They Tried to Divide the Sky: Listening to Cold War Berlin FLORENCE FEIEREISEN MIDDLEBURY COLLEGE «At least they can’t divide the sky,» Manfred states in Christa Wolf’s novel They Divided the Sky, when his lover Rita chooses socialist ideals and life in the German Democratic Republic over westbound Manfred. «The sky? ,» Rita thinks in response, «this enormous vault of hope and yearning, love, and sorrow? » «Yes they can,» she says, «the sky is what divides first of all» (191). Originally in German, Wolf’s Der geteilte Himmel was written in 1963 during the aftermath of the construction of the Berlin Wall, a time of high cold war tension. The story is the tragic one of two young lovers who find their lives separated by the Wall. I am interested in the concept of a «divided sky» and seek to examine how the airspace situated along the border between East and West was experienced sonically in divided Berlin. Blesser and Salter define an acoustic arena as a «region where listeners [share] an ability to hear a sonic event» (22). In what follows, I leave Wolf’s novel behind and present three acoustic arenas that showcase how the people of East and West Berlin lived in and visually experienced separate spaces, while sharing the sonic airspaces of the Cold War: first, the highly politically charged sound war that took place in the early 1960s at the command of those in charge on both sides of barbed wire and Wall; second, traveling sound waves at a concert given by Western artists (including David Bowie and Genesis) on the west side of the Wall but intended for East Berliners to hear in 1987; and third, traveling ambient sounds in the border area of the train station Berlin-Friedrichstraße, a transfer station for West transit into Eastern territory. These sounds include engineered and accidental sounds, sounds amplified through loudspeakers, and sounds that were completely unprocessed. There is no doubt that sounds played a significant role in the everyday lives of East Berliners - acoustic control and surveillance through the Ministerium für Staatsicherheit (Stasi) and socialist mass songs are just two examples - but I argue that the Cold War as it was fought acoustically within earshot of the Berlin Wall was, above all, a loud war. Studying the sounds along the Wall sheds light on the manipulation and control of the sonic public in divided Berlin. Visually speaking, the Wall was a monumental reminder of German division; understanding the aural meaning of the traveling sound waves in the Wall’s shared, undivided airspace adds a layer to our understanding of the Cold War. The descriptions of historical eyewitnesses, or of earwitnesses, will help us reconstruct Berlin’s past as a means to understanding this visual marker of division in sonic terms. Sound is ethereal; it enters a space without appropriate papers, and it doesn’t ask for permission from the authorities to bathe the ears of listeners in its waves. All sound waves are, by definition, travelers: they are pressure waves of air molecules in motion through a medium. Physically speaking, a wave is a propagating disturbance of an equilibrium state. Like ocean waves, sound waves need a medium through which to travel, and anything made of molecules can play this role; in our context, we will look at sound waves traveling through air. These molecules carry the sound waves by bumping into each other, just as colliding billiard balls pass on their kinetic energy. They finish their journey at our eardrums (tympanic membranes), setting up vibrations inside resonance cavities within the inner ear. I examine historical situations in which sound could travel when people could not: while the Wall prevented (most) East Berliners from crossing the border, nothing was - or still is - in place to prevent sound waves from traveling over walls. In Spaces Speak, Are You Listening? Barry Blesser und Linda-Ruth Salter observe: «History provides an almost limitless portfolio of visual sketches of spaces, but no corresponding portfolio of aural records» (70). These days, it seems that one can find any data needed online - yet in comparison to visual data, not much sonic data pertaining to the past is readily available because the recordings disappeared, became unreadable, or simply never existed. For one, recording technology is very young: in 1857, a dozen years before Edison would introduce his Phonograph, Parisian inventor Edouard-Léon Scott de Martinville (1817 - 1879) received French patent #17,897/ 31,470 for his Phonautograph. A printer by trade and very interested in the field of acoustics, Scott de Martinville sought to create a device that could transcribe vocal sounds. The recording process of this, the earliest known device of its sort, started with Scott himself speaking (or singing) into a funnel-like horn; his voice set a membrane at the end of the horn in vibration, forcing a pig bristle connected to the membrane to trace lines onto smoke-blackened glass or paper. 1 His recording invention worked, but playback options did not exist at the time. According to Jonathan Sterne und Mitchell Akiyama, Phonautographs «were never supposed to be heard»; in fact «the idea of audio playback had not been conceived.» They were, rather, «intended to be seen» (545; my emphasis). Therefore Scott de Martinville’s goal was not to reconstruct the sonic past; rather, his scientific endeavor was to succeed in turning acoustic 411 They Tried to Divide the Sky waves into visual documents. But why were Scott de Martinville and his contemporaries not interested in hearing the data upon successful recording? Sterne and Akiyama offer an explanation: «[They] believed that to see sound was to better know it» (546). Scott de Martinville’s task had, in his view, been successfully completed. 2 Another, more significant, reason why we cannot listen to more sounds of the past is that nobody recorded them. Recording technology was not, and still is not, readily available for everyone; more importantly, many sounds - unless they contain music or human voices in intentional acts, such as giving speeches or reciting poetry - do not seem to the general public to be worthy of documentation. In our context, many recordings of speeches given by GDR officials, social-realist music, and even the sounds of thousands of Berliners celebrating the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 can be readily found on YouTube. In contrast, there is only a small selection of ambient sounds available: the sounds of train stations, of streets, of random conversations. It is these sounds that allow us a more robust concept of times past, replete with the full complexity and texture of the experience. «[T]he general acoustic environment of a society,» suggests R. Murray Schafer, Canadian composer and pioneer of Anglophone sound studies, «can be read as an indicator of social conditions which produce it and may tell us much about trending and evolution of that society» (7). Advocating the consideration of a community’s soundscape as a marker of identity, Kendall Wrightson adds: «Schafer’s terminology helps to express the idea that the sound of a particular locality (its keynotes, sound signals and soundmarks) can - like local architecture, customs and dress - express a community’s identity to the extent that settlements can be recognised and characterised by their soundscapes» (10). But how are scholars of sound to conduct research when sonic data do not exist? Even when sound recordings are not available, one can collect aural information and reconstruct the sonic past by auralizing (the aural analogue of visualizing) it. Blesser and Salter define the term as «converting an image of a prospective spatial design into its acoustic properties» (70). Auralizing, therefore, works as a converse to Scott de Martinville’s Phonautograph: the point is to learn to «listen» to visual data of a certain time and space in maps, photographs, written eyewitness accounts, newspaper clippings, policy documents, etc. In auralizing, the goal is not to recreate every single note of the musical composition of the world around us, but to listen to properties of sound that lie beyond mere waveforms and to investigate the relationship of sounds and their environments. In other words, the task is to «describe the meaning contemporaries attached to the sounds they heard, why they listened to actual and represented sounds in particular ways, and 412 Florence Feiereisen how listening shaped their understanding of themselves and their societies» (Smith, «Echoes» 318). Hearing is an integral part of our perception of the world, and it contributes to our daily acquisition of knowledge. This notion can - and should - be applied to academic research; indeed, several disciplines have been experiencing a «sonic turn.» In Hearing History, sensory historian Mark M. Smith writes of the increasing focus on the aural in historical research: «This intensification holds out the prospect of helping to redirect in some profoundly important ways what is often the visually oriented discipline of history, a discipline replete with emphases on the search for ‹perspective› and ‹focus› through the ‹lens› of evidence, one heavily, if often unthinkingly, indebted to the visualism of ‹Enlightenment› thinking and ways of understanding the word» (ix). In his introduction, «Onwards to Audible Pasts,» he pleads: My hope is that questions of sound, noise and aurality will not just infiltrate historical narratives but also change the very conceptualization of historical thinking and problems. Should that occur, history will regain its full texture, invite new questions, and take us beyond an unwitting commitment to seeing the past. Ideally, we will begin to contextualize the past within the larger rubric of all senses and thus free mainstream historical writing from the powerful but blinding focus of vision alone (xxi). This article focuses on the aural aspects of narrating Germany’s past, which holds one seat at the table of what Smith terms «Sensory History»: not a field within the traditional discipline of history, but rather, a certain «habit» in «thinking about the past» (Sensing 5). «What are usually considered historical ‹fields› of inquiry - diplomatic, gender, race, regional, borderlands, cultural, political, military, and so on,» argues Smith, «could all be written and researched through the habit of sensory history» (Sensing 5). In other words, the senses function not only as an avenue to philosophically experience our own world, but also as a ‹lens› through which society, both past and present, can be investigated. Applying this ‹lense› to understanding Berlin’s past reveals soundscapes as a site of power struggle. Defective relationships frequently reveal themselves through sound. A lack of mutual tolerance and deficient willingness to communicate are often reinforced by loud rhetoric. This is exactly how the media along the Wall dealt with one another in divided Berlin. The war of sound waves happened in the shared airspace. For our auralization, let us backtrack a little. The construction of the Berlin Wall appeared as its own distinct soundscape: shortly before 2 a. m. on 13 August 1961, the lights around the 413 They Tried to Divide the Sky Brandenburg Gate were switched off, and one could hear the puttering sounds of trucks approaching from the street Unter den Linden, the rattling of tanks, vehicle doors clicking open, footfalls as men exited the vehicles, and doors slamming shut. Soon thereafter, Berliners sleeping in their apartments on either side of the border rustled in their beds and awoke to the ear-splitting sounds of jackhammers drilling a swath of destruction into the streets. With a grating ring as barbed wire was rolled out and tightened, the border between East and West Berlin became physically closed off. Before concrete fortified the border and obstructed the view, Berliners on each side could communicate both visually (for example by waving handkerchiefs) and acoustically («Kannste mal ne Schachtel Zigaretten rüberwerfen? » or «Du, der Else geht’s gar nicht gut.»). As no form of communication was allowed, information could be exchanged only when the border guards were not looking. But by the crack of dawn on 18 August, the barbed wire had been replaced by bricks and, later, concrete blocks. The physical manifestation of the Iron Curtain would remain closed for the next twentyeight years. Consider its dimensions. Length of the demarcation line between West Berlin and East Berlin (inner ring): 26.8 miles; length of the demarcation line between West Berlin and GDR (outer ring): 69.5 miles; overall length: 96.3 miles; parts of house fronts and boundary walls: 0.3 miles; 302 observation towers; 259 installations with dogs on cable-runs. 3 A shootto-kill order for border guards was put in effect. With an average height of 11.8 feet, the Wall’s concrete blocks had visually sealed the border. According to Heinz Gerull, West German radio journalist and face of the Studio am Stacheldraht, the GDR installed 190 loudspeakers along the demarcation line. When West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer visited West Berlin nine days after the construction of the Wall, he was greeted by a popular hit blasting from the speakers at the East side of the Reichstag: «Da sprach der alte Häuptling der Indianer, wild ist der Westen, schwer ist der Beruf.» Insulted by this music, Adenauer immediately turned around and walked back West (Pragal and Stratenschulte 36). Although helpless in the face of the Wall’s physical construction, West Berlin refused to accept this loudspeaker propaganda. After the first two deaths at the Wall, Senator of the Interior of West Berlin Joachim Lipschitz decided to launch a sonic counterattack. Together with RIAS (Radio in the American Sector), he arranged for a mobile loudspeaker unit on wheels, the Studio am Stacheldraht, to broadcast information from West Berlin into the East using a Volkswagen van (Volkswagen Kombi T1 b) fitted with six loudspeakers at 150 watts each. Soon thereafter, four Volkswagen vans 414 Florence Feiereisen commenced operations for acoustic guard duty day and night. Within a few days of the erection of the Wall, the acoustic arms race was in full swing. 4 Figure 1: Photograph from the Landesarchiv Berlin showing the Studio am Stacheldraht vans in action. Western newspaper were hard to come by in the East, and in the first years after the construction of the Wall, West German radio could not be received everywhere. Lipschitz sought to fill this information vacuum in East Berlin with the mobile loudspeaker units (Stratenschulte). The broadcasts always started with the famous military tune «Taps» (known to Germans as the trumpet solo from the 1953 Hollywood movie «From Here to Eternity») followed by the slogan «Hier spricht das Studio am Stacheldraht.» Before Gerull read the news, he appealed to the members of the Volkspolizei (German People’s Police of the GDR) and the Nationale Volksarmee (National People’s Army) not to shoot at people who tried to escape: «Wer einen Menschen erschießt, der von Deutschland nach Deutschland gehen will, begeht einen Mord. Niemand soll glauben, er könne sich eines Tages, wenn er zur Rechenschaft gezogen wird, auf höheren Befehl berufen. Mord bleibt Mord - auch wenn er befohlen worden ist.» The reporter’s voice addressed the officers who could see him and asked why they had been standing there since 13 August («Warum eigentlich? Fragt euch einmal, warum ihr hier stehen müsst.»), then immediately offered his own explanation: Walter Ulbricht and other officials wanted to persuade them that the construction of the Wall was to protect the citizens of the GDR. But the reporter pleaded: «Ihr seid klug genug, um diese Lüge zu erkennen.» Ulbricht, he said, wants to force them to commit crimes of violence. «Fragt euch selbst, fragt eure Kameraden, wie lange dieser unglückliche Zustand noch andauern soll. Sie hörten das Studio am Stacheldraht.» After fifteen 415 They Tried to Divide the Sky minutes, the trumpet solo was played again and the van drove off to the next location. 5 Although Studio am Stacheldraht tried to reach out to the ears of all East Berliners, it specifically targeted border guards who were stationed along the demarcation line and on watchtowers. Since the guards were not allowed to leave their position, they were a captive audience; they could not escape the sounds because, unlike eyes, ears do not have lids that can be closed on command. Moreover, had the guards worn headphones, they would have been unable to do their jobs. Reactions to this tactic differed: according to earwitnesses of the time, some guards heard the information and dispersed without saying a word; it is said that other guards welcomed these sounds from West Berlin and even kept small radio receivers on the towers to secretly listen to RIAS. But other times the scene was more dramatic, as it involved tear gas, fog bombs, rocks, bricks, and trash thrown over the Wall to the West. Earwitness Rainer Steinführ remembers the battle of the loudspeakers from his childhood: Die Fahrzeuge zogen natürlich den Unmut der ‹Organe› auf sich. Tränengas, Nebelbomben, Steine, Abfall wurden gern von der anderen Mauerseite zu den Wagen geworfen. Ich habe auch gezogene und in Anschlag gebrachte Waffen gesehen. Wie dem auch sei, zumeist dauerte es nicht lange, dann tauchte auf Ostberliner Seite ebenfalls ein Lautsprecherwagen auf, der Gegenparolen oder sowjetische Marschmusik verbreitete (Steinführ). Arriving literally from above, the acoustic responses to the Studio am Stacheldraht were initially folk tunes played loudly from the East’s 190 loudspeakers to drown out the Studio’s questions. Later, the East Berlin authorities set up their own mobile units; over the next few months, up to fifteen vans with loudspeakers from the VEB Roter Zinnober mounted onto the roofs came to stand guard. The West Berlin police called these vans that dispersed political slogans Rote Hugos. West Berlin won the volume battle: the fifteen Red Hugos (95 to 105 Phon) were outperformed by the Studio’s four vans (120 Phon). 6 I am not aware of any study that discusses hearing loss as a result of the sound war along the barbed wire, but it is clear that, regardless of whether they were actively involved, people up to 2.5 miles from the border dealt with ear-splittingly loud soundscapes. Border guards, of course, were not the only citizens addressed: on 16 October, workers of an East Berlin factory stood by their building’s (open) windows to listen to the messages of the Studio from the other side of the Wall. The factory’s authorities immediately arranged for its loudspeakers to blast Soviet marches, which only caused the staff to move closer to the windows. In this case, music as a weapon did not work against the power of 416 Florence Feiereisen words. The Volkspolizisten who were called to the site then threw tear gas grenades over the border and threatened the Studio’s van with machine guns. The vans reacted again as they loudly invited the East German workers to look out of the window and memorize the faces of those Volkspolizisten who wanted to shoot at people who, as the Studio said, simply wanted to read messages aloud. In private homes, this exposure to sound waves continued in both the East and the West. In a Zeit article titled «Propaganda-Posaunen,» a West Berliner who wrote under the acronym G. R. complained in 1963 about the West’s acoustic war: Noch in zwei Kilometern Entfernung ist keine Verringerung der Tonstärke zu bemerken. Im Umkreis von 100 m zerspringen Fensterscheiben, wenn sie angepeilt werden. Letzte Woche wurden diese Lautsprecher zum ersten Mal auf eine Kaserne der Volksarmee in Groß Glienicke eingesetzt. Die Antwort ließ nicht auf sich warten. Die Vopo fuhr am nächsten Tag Lautsprecher auf, die zwar nicht die Fensterscheiben zerklirren ließen, aber doch die in der Nähe der Zonengrenze wohnenden Westberliner zwang, die Fenster zu schließen, um das eigene Wort verstehen zu können (24). It was the citizens of West Berlin, added the earwitness, who were saddled with the burden of authorities fighting this deafening war: «Wer bezahlt das? Wahrscheinlich doch die Steuerzahler, die doppelt geschädigt werden, finanziell und gesundheitlich» (24). The East’s authorities went on to install permanent speakers next to one another on the horizontal bar of former overhead masts of the tram. The speakers were directed at West Berliners as earwitness Peter Ulrich from Lichterfelde (West Berlin) recalls: So gab es Tage, an denen wir acht oder zehn Stunden hindurch - pausenlos - beschallt wurden - und an anderen Tagen war überraschend wieder völlig Ruhe; eine unberechenbare Taktik war das, die uns zermürben sollte. Doch nicht bloß Nachrichten oder Kommentare gab es, sondern auch einfach nur Tanzmusik, mit der man glaubte uns unterhalten zu müssen; mal lauter, mal leiser, wie es eben gerade kam. Und nicht nur tagsüber ging das so; es kam vor, dass es spät abends um 22 Uhr immer noch hinter der Mauer quäkte, jaulte und brabbelte [. . .]. Diese Praxis wurde fast drei Jahre lang fortgeführt; erst im Laufe des Jahres 1964 hat man uns allmählich wieder Ruhe gegönnt. (Ulrich) But before the sound war finally quieted down, it became very loud one more time. On 7 October 1965, more than four years after the acoustic war had begun, the Nationale Volksarmee celebrated the GDR’s sixteenth anniversary on the military grounds just across the border from Berlin-Gatow. The Studio drove up to the Wall and disturbed the GDR’s festivities with its 417 They Tried to Divide the Sky characteristic trumpet solo. Instead of the vans, the Studio broadcasted from a new fleet of trucks with hydraulic cranes that lifted the loudspeakers up to 42 feet into the air and rotated them to aim as needed; the mounted 5,000 watt loudspeakers could sound more than three miles into the enemy territory (Epping-Jäger 17). 7 Announcing that yet another East German soldier was shot by his own comrades because he wanted to go «from Germany to Germany,» West German reporter Gerull’s voice continued: «Ein Schuss kann befohlen werden; dass er aber auch trifft, kann kein Befehl dieser Welt erzwingen.» After a gong, news from Moscow and Los Angeles were read. Another gong and the by now familiar trumpet solo brought the very last broadcast of the Studio am Stacheldraht to an end. After this event, the East German authorities ceased with their acoustic onslaught and the Studio’s loudspeaker vans were no longer deployed. Other than the only partially effective strategy to drown out sounds with even louder ones, the East’s authorities had not been successful in preventing traveling sound waves from crossing the border and propagating through the supposedly «divided sky.» Whereas people in 1961 were bombarded by inescapable sounds ordered and executed from ‹above› on both sides of the Wall, my next soundscape, the «Concert for Berlin» that took place very close to the Wall on Western territory in June 1987, features engineered, intentional sounds around which people congregated voluntarily. Similar to the 1961 soundscape, there was still no technology available twenty-six years later to divide the shared airspace sonically. Figure 2: Ticket for the «Concert for Berlin» 418 Florence Feiereisen When the three-day concert began at 4 p. m. on 6 June 1987, a stage 250 feet wide had been erected, 50,000 tickets had been sold, and technicians from RIAS2 (the youth radio in the American sector) stood ready in West Berlin to record the festival «Concert for Berlin,» which would celebrate the city’s 750 th anniversary. World stars had been hired to entertain the masses on the Platz der Republik directly in front of West Berlin’s Reichstag: David Bowie, New Model Army, the Eurythmics, Bruce Hornsby, Paul Young, and Genesis. The stage was physically in West Berlin, but it sat well within earshot of East Berlin - a mere 700 feet as the crow flies. The Wall ran around the back of the building and then formed a small arc around the west side of the Brandenburg Gate, that sad icon of divided Berlin and Germany. Already on the first night, East German authorities were stunned to see 6,000 youth convene around the Brandenburg Gate as the wind carried the music to the East. The hard, stone-clad facade of the Soviet Embassy at Unter den Linden 63 - 65 reflected the sound into the large courtyard. Standing in front of the iron doors made for a breathtaking acoustic experience. In the 1980s, young East Berliners craved popular music, and music from the West was in particularly high demand. Those in power deemed popular music as potentially subversive, so the mainstream music scene was monitored, controlled, and limited to those musicians willing to conform to state restrictions. GDR bands such as Renft, Puhdys, and Karat reached cult status and were promoted by the East German authorities as long as they adhered to the party line. Renft was banned in 1975; the Puhdys, on the other hand, adhered more strictly to the rules and were permitted to sing in English and even to tour in the Federal Republic of Germany! But East German youth craved English-speaking rock and pop music and felt more and more excluded from the world. Every day, they would listen to West radio and watch West TV, yet they found themselves just onlookers of Western popular culture. But popular music was not just a means through which to live vicariously as musicologist Peter Wicke suggested in a review on rock music in the very same year of the «Concert for Berlin»: «Rockmusik ist in der DDR - und das macht den wesentlichen Unterschied zu ihren angloamerikanischen Ursprüngen aus -Bestandteil des politischen Diskurses innerhalb der Gesellschaft [. . .], eine Diskussion freilich, die sich eher in sprachlicher und kultureller Symbolik denn in argumentativer Unmittelbarkeit vollzieht» (35). The East German authorities were very aware of popular music’s significance in society, and in order to placate their citizens, they allowed an increasing number of recordings by West German, British, and American artists to become available in the GDR. Whereas in the first two decades of 419 They Tried to Divide the Sky the GDR, the SED had viewed popular music as a dangerous American cultural weapon designed to corrupt its young people, turning them away from socialist ideals, the state label AMIGA (VEB Deutsche Schallplatten) started in the mid-1960s to release albums by Western artists such as Bob Dylan and the Beatles, and later, Phil Collins and Michael Jackson. Yet all foreign-licensed records were pressed in small quantities, so they were usually sold out within minutes. Music lovers resorted to recording radio music (often from stations in the West) onto tapes. In the mid-eighties, as Günter Mayer observes, [i]n 97.8 percent of all households there is a radio; in many there are two or three. The technical equipment has high-fidelity standard. More than 82 percent of the people between ages 15 and 23 have their own portable radios (more and more with taping-technique). The number of «walkmen» is increasing. The real popular use of radio is evident: more than 70 percent of the people in the GDR, older than 15, listen to the radio on workdays between four and eight o’clock AM. Most of such music is popular music. It is a fact - determined by sociologists - that - like everywhere else - people between the ages of 14 and 25 listen to music for an average of 2 or 3 hours a day, and often more. (n. pag.) Well aware of their youth’s enthusiasm for music from the West, the GDR authorities became apprehensive when they learned about West Berlin’s «Concert for Berlin» in June 1987. They assumed the festival to be yet another villainous attempt by the capitalist FRG to fight an international class battle and to spoil their youth (Kloth). Because the East’s authorities could not stop the sound waves from traveling across the border, they tried to remove the GDR citizens from the sound waves instead. The masses of youth that congregated in front of the Soviet Embassy close to the Wall in order to hear the festival presented a serious security problem that could possibly result in an attack on the «Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart.» Members of the Volkspolizei broke up the group, chasing people toward Alexanderplatz with truncheons in hand. The masses reacted by means of sound as thousands of GDR citizens proclaimed: «Die Mauer muss weg! ,» a famous quotation from then-mayor of West Berlin Willy Brandt’s 1961 speech in front of the Schöneberg city hall. Just a few months before the concert took place, the song «Berlin, Berlin (. . . dein Herz kennt keine Mauern)» by the West German band John F. und die Gropiuslerchen had also contained the line «Die Mauer muss weg»; it was therefore fresh in people’s memories. But soon the mood changed: West Germans recount hearing catcalls at first, then shrill cries from the other side of the Wall; by 10 p. m., rocks and empty cans were thrown over the Wall (Kloth). Soon thereafter, East authorities erected 420 Florence Feiereisen barriers and began to make arrests. All of this occurred on the first day of the three-day long festival. Overnight, both East and West German media reported on the police’s prohibition of youth from convening in front of the Soviet Embassy to participate (if only auditorily) in the music festival. On day two, thousands upon thousands flocked to the border area to find a good listening spot. Yet the East’s authorities had prepared for the event thoroughly: barrier chains had been installed far ahead of the Brandenburg Gate, and water cannons stood at the ready. Earwitnesses from the East report that it was impossible to determine whether people at this point had come to hear Phil Collins’s Genesis (who were slated to perform on that day), or whether they were simply onlookers to the upheaval. At sunset, the situation escalated again, and once more, West German festival goers reported hearing the masses chant «Die Mauer muss weg! » on the other side of the Wall (Kloth). It is important to note that all of this commotion did not come as a surprise to West Berlin - indeed, to unite both parts of Berlin through the means of music had been the explicit intention of West German festival organizer Concert Conzept Veranstaltungs-GmbH. In 1984, the same concert organizers had hired André Heller to put on a gigantic firework display that was seen by many in the East, so they knew exactly what would happen (Wagner). Heller’s Feuertheater, essentially a large-scale provocative piece of art, had illuminated the «divided sky» - its light show, accompanied by the sounds of detonating fireworks, had attracted many East Berliners to the border area. In this sense, Heller’s spectacle had been the dress rehearsal for the 1987 festival’s audacle in celebration of Berlin’s 750 th birthday. The artists themselves also knew that their audience would comprise both West and East Berliners. RIAS project manager Christoph Lanz, emcee at the festival, stated: «Nachdem [Phil Collins] erfahren hat, welche Hörerschaft RIAS2 in Ostberlin und in der DDR hat, dann hat er gesagt: Das machen wir! Damit in der DDR das gehört werden kann» (Wagner). The concert’s main act, David Bowie, went several steps further: he asked for the speakers to be turned not to face the West German concert goers, but to face the Wall. For technical reasons, it was only possible to turn a quarter of the speakers. After he sang the song «Time Will Crawl,» Bowie introduced his band and then addressed his audience in the GDR in German: «Wir schicken unsere besten Wünsche an all unsere Freunde, die auf der anderen Seite der Mauer sind.» Bowie had lived in West Berlin in the shadow of the Wall from 1976 to 1979, sharing an apartment in Schöneberg with Iggy Pop for parts of his Berlin stay. 8 421 They Tried to Divide the Sky Bowie’s stay in the divided city ten years earlier had influenced his song choice as well, as he went on to sing «Heroes,» which tells a classic story of two lovers who meet under the «divided sky.» Bowie sang: I, I can remember / standing, by the Wall and the guns shot above our heads / and we kissed as though nothing could fall and the shame was on the other side / ah, we can beat them for ever and ever then we could be Heroes just for one day. The atmosphere was electrifying; less than a week later elsewhere in West Berlin, with the monumental Brandenburg Gate as the backdrop, Ronald Reagan told Mikhail Gorbachev to «Tear down this wall.» The music made the Wall tremble on contact, both literally and metaphorically. More than twenty-five years ago the «Concert for Berlin» allowed East and West Germans to listen to sound waves sent into their shared airspace by world-class music artists and participants on both sides of the Wall, through conversations, sing along, catcalls, and the sounds of thrown rocks and empty cans. It also reminded all involved quite plainly that the Wall was still up, a sonic reminder that to live in its shadow meant to live a life interfered with. Meanwhile, the GDR regime downplayed the situation, noting that everything had gone according to protocol and there was no cause for worry. When East Berlin authorities learned that West Berlin planned to host another concert series of West German and international artists including Pink Floyd, Michael Jackson, Nina Hagen, and Udo Lindenberg in the Wall’s shadow in 1988, they realized that immediate action was necessary. They complained to the West Berlin senate that «the concerts were too close to a nearby hospital [Charité] and that the noise and vibration could cause the deaths of seriously ill patients there» («Fearing»). But music promoter Peter Schwenkow had already sold 30,000 tickets, so it was too late to cancel the concert outright. Instead, he asked the bands to lower their volume; in response, Pink Floyd redirected the loudspeakers to blast their song «The Wall» eastward (Kloth). The Minsterium für Staatsicherheit also removed potential troublemakers from the Wall ahead of time. But the principal precaution taken was to schedule a competing concert with international stars at exactly the same time in a different location. In order both to avoid a protest along the Wall similar to the one a year before and to win back the support of East German youth, the Künstleragentur der DDR had begun to organize concerts with famous artists from the West, resulting in what became known as the «Music Summer of 1988»: Depeche Mode followed the invitation to play in celebration of the Free German Youth’s 42 nd birthday; The Wailers, Marillion, and Bryan Adams performed during a three-day 422 Florence Feiereisen festival in June; West German artist Rio Reiser played on two consecutive nights in October. Although the dueling concerts might appear at first to be parallel to the acoustic arms race along the barbed wire a quarter century before, the GDR’s music festivals did not take place near the Wall, but on the cycling track in Berlin-Weißensee, deep in East Berlin and therefore at a safe distance from the Wall and the class enemy. Despite the GDR’s efforts to draw music fans eastward and away from the concerts on the West side of the Wall, thousands of youth congregated behind the Brandenburg Gate to eavesdrop, again chanting «Die Mauer muss weg! » Even before the concert started, people were bullied away, and one hundred individuals were arrested. One month later, Bruce Springsteen played before the biggest audience of his life: 160,000 tickets had been sold, but many more entered the cycling track in Weißensee without one. Although censored, millions of East Germans saw the concert on TV. 9 During the concert, Springsteen told the crowd in German: «Es ist schön, in Ostberlin zu sein. Ich bin nicht für oder gegen eine Regierung. Ich bin gekommen um Rock and Roll zu spielen für Ostberliner, in der Hoffnung, dass eines Tages alle Barrieren abgerissen werden.» Note that Springsteen chose «barriers» instead of «walls» - he did not want to risk being shut down by the authorities right away. His message achieved its goal independent of its exact wording. Music obviously is not just about passively listening to pleasant sounds. Indeed, by the 1980s, music directed at and even in the GDR itself had become an important platform for promoting reform and resistance: it actively advocated for political change. Not even the mighty Wall could stop this. United in the sonic airspace of the «divided sky,» both East and West Germans, in concert with West German and international pop stars, participated in a politicized acoustic arena together and planted the seeds for more change to come. The first two examples of the Cold War’s acoustic arenas revealed the sonic characteristics of the common airspace along the border between East and West Berlin. Example one was chosen from the earliest history of the Berlin Wall, while example two presented the soundscapes of June 1987, roughly two and a half years before its fall. My third example presents the soundscapes of yet another shared (air)space, this time not above, but rather below the divided city. While the Wall epitomized the German division, standing tall for twenty-eight years for everyone to see, there were many other, invisible «walls» that divided the city into two parts. In fact, even before the Wall was built, Berlin had been a divided city: its phone network, drinking water system, light cables, and gas lines had already been separated 423 They Tried to Divide the Sky (Pragal and Stratenschulte 51). 13 August 1961, finally, saw the all-important public transportation network divided and a frequently traveled escape route to the West cut off. Some train lines serving West Berlin ran through East territory; rerouting them proved to be financially unfeasible. The Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe (West) first offered 2.8 million Deutschmark, which was later raised to 6 million, for the right to use East German rails. Strapped for cash, the GDR agreed to the deal. After 1961, the subway line U6 ran from Tegel (West Berlin) to Tempelhof (after 1966, all the way to Alt-Marienfelde, West Berlin), passing through a short stretch of East German territory on its way. Figure 3: Map of the BVG (West Berlin) subway system in 1966. The five underground train stations between Reinickendorfer Straße and Kochstraße became ghost stations, allowing passengers of the West Berlin Uand S-Bahn to physically travel through East Berlin without stopping and therefore without legally entering the GDR. 10 This peculiar situation resulted from the position of the East Berlin neighborhood Mitte, which protruded into West Berlin; Mitte bordered West Berlin in the North, West, and South, thus forcing the lines U6 and U8 (and, after 1984, also the city train S2) to pass through this territory on their way from West Berlin to West Berlin. Before entering East Berlin territory, visual (signs) and auditory (recorded voice) warnings were given to the passengers that they were about to leave West Berlin. Earwitness Annette Scharnberg commuted with public transportation from her West Berlin apartment through East Berlin to her workplace in West Berlin. She remembers that the train passed slowly through the guarded ghost stations. What Scharnberg recalls as «slow» must have been fifteen miles per 424 Florence Feiereisen hour according to my own estimates. Scharnberg describes her memory in sonic terms: On my way to [Berlin-]Wedding, I went through the East and I remember that everything there sounded a bit different. The underground itself sounded different, too. [. . .] There was a specific sound to this slowness, somehow hollow, maybe because [the stations] were emptier. This hollow clack, clack, clack. A different resonance cavity. I think it is like in some films [. . .] steps approaching you across a big dark room: clack, clack, clack. This hollow sound - I think that stands for something threatening. A hollow sound in the emptiness (Dietrich 103). It is quite telling that this earwitness does not remember any other humans or human sounds - only the eerie sounds connected to the vast empty space. In most underground stations, there are waiting passengers, signs, benches, and often concession stands. Many West Berlin train stations featured musicians who entertained the masses hoping for a few Deutschmark. Yet since the Cold War’s ghost stations were underground stations void of any signs of human life with the exception of the border guards, there were no soft objects (hair, clothing, strollers, filled trash bins, newspaper kiosks, etc.) to absorb sound waves or dampen them; the hard surfaces of the stone or concrete floors, walls, and columns simply reflected the sounds of the train, causing the space to sound like an enormous hollow chamber with eerie reverberations. There were some ghost stations aboveground, but most ghost stations were underground, meaning that the train passengers passing through would not see East Berlin scenery, only the interior of abandoned train stations dimly lit by humming neon lights, just enough for train conductors and GDR guards to see. Earwitnesses also recall that once the trains passed into the ghost stations, conversations on the train would cease. The train ride was, for the passengers, a highly aural experience; this was true for the East Berliners aboveground as well. But in addition to hearing, they also smelled, and even felt, the West Berlin U6 traffic through ventilation grids and air shafts. Around the train station Friedrichstraße, not more than twelve feet separated passers-by on foot in East Berlin from those on the train heading back to West Berlin. The only train station along the U6 that did not become a ghost station was the train station Friedrichstraße, at which passengers from West Berlin could switch onto other West Berlin trains. The S3 that started in Wannsee actually ended at Friedrichstraße. This last example for the «divided sky» in Berlin remained a busy station even after the construction of the Wall. It was a unique situation in which a physical wall existed within the train station, separating East and West traffic: East and West Berlin in one building, on East German territory! This made Friedrichstraße the site of numerous attempts, a few 425 They Tried to Divide the Sky successful, many more unsuccessful, by citizens of the GDR to escape into the West. The train station was also a major border crossing between East and West Berlin: with the appropriate papers, after the Passagierscheinabkommen in 1963 and even more so after signing the Four Power Agreement in 1971, Friedrichstraße was an official entry point for visitors from the FRG and other Western countries into East Berlin and a transit station to get from West Berlin through Friedrichstraße to a destination in the FRG; selected GDR citizens with hard-to-obtain exit permits were also allowed to enter a West German train and ride it into West Berlin and/ or the FRG. It was also an Agentenschleuse, a transfer for agents - unofficially called Ho-Chi-Minh path. In «Bahnhof Friedrichstraße. Ein Museum,» East German author Jens Sparschuh calls Friedrichstraße the «absurdeste Berliner Bahnhof» (225) and explains: «Unterm Strich also, kurz und knapp: der Grenz- und Fernbahnhof Friedrichstraße ist ein Umsteigebahnhof, kombiniert aus Durchgangs- und doppeltem Kopfbeziehungsweise Sack-Bahnhof in Form eines Turm- Bahnhofs» (238). To decipher this quotation and to understand this train station as a border, long-distance, connecting, transit, terminal, and two-level train station, the reader has to think of it as two separate train stations with three platforms and on two levels. GDR citizens used platform C as a connecting or transit station to exit or board trains to other stations in East Berlin or in East Germany. Platform A was a long-distance station for international travels including Interzonenzüge, i. e., trains running nonstop from Berlin through the GDR to the FRG. In a «Geheime Verschlusssache,» Minister of the Interior of the GDR, Karl Maron, had ordered on 12 August 1961: «Züge im internationalen Reiseverkehr in Richtung Westen und zwischen Westberlin und Westdeutschland beginnen und enden auf dem Bahnsteig A des Bahnhofes Friedrichstraße» (Mugay 98). At this platform, the transit station became a terminus for trains commuting between the FRG and Berlin, a stop along the routes of longdistance trains to international destinations such as Copenhagen and Stockholm and the Paris-Moscow express. Platform B, finally, was the final destination for West Berlin’s S-Bahn to Wannsee and Staaken. Passengers from West Berlin switched to a different level, to subways or city trains located on the lower level of the train station. Platform B was also a shopping destination for visitors from the West: Intershops, a government-run chain of retail stores, offered alcohol, cigarettes, cosmetics, and other goods marketed to a West audience at comparatively low cost in order to generate a stream of outside currency into the GDR. Being situated on East German territory, all operations at the station were under GDR jurisdiction: all employees of Intershops and train station staff were 426 Florence Feiereisen from the East; only the train conductors on West Berlin subways or city trains and long distance trains from the FRG were from the West and traveled from West to East and then back to the West without leaving the platform. The platforms aboveground were separated by walls. Soon after traffic commenced again following 13 August, a wall almost three meters high constructed of opaque security glass with wire mesh was installed. East and West Berliners would pass each other unseen, but again, the sonic airspace above the glass wall was a shared resource. West Berliner earwitnesses recall hearing speaker announcements such as «Schönefeld zurückbleiben,» and the passengers waiting for their connecting train on the «Ost-Bahnsteig» (platform C) also heard announcements from the adjacent (West) platforms. An East Berliner recalls hearing the juxtaposition of directions from both sides: first instructions to step back while the long distance train to Munich passes through, and then an invitation to board that train. Delays to Hamburg were also announced (Dietrich 103). To the many participants in this soundscape who were never allowed to travel to those destinations, this was a cruel sonic teaser. In the 1980s, the glass was replaced by a higher metal wall that reached to the roof and prevented sounds from crossing over. Still, the sounds traveled around the walls: the East authorities did not build soundproof tunnels around West trains, so the trains entering the station - before they reached the platform - could be both seen and heard by people on adjacent platforms. The same held true for announcements, which needed to be sufficiently amplified to reach and be understood by all passengers on the platform. Had platform A or B been enclosed spaces, the passengers on platform C would not have been able to participate in the soundscape. Where the trains arrived and left revealed shared airspace capacious enough for sound to travel and, due to its volume, still be heard on the platforms. Underground, Bahnhof Friedrichstraße was an even more complicated maze. When the train station was restructured according to the above mentioned «Geheime Verschlusssache,» old corridors were closed, and others were built - with two-way mirrors, surveillance cameras, and interrogation rooms. There were even more walls separating East and West traffic, but with brick or concrete walls from floor to ceiling and a lack of the necessary volume described above, the airspace underground was now indeed divided. Lastly, the train station served as an official border crossing for westbound travel. Here, people were actually allowed to cross into the other world, provided they had the appropriate papers. Our last auralization, therefore, will reconstruct the soundscape of exiting the GDR while still on East Berlin territory. Western visitors to the East, GDR retirees, and others who had 427 They Tried to Divide the Sky special permission were allowed to travel from the GDR to the West using Bahnhof Friedrichstraße. Before they could leave, they had to enter through the Tränenpalast (palace of tears), a glass pavilion attached to the train station for customs, security, and foreign exchange checks. After waiting in line with many others, being interviewed, and receiving their stamps, they heard a buzzer and could now enter the train station’s hall through a metal door. In order to auralize this, we must also consider the demography: many of those traveling from the East to the West at this train station were citizens of the GDR aged sixty or older (termed «veterans of labor»), making for a rather advanced average age among the passengers at this border crossing. Exceptions were young or middle-aged uniformed officers who had the travelers and their luggage line up along a white stripe on the floor while their comrades searched the train; not until it was officially announced through loudspeakers were the travelers allowed to pick up their luggage and board the train. Needless to say, although many travelers were in their sixties, nobody would help them with their luggage. Hence, we have to add to the soundscape their heartbeats, their panting from being out of breath after schlepping heavy luggage, their fearful answers to the officials, and the barking and sniffing of police dogs (or the scratching of their claws on the concrete floor). Just to emphasize how hostile this environment was, consider one very sad fact: between 1961 and 1989, in the context of border controls at train station Friedrichstraße, at least 227 people died of natural causes; in most cases, the cause of death was a heart attack due to stress (Hertle and Nooke). As soon as the train was in motion, the soundscape became quieter. The train would roll through train station Friedrichstraße and reveal visually twice (upon entering and leaving West Berlin) that which one usually did not see: walls, fences, the death strip, dogs on cable runs. All the passengers would hear was the rattling of the train, their own body sounds, other passengers relieving built-up tension - the journey had begun. Though this last example does not represent an acoustic arena along the Wall itself, it is an important puzzle piece in understanding the sonic significance of the border area’s soundscapes. An acoustic arena is an auditory community for those who are not only producers but also recipients of sounds - by hearing what happens in the common airspace, the members of this community have unknowingly already signed their membership cards. Not even the Berlin Wall could stop the inhabitants of two different political systems who lived in the border area from being part of a single auditory community. I have presented three such acoustic arenas in which sound waves traveled from one side to the other. The battle of the loudspeakers along the barbed wire in the early 1960s was a technological arms race based 428 Florence Feiereisen on orders from above: as a result, West German reporters and East German border guards manipulated and controlled the sonic public. Each side tried to «win» by drowning out each other’s sounds or to simply win the contest in volume. Though officially declared as a news medium, the sounds the Studio am Stacheldraht dispersed were part of a politically charged sound war directed at those who could not escape: the border guards on the East side and thousands of civilians on both sides of the wall whose daily lives were affected by the loud soundscapes. When East authorities installed permanent loud speakers, citizens in the border area had to close their windows day and night in order to sleep or even to have a conversation without shouting. The second acoustic arena in the form of rock concerts also featured sound signals processed and broadcast through loudspeakers, though the sound production was less unpredictable in comparison with the 1961 - 65 soundscape. Also, these sound waves did not intrude upon everyday life, but came from performances advertised well in advance. Concerts by Western artists for East and West Berliners on West Berlin grounds were not about winning the volume war (though they were most certainly loud! ), but they showed that musical performances could be just as political as standard propaganda. These concerts were officially sanctioned and executed by a commercial company equipped with all the technological means to bring a provocative audicle to the Brandenburg Gate border area. Western artists demonstrated their solidarity and sonically included East German youth. Not sent through loudspeakers, but still an important part of the soundscape, were the sounds that evolved on the East side of the Wall (ranging from the sounds of enjoyment to subsequent sounds of danger and violence). The third acoustic arena represented a sonic wall experience a mile away from the Berlin Wall. While the first two examples had featured intentionally engineered sounds that were meant to be sent over the wall, the traveling ambient sounds at train station Berlin-Friedrichstraße - some of them amplified, others unprocessed - were produced with no intent yet were heard all the same. In fact, the authorities in the East went to great lengths to keep these sounds divided. In the end, despite their efforts to route people through an overand underground maze by erecting walls separating platforms, these authorities did not succeed completely in preventing sound waves from traveling from one side to the other. Berlin was divided, but unlike the American translation of Christa Wolf’s novel suggests, they could not divide the sky above it. All three examples show that a soundscape can be the site of power struggle for all of its participants, be they intentional producers or accidental recipients of sound. It can be a site of any combination of annoyance, fear, hope, or pleasure - whatever the mix, a 429 They Tried to Divide the Sky soundscape is a field of interaction, an arena in which people connect with each other. «Knowing the world through sound,» Bruce Smith argues, «is fundamentally different from knowing the world through vision,» (Smith, «Tuning» 129), and so it is only appropriate to investigate sound spaces in an effort to make sense of our world and lend an ear to our history. Notes 1 The earliest known recording of intelligible human speech is Edouard-Léon Scott de Martinville singing the French song «Au Clair de la Lune»: http: / / www.firstsounds. org/ sounds/ 1860-Scott-Au-Clair-de-la-Lune-05-09.mp3. 2 Even for twentieth-century sources playback technology remains a challenge. Some sound recordings exist, yet the format is so old that the data is not easy to extract. 3 See «Der Polizeipräsident von Berlin.» Chronik der Mauer: http: / / www.chronik-dermauer.de/ index.php/ de/ Start/ Detail/ id/ 593791/ page/ 0. 4 Epping-Jäger points out that the construction of the Studio am Stacheldraht reminds her of the NSDAP’s Reichs-Auto-Züge. The Third Reich’s speech trucks had featured hydraulic stages to reach the audience via sight and sound (38). 5 For a RIAS recording of the Studio am Stacheldraht broadcast on16 October 1961 go to: http: / / www.chronik-der-mauer.de/ chronik/ #anchornid173492. 6 For the sake of comparison: the standard range for orchestral music is about 40 to 100 Phon; 120 Phon can be compared to an airplane engine only 4 meters away («Schall und Rauch» 37 f.); the threshold of physical pain is at 130 Phon. 7 For a recording of the Studio’s last broadcast go to: http: / / www.berliner-mauer.tv/ interview-gerull-heinz/ die-letzte-sendung-studio-am-stacheldraht.html? showall=&limitstart=. 8 For a video recording of David Bowie’s 1987 West Berlin rendition of «Time Will Crawl» go to: http: / / www.youtube.com/ watch? v=uZiKOH9NXKc. 9 For a video recording of Bruce Springsteen’s «Chimes of Freedom» in East Berlin 1988 go to: https: / / www.youtube.com/ watch? v=WBIcfPBVxxQ. 10 Had the train stopped there, the stairways would have been metal-grilled or closed with masonry. 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