 |
Interview with Wenzel Peikert at the Schiff Ahoi bar in Berlin, Kreuzberg.
On October 6th, 1989, the morning of the 40th anniversary of the founding of the GDR, Petra Peikert and her six year old son, Wenzel, escaped from East Berlin. Petra told her son that they were going on a short vacation to Budapest. They brought a small suitcase and little else. He was looking forward to take his flight aboard an airplane. On the taxi ride to the airport, Wenzel saw the tanks lined up on Karl-Marx Allee in preparation for the Panzer Parade and he was sad that he would miss the excitement. When they arrived in Budapest, his mother informed him that they wouldn't be returning to Berlin. He only cried when he realized that nobody would be around to feed his Guinea pig. (A neighbor cared for the animal, and Wenzel would be reunited with his pet a year later).
|
|
|
In Budapest, Wenzel got his first taste of the West and freedom-at McDonalds. From Budapest, Wenzel and his mother, along with several other East German refugees, took a bus to West Germany. After an overnight stay in a West German army base where the two received shelter, a hot meal, and a small amount of cash to help them to their destination, they met with relatives in Hamburg. Having come just ahead of the masses that would be heading west when the Wall came down one month later, Petra Peikert quickly found an apartment and a job as a dentist.
|
||
|
Wenzel Hieronymus Peikert was born on October 29th, 1982, in East Berlin at the Krankenhaus Friedrichshain. Earlier that same month, Helmut Kohl became Chancellor in the Federal Republic of Germany. In November, Yuri Andropov, head of the Soviet secret service KGB, became Secretary General of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party. When Wenzel was born, nobody, including high ranking officials of either the East or the West, could have predicted that less than a decade later the GDR would dissolve and Germany would again be reunited. When Wenzel and his mother fled East Berlin, the GDR was celebrating its fortieth anniversary as if it expected to celebrate its hundredth. In hindsight, it might appear that their actions were at worst rash, and at best premature; just one month later, they could have legally emigrated. At the time the relaxed emigration policy and border security were seen as an aberration, and that eventually the GDR leadership and the Stasi would crack down. Earlier in 1989, Stasi chief Erik Mielke was preparing to mimic the deadly repressive methods of the Chinese during the protests at Tiananmen Square in response to the ever increasing protests in East Germany. If history was to be any guide, this would have been the GDR's course of action. Had Wenzel and his mother not fled while the "getting was good", who knows if they would have another chance? That they fled when they did was courageous because they could not anticipate the events that followed.
|
 |
