonisingly long time, with the fear of being caught breathing down their necks. ‘If they had been discovered, under GDR law they would have been guilty of so-called attempted flight from the Republic, which carried a prison sentence of up to three years,’ explains the historian Ludwig. ‘If people trying to escape were discovered, they were arrested and put in the relevant Stasi remand prison. Here we have to speak plainly of physical and psychological torture.’
The ‘agent sluice’ – or ‘Stasi tube’ – was an underground link between the GDR and West Germany. The Stasi used it to smuggle agents between East and West beneath the border without being seen.
A patrol track runs along the former inner-German border on the Uhlenkopf.
Grenzdenkmal Hötensleben, Mauer, Panzersperren, Minenstreifen, MiStrf, Todesstreifen, Wachturm, Kolonnenweg
‘If people trying to escape were discovered, they were arrested and put in the relevant Stasi remand prison. Here we have to speak plainly of physical and psychological torture.’ – Felix Ludwig, historian
Verbogener Grenzzaun, Grenzdenkmal Hötensleben, Denkmal, Innerdeutsche Grenze
A bent border fence at the Hötensleben border memorial
Joachim, Veronika’s boyfriend and fellow escapee, gets drunk with a friend in the East as a farewell; Veronika takes two sedatives. ‘When I was lying on top of Joachim, he started singing because he was so drunk. Probably, I think today, he was scared. But of course it was terrible – I couldn’t get him to calm down. I was in total panic when Frank yelled from the front that we should damn well keep quiet now, he could already see the checkpoint. And then – this is dreadful, and I hope I would never have done it – I told Joachim that if he didn’t shut up now, I would smother him. Then he kept quiet.’
Veronika remembers the Audi 100 stopping and starting again a few times – and each time sheer panic wells up in her. She thinks the boot will be flung open any moment and it will all be over. ‘For many years after the escape I still had nightmares in which I was lying in the boot at night, it was opened and five submachine guns were pointed at me. It was a terrible situation of fear.’
Dividing wall and bottleneck between East and West at the same time – at the Marienborn border crossing, everyone was checked, whether they wanted to go West or East. No one got past handing over and the thorough checking of passports. On entering the GDR, the customs area was searched for weapons, drugs and political literature, but also for other forbidden things brought from the West, such as mail-order catalogues. ‘The GDR didn’t want its citizens to know everything that was available in the West – and above all at what low prices,’ Ludwig explains. If in doubt, luggage was X-rayed.
‘Especially when people were leaving, though, we are above all talking about refugees they might be hiding. That is mainly what they were searching for. The sniffer dogs used here were of course trained to sniff out not only drugs and explosives but also people who might be hidden in vehicles.’ The transit agreement signed in 1971 made travel between East and West easier. ‘The transit agreement prohibited searches without cause. But “without cause” is an elastic term. The people who worked there were of course trained to create causes. That could be things like luggage on the back seat that you would normally expect in the boot, or openings at the rear that could be breathing slits,’ Ludwig explains.
A former watchtower in the woods at Pötenitzer Wiek.
But Veronika and Joachim make it across the border undetected. ‘You’re free,’ she hears Frank say, and then the boot opens. But she does not throw her arms around her escape helper, happy and relieved; instead a very different feeling creeps over her. ‘I got out, above me was the open sky, it was a very clear night, I saw the stars, and very, very far away, from the western side, I saw the border checkpoint. It was a feeling of complete lostness. My heart almost pulled me back to the checkpoint; I couldn’t be happy at all. The first sentence I said in the West was the one that really outed me as a GDR person. I said to Frank: “Now I know what existential fear is.” That’s what we were always told at school: in the West, everyone lives in existential fear.’
The West as a place of longing, the hope of a life in freedom – whatever may have driven other GDR refugees to flee, it does not apply to Veronika. ‘The crazy thing was that I still believed in the GDR. I was still convinced of socialism, that the GDR was the better German state. But I believed I wasn’t good enough. So I cleared off,’ she explains.
But even when Veronika arrives in the West undetected, her escape is not over. ‘There followed a very long time when – I know today – I was still on the run inside.’ West Berlin, Swabia, Crete – ‘only ten years later, in 1983, when I came back from Greece to West Berlin for good, did I begin to develop a sense of home again.’ The fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989 also stirs up what she went through. The images of that evening go round the world – crowds on the once insurmountable Wall in front of the Brandenburg Gate, complete strangers hugging each other with joy, German flags waving as a sign of newly won unity. ‘The opening of the border is one of the few moments in contemporary German history of which you can say it is an unreservedly positive story. That day, that evening, that night,’ Ludwig explains.
For Veronika, though, it is not an evening of happiness – quite the opposite. ‘When the Wall came down in 1989 and everyone was in a frenzy of joy, I had panic attacks and almost went mad. I developed real psychological problems.’ She seeks help and undergoes psychoanalysis. ‘Only then, in the early to mid-1990s – which was ages after the escape – did I start to reflect that it wasn’t me who was wrong, or a traitor, but that the state was wrong, with all its repression, indoctrination and paternalism. It took decades for me to understand that at 21 I wanted something completely normal. I wanted to go where I wanted to go, and above all I wanted to say what I think. I wanted to live; I wanted to feel free.’
*Names changed
Ehemalige Innerdeutsche Grenze Hötensleben, Mauer, Fluchtleiter, Leiter, Lichttrasse, Signalzaun
The former inner-German border near Hötensleben
