The Berlin Wall separated his family. Its legacy still endures

This feature is the first in a series examining how artificial borders reshape daily life, divide families and force loved ones to navigate the human cost of political geography.

Erich Guetinger was 18 years old when he first saw his uncle’s family as an adult.

Having last seen them as a small child, Guetinger was both excited and nervous to see his uncle, aunt, and two older cousins after so long.

It was the summer of 1969 – the Beatles were recording Abbey Road, the United States had begun withdrawing troops from Vietnam, and Neil Armstrong was about to become the first person to walk on the moon.

By then, Germany had been divided for two decades. The Federal Republic of Germany, or West Germany, was a capitalist democracy aligned with the US and Western Europe. The German Democratic Republic, or East Germany, was a Soviet-aligned socialist state governed by the Socialist Unity Party. Berlin itself had been divided since 1945, and the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 had hardened that separation.

The two states differed sharply in size and population. About 51 million people lived in West Germany and about 18 million in East Germany, separated by a nearly 2,000km (1,242 miles) border running 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 his family in their hometown of Babenhausen, Bavaria, and his uncle Hans, aunt Frieda, and cousins Dieter and Guenter in Brieskow-Finkenheerd, a village near Frankfurt an der Oder in East Germany, the Guetingers were directly affected by Germany’s political partition.

A journey that would take just a few hours by car was, back then, a trip requiring visa approval, designated transit corridors, and border guard inspections.

It was the lengths they had to go through that had caused the young Guetinger some unease.

“My dad and I set off for our trip on a Saturday afternoon,” recalled Guetinger, a genial 75-year-old historian, author, and grandfather, who today lives in what would have been West Berlin.

“After a visa process lasting two to three weeks, during which we had to inform GDR officials where we were staying and the purpose of the trip, we set off for one of the three transit corridors that served as official points of entry and exit between the two countries,” he explained.

They travelled by train through a Bavarian border crossing into Probstzella, in the GDR.

“As soon as the train entered GDR territory”, Guetinger said, “we were stopped, and border guards checked our visas and IDs".

The pair stayed in Frankfurt an der Oder for a week, meeting the family’s friends, eating fresh meat and spending quality time at the small family home.

“My uncle was keen to introduce his brother from the West to all his friends,” Guetinger recounts with a smile.

“It was a nice trip, and while we hadn’t seen each other in some time, we got along well.”

They returned home to Bavaria just in time to see Armstrong take his first step on the moon, which they watched with Guetinger’s other uncle, Erich, and some of his friends.

“Even now, I vividly remember the blurred black-and-white pictures appearing on TV. The distance between us wasn’t very far, but making that trip from Bavaria to Frankfurt an der Oder seemed as far as going to the moon and back.”

Germany splits

At least two generations on both Guetinger’s maternal and paternal sides were from Babenhausen, a small Bavarian market town of about 4,000 people in the 1960s. Surrounded by a castle, it was once home to a merchant family said to have been prominent during the Middle Ages.

Guetinger’s father, Ernst, was among five siblings and the youngest of the three boys. Hans was the eldest, followed by another brother, Erich, and there was a four-year age gap between Ernst and Hans. Guetinger said this age difference played a role in his father's and uncle's relationship.

“My dad and uncle Hans didn’t have a very close relationship because they had grown up during wartime,” he said. “When war broke out in 1939, Uncle Hans was obliged to serve as a soldier.”

Soldiers were in short supply, so German boys aged 16 and 17 were drafted as “Flakhelfer” to work with anti-aircraft guns or man the huge lights that tracked enemy aircraft.

“My Uncle Erich was in this age range so served in this role, but my dad, being the youngest, did not have to serve,” he added.

After Nazi Germany’s defeat in 1945, the country was divided into occupation zones and then formally split into two separate countries in 1949.

Hans returned to Babenhausen, Bavaria, after the war and looked for work as a shoemaker. But jobs were scarce, and he had trouble finding work.

Amid their struggles, Hans’s homesick wife encouraged him to try finding work in the GDR, where she was from. They knew they would be welcomed, because the GDR was keen on people willing to buck the trend of those going west - roughly 2.7 million people moved to West Germany between 1949 and 1961 – for better economic and employment opportunities.

In 1958, Hans's family moved east to Brieskow-Finkenheerd, a village near the Polish border, where Hans started working at a power station that also provided their accommodation. He was also able to indulge in his love of hunting as much as he liked.

“He was very happy hunting,” Guetinger remembered fondly. “In West Germany, you could only hunt if you owned land, but since the government owned all the land in the GDR, my uncle was told he could hunt wherever he wanted.”

Hans became so well known for his hunting abilities that when the big cadres wanted to celebrate something and eat some tasty meat like boar or wild swine, they would ask Hans to go hunting.

“The party had its own hunters, but they considered my uncle one of the best,” Guetinger said.

Meanwhile, Hans’s younger brother Ernst, back in Bavaria, became a father to Erich Guetinger in 1951.

In the 1950s, freedom of movement between the two countries remained largely unrestricted, but from the 1960s onwards, tougher measures were instituted. After that, East Germans were generally only allowed to travel to the West for urgent family matters, such as funerals or weddings.

In August 1961 – 65 years ago – the East German government began building the Berlin Wall, a 155km (96 miles) concrete structure surrounding West Berlin that effectively isolated it within GDR territory and severed the capital.

Outside Berlin, efforts to fortify the division led to the installation of new barbed wire fences, detectors, watchtowers, as well as booby-traps and extended powers for border guards to shoot and arrest escapees. Between then and 1989, when the wall came down, an estimated 75,000 people were imprisoned for trying to escape.

Guetinger says that in the early years of the division, there was barely any contact with his uncle and family.

“Eventually, we were able to start sending letters, but we shared very little in these because everybody knew the East German secret police, known as the Stasi, would carefully check the post between families, often reading our letters,” he said.

Like many families in West Germany, the Guetingers would often send Western products to their relatives in the East.

“For Christmas, we made parcels containing things we knew they would like, and which we knew it would be difficult for them to get, such as coffee and blue jeans," Guetinger said.

"Blue jeans were particularly hot property, and my cousins liked this kind of clothing. And even though we would send parcels, there was always a chance that they wouldn’t reach them,” he explained, noting that shipments were closely monitored.

Guetinger says it is still hard to fully assess how the day-to-day disruption caused by the division impacted their family’s sense of safety and unity.

“Even if my parents had a heavy heart back then, they would rarely talk about it, so today, I have to rely on other indicators to try and understand. And one of the indicators is that my dad and his elder brother tried to visit each other as soon as it was possible for both of them.”

Stasi secrets

Yet, even with the 1969 trip being made possible, Guetinger paints a picture of an uneasy time clouded by the fear of Stasi spies.

“We have been sitting here for more than 30 minutes and not once have I looked over my shoulder,” he said. “I’m not afraid of saying something private or political. I don’t care if anyone is listening.”

That was not true back then.

“During that trip, as soon as we entered anywhere, we first had to scan the room to see who was there and how far they were away from us," he said, noting how this determined their topics of conversation.

"Uncle Hans had a lot of friends whom he met regularly outside of his house, and they did this every time they met. It was understood that the secret service was everywhere, and they could make life very difficult for you.”

Meeting his wife

In 1973, Guetinger travelled to meet his friend in Hessen, West Germany, a trip that would see his life take an unexpected turn.

“My friend had a Chinese girlfriend called Hui-Chui Ma, and the plan was that she and her best friend would be joining us upon their return from a trip to Vienna. Her friend, Yan-Yun, was a nurse from China working in Freiburg, around 400km [250 miles] away from Hessen,” he explained.

“When we left, we got the train together, and eventually we went in different directions. But something had hit [Yan-Yun and I] like a lightning bolt.”

Germany’s division had also shaped family stories beyond its borders, with migration patterns evolving on either side depending on the political alignments and economic needs of each nation.

Alignment with countries inside the neighbouring Eastern Bloc, such as Poland, Hungary and Bulgaria, brought links with socially aligned nations on a global level. This led to approximately 70,000 contract workers from Vietnam, more than 20,000 young people from Mozambique, and a small number of engineers from North Korea coming to East Germany during the division. After unification, many of these migrant workers sought to stay on and build families.

West Germany, meanwhile, had friendly links with South Korea, Indonesia and Japan, among others.

Guetinger says that Yan-Yun came to West Germany through a recruitment drive for nurses initiated in Taiwan in the early 1970s.

The pair started to get to know each other, and despite the language barrier, they found that they had something in common.

“The Chiang family shared a common experience... their extended family had been split by the political tensions between mainland China and Taiwan,” he explained.

“Yan-Yun was born in what was then Peking [Beijing today], and at the age of two, her family fled to Taiwan, where she stayed until she came to West Germany. But they had no idea if other family members in mainland China had survived the internal war.”

West Berlin student life

The relationship between the couple developed quickly, and in the summer of 1974, Guetinger moved with Yan-Yun to West Berlin, where he began studying Chinese politics at the Free University. Like many West Berliners, he took advantage of having better freedom of movement, including the ability to travel to and from the GDR.

“For me, as a student, it was interesting to go to East Berlin because the books there were much cheaper, plus the music in East Germany was very good, and you could get cheaper music discs.”

Yet, there were travel rules that West Germans had to obey, such as registering with local police on arrival. They also could not exchange East German Marks back into hard West German Deutsche Marks when leaving. Instead, they were required to deposit the money into an East German bank.

At the end of one trip, Guetinger went to deposit the money but encountered a long queue.

“So I decided to skip the deposit and placed the money in a pouch with my keys,” he said. “We had different currencies, and GDR money was of no value across the border, so it remained there for many months until I went back.”

On his next trip to East Berlin, the casually dressed student watched as border guards sitting at high counters let in West Germans who were carrying big, heavy bags. Travelling empty-handed, he thought his passage would be hassle-free.

But when the border police got to him, they stopped and ordered him to follow them. They took him to a very small room with no window and a neon light, and they asked him to remove everything from his pockets.

“One by one, out came my passport, some money and the pouch. ‘What’s that?’ the guard asked, and I told him it was for my keys. For a few seconds, I hoped that would be enough," he said.

"Then he ordered me to open it, and instead of finding a key, he found GDR money. This was a major offence, what they called ‘offending the rules concerning the transfer of money’.”

Guetinger was questioned about the purpose of his visit and then left alone for what he says was about 90 minutes while the guards decided his fate.

“I sat in that room alone, and I knew I was in some kind of trouble,” he recalled.

Guetinger says he was ultimately allowed to go because the guards were satisfied with who he was meeting – a well-known writer named Jan Koplowitz, a former member of the German Communist Party.

“I could leave because I had an appointment with this particular connection,” he said.

Guetinger later concluded that X-rays had been used at the border, and that was how the guards had established that he was carrying cash into the GDR.

“We didn’t know about this back then,” he added.

Finding families

Despite the division, Guetinger’s family would find ways to meet, and sometimes broke rules to do so.

He recalls one such trip in the mid-1970s when his father came to visit him in West Berlin.

Guetinger says they decided to visit East Berlin and, at the last minute, decided to go on to visit his family in Frankfurt an der Oder.

Since the plan was hatched late in the day, it meant circumventing strict visa rules. A visa for East Berlin – which is all they had – meant they were only permitted to visit East Berlin and nowhere else in the GDR.

Guetinger says the trip quickly turned into a clandestine affair that involved coordination with his cousin and uncle. In East Germany, hardly anyone had a home phone, so they had to rely on public telephones or phones at work.

That constraint helped shape the family’s plan.

“My uncle and his son both worked at the power station, and anyone entering or leaving the power station had to report to the gatekeeper, who had a telephone. The gatekeeper liked eating fresh game, so in exchange for using the phone, my uncle would bring him deer or birds that he had hunted,” he said.

His cousin used the phone to speak with Guetinger and make the arrangements. Then, once in East Berlin, Guetinger and his family took the train as far as Karlshorst, a station about 30 minutes outside the city, where his cousin collected them by car.

“It was easier in a private car as we had less chance of being stopped by border guards than if we were on a train,” he said.

While it would have been possible to arrange to meet the family in East Berlin, they were eager to see where and how their family lived in the GDR. But they knew it was risky.

“If we had been caught, it would have been a problem not only for us but also for our family [in the East], as it would have been seen as a serious offence. We felt a genuine fear, but luckily, we were able to go and return without any trouble.”

West Germany and China

West Germany established diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China in 1972. For Yan-Yun’s family, the new connection between West Berlin, Taiwan and mainland China created a possible channel for renewing contact.

Guetinger said the family used West Berlin as an informal postal hub, passing letters between relatives in Taiwan and relatives in mainland China.

“The reconnection with my wife’s relatives was managed by postal communication, where our family in Taiwan sent us letters to West Berlin, and we could send them on to addresses in China, and vice versa,” Guetinger explained. “We had the names and old addresses, and that was enough.”

In 1988, Guetinger and his wife – they had married in 1977 – were able to visit mainland China, marking Yan-Yun’s first time back in more than four decades.

“It was an important trip,” Guetinger said, noting that they visited his wife’s family home and her birthplace.

“Some years later, we met Yan-Yun’s mother in Taiwan and travelled together with her from Taiwan to the Chinese mainland to meet other family members in Kunming and Nanjing. The family had been apart for 40 years, and reconnecting with them had all started from West Berlin,” he explained.

Lingering legacies of division

Following months of mounting public pressure, the Berlin Wall finally fell on a cold November night in 1989. Guetinger says it was a “surreal” moment – and his family quickly started seeing one another again.

“By then, Uncle Hans had retired, and both he, my aunt and Guenter visited us a few times in West Berlin. My other cousin, however, didn’t come to visit. He was happy to stay in the countryside. From what I can recall, Uncle Hans never got to return to our hometown of Bavaria before he passed away,” he said.

Today, Guetinger remains in contact with his family from the former GDR, and both of his children have met that part of their family, with the sides visiting each other’s respective homes.

Similarly, the family is also close with their wider family in Taiwan and visits often. Guetinger, who in the early 2000s authored Die Geschichte der Chinesen in Deutschland (The History of the Chinese in Germany), and his wife were there again this summer.

German unification continues to be heralded as a celebration – a peaceful revolution for the people, by the people – but there remain strong signs that the seeds of separation sown during the division have in many ways taken root.

For many, the experience of unification was characterised by economic instability, with job losses and the privatisation of East German companies. While less extreme today, economic disparities between the regions persist.

Unification effectively saw the capitalist-dominant West Germany absorb communist East Germany, and in doing so, left behind some of the more progressive elements of GDR society, including closer wage parity between genders and abortion rights.

For many eastern Germans, reunification also came with a sense that their institutions, careers and social arrangements had been swept aside rather than incorporated into a genuinely shared country. The economic shock was especially acute after the privatisation and closure of many East German enterprises.

Around the 30th anniversary of reunification, the Bertelsmann Foundation published a study based on research by the Berlin institute pollytix. It revealed that 84 percent of eastern respondents felt the unified nation should have kept more elements that worked well in the GDR. Researchers noted that Easterners frequently expressed that a true common society was never created, feeling instead that the Western system was simply imposed upon them.

The upheaval coincided with a surge in racist violence. In Rostock-Lichtenhagen in 1992, several hundred far-right rioters attacked the Sunflower House, which included accommodation for Vietnamese contract workers, and threw Molotov cocktails as police failed for days to regain control. This and other xenophobic attacks reflected the wider discontent non-white people faced as Germany sought to unify amid rising economic uncertainty.

Similar anti-immigration debates and economic fears have fuelled the rise of the far-right Alternative for Deutschland party in recent years.

For Guetinger, the enforced separation he has witnessed, first in his own life and then with his wife’s family, has left a legacy not just for his generation, but also for his children, both of whom were born during the division.

“There is a very famous saying – that you tear down the Wall, but there is still the ‘Mauer im Kopf’, or wall in the mind. I think my children’s generation are affected by this but in a very different way. They know there are these frictions.

“Even now, it’s very difficult to see how the division has affected my life. It feels like a daydream. History has taught us that politics does not work well if people are forced to separate. People should be free. Who are the people to say you are not allowed to meet your own family?

“My experiences have shown me that it’s abnormal to keep people separated and divided.”

Reporting originally appeared via Al Jazeera. Read the full source for additional context.