Trabants to the left of us, Trabants to the right

July 11, 2023

MARIENBORN- You remember those long lines of Trabants waiting to pour through the freshly opened border?

The exodus happened in several places, of course, but no more so than in Marienborn. And that crossing point has been saved as a national monument.

Don't get the impression that "crossing point" implies the sort of place you go through to see a football match or a pop concert. Marienborn is the size of an airfield, with huge processing sheds, examination rooms and enough lanes of roads to be visible from the Moon. (Not, before you write to tell me, not literally.)

It's hard to convey the size of the place in a snapshot. This was just one of a line of processing sheds

I crossed the Iron Curtain back in the day, from the West into the former Czechoslovakia. It was daunting but not without humour: the guards who boarded the train kept laughing that my visa was marked NOVINARKSE and that I had a Russian camera.

Why would I want a Russian camera, they seemed to ask. Even the Czechs wouldn't put up with Russian cameras.

My neighbours in the train told me as we moved off again that Novinarske meant "you write in newspaper, perhaps."

"Ah," I said, "a journalist!"

They agreed and found it as funny as the guards had.

Marienborn was never as enjoyable. The British built it in a more modest way to separate their zone from the Russians. The linking road was and remains the main highway from Hannover to Berlin. When East and West Germany separated and the East became the DDR, Marienborn was simply shut to everyone from the DDR who had no reason to pass and made difficult for those from the West.

This gives a better idea of the size, but it's still not all of it

The Eastern border guards were told to be cold and impersonal, even or perhaps especially to fellow countrymen. Panels at the site recall memories, such as "A chill fell over the car as we approached the border [from the East]. We knew we had nothing to hide, nothing to fear, but getting to the border just made us feel guilty. The hardest part was convincing the children that they had to stop laughing and talking. We thought one word out of place and there'd be trouble."

Passports were placed in this covered conveyor belt. They reached the guards before the drivers. The guards then knew who in the line needed more questioning than others

More than a thousand people worked there, processing nearly 35 million travellers in just the last four years.

On 9 November 1989, those at the border simply watched the thousands passing through unchecked. The border had fallen. Most had never known anything but the DDR. Many believed in it and many still regret that it didn't work, that they were not so much merged with the West as taken over by it.

For the most part, the Trabants that passed through that day turned round in the afternoon and drove back home again. Their drivers didn't want to "escape" to the West so much as to enjoy the novelty of going there, to buy bananas and come back with a tale to tell.

It was so recent but so distant. Had Marienborn not been kept as a national monument, it would be hard to think it had ever happened.

Rate this entry's writing	Heart	9
Comment on this entry	Comment	0