A CITY DIVIDED: GERMAN AUTHOR SHARES MEMORIES DURING RISE AND FALL OF THE BERLIN WALL

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By: Trevor Hill

June 11, 2014 (San Diego’s East County) -- J. Elke Ertle, author of Walled-In, A West Berlin Girl’s Journey to Freedom, hosted a book signing at the Lemon Grove Library on May 28, where she spoke about the history of the Berlin Wall and her experience in West Berlin during the separation. Ertle described her book as “juxtaposing historical events with personal experiences”. She calls it “a coming of age story. Of breaking off and staying alone."

Ertle was born on November 21, 1945 in Berlin’s British-occupied sector. Her father, Karl Umbach, was a wartime photographer, and her mother, Gertrud Umbach, had been drafted for the war effort to compute rations for the Luftwaffe. Ertle stayed in Berlin until she was 21, at which point she moved to San Diego. She spent years studying using a student VISA. After multiple applications, she was finally granted US citizenship in 1972. She currently resides in San Diego.

Ertle was born in the midst of the Soviets’ Berlin Blockade. Just one month after she was born, rations in West Berlin were so low that each person was receiving only 400 calories a day. She recalled that “each family received only three teaspoons of salt and that had to last you for the week.”

By the 1950’s, West Berlin’s economy was slowly picking up. Ertle, who was only a small girl at the time, witnessed an influx of between 150 and 300 thousand refugees from East Berlin and parts of surrounding East Germany each year throughout the decade.

Ertle described her childhood as “tough” because of her harsh parents. “They were strict,” she said, “stricter than any of the parents in all of Berlin -- probably in the world!” She explained that back then, German schools ended their day early, around 1 or 2 pm. However, students were heavily laden with homework and were expected to do their studying at home. Even after she was done with her homework, when Ertle asked her parents if she could go outside and play, they made her stay in and study her French and English textbooks. Even on the “free” side of the wall, she was not experiencing the same freedoms that her friends and classmates were.

Ertle recalled an experience from when she was a young girl, when her parents bought her a Hohner accordion for Christmas in 1958. She was elated. Ertle was hardly ever allowed to do anything fun, so she was very thankful that her parents had loosened up on her and bought her something that was purely for entertainment. However, she quickly saw why her parents had bought her the instrument. “I only got to my second song before I realized why my parents bought me an accordion. So they could say, ‘You can't go play! You need to stay home and practice accordion!’”

By 1960, West Berlin’s economy was beginning to boom; unemployment was virtually zero. In the East, however, the economy was tanking. In order to prevent anymore East Germans from immigrating to West Berlin, on August 13, 1961, in the dead of night, Russian soldiers constructed a barbed wire fence around West Berlin. Ertle described the tension at this border fence, where East and West Berliners could see and hear each other, but were denied access to the other side by armed soldiers. The fence was quickly upgraded to a twelve foot high cement barricade which featured guard towers and a death strip. The wall split countless friends and families apart, which was devastating to many Berliners.

Luckily, Ertle knew only one person who was split from her and her family by the wall. That person was her family’s cleaning woman. Two years after obtaining her US citizenship in 1972, Ertle visited her cleaning woman in East Berlin where the people were living in poverty. “They treated us like royalty,” she said. Visitors from America were not a regular occurrence, so the poverty-stricken family ‘rolled out the red carpet’ for Ertle. “I still remember what they cooked for us,” she said, “pork chops and cauliflower. They served us the pork chops and cauliflower and they didn't have any.” They had spent all of their savings on serving Ertle and her husband the most lavish meal they could afford. It was a testament to the affection that Ertle’s cleaning woman still held for her and her family.

In 1990 when the Berlin Wall came down, Ertle went back to Germany to hammer off her own personal piece of it, which she brought with her to the book signing. Although the wall has fallen, Ertle claims that there is still tension between East and West Berliners. “The Wall is still in people's heads. It takes several generations to get that out.” However, she is hopeful for the future. She says that she sees younger generations having an easier time with the unification, and estimates that by the third generation after the fall of the wall, the tension will have dissipated entirely.

For more information on Ertle or her book, Walled-In, a West Berlin Girl’s Journey to Freedom, visit her website at http://walled-in-berlin.com/

 


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