The Berlin Wall Divided His Family, and Its Legacy Remains
Gouri Sharma
When Germany was divided, the Guetinger family was among the millions separated. In 1969, young Erich Guetinger finally reunited with his uncle's family in East Germany, a journey that symbolized the pain of political borders. He shares his memories of the arduous visa process and the emotional reunion.
Erich Guetinger was 18 when he first met his uncle's family again as a grown man. The last time he had seen them, he was a small child, so he was both eager and anxious to meet his uncle, aunt, and two cousins after all those years.
It was the summer of 1969—the time the Beatles were recording Abbey Road, the United States was beginning to withdraw troops from Vietnam, and Neil Armstrong was about to become the first person to set foot on the Moon. By then, Germany had been divided for two decades. The Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) was a capitalist democracy allied with the United States and Western Europe, while the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) was a socialist state tied to the Soviet Union, led by the Socialist Unity Party. Berlin itself had been divided since 1945, and the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 deepened that rift.
The two states differed markedly in size and population. About 51 million people lived in West Germany and about 18 million in East Germany, separated by a border nearly 2,000 kilometers (1,242 miles) long that ran from the Baltic Sea to the Czechoslovak border. By 1969, West Germany's population had grown to about 61 million, while East Germany's had fallen to roughly 17 million.
With most of the family living in their hometown of Babenhausen, Bavaria, and Uncle Hans, Aunt Frieda, and cousins Dieter and Guenter in Brieskow-Finkenheerd, a village near Frankfurt an der Oder in East Germany, the Guetinger family was directly affected by Germany's political division.
The journey that today takes only a few hours by car, back then required obtaining visas, traveling along designated transit corridors, and enduring checks by border guards. It was those cumbersome procedures that made young Guetinger uneasy.
“My father and I set off on Saturday afternoon,” recalls Guetinger, now 75, a historian, author, and kindly grandfather who lives in what was formerly West Berlin. “After a two-to-three-week visa process, during which we had to notify East German authorities of our accommodation and purpose of travel, we reached one of the three transit corridors that were the official entry and exit points between the two countries.”
They traveled by train through the Bavarian border crossing into Probstzella, in GDR territory. “As soon as the train entered GDR territory,” Guetinger says, “we were stopped and border guards checked our visas and IDs.”
The father and son stayed in Frankfurt an der Oder for a week, meeting family friends, enjoying fresh meat, and spending quality time in the small home. “My uncle was very keen to introduce his brother from the West to all his friends,” Guetinger recalls with a smile. “It was a wonderful trip, and although it had been a long time, we got along very well.”
They returned to Bavaria just in time to watch Armstrong set foot on the Moon, together with another uncle named Erich and some friends. “To this day, I still remember the faint black-and-white images on the TV. The distance between us wasn't that far, but making the trip from Bavaria to Frankfurt an der Oder felt as remote as going to the Moon and back.”
