Second Thoughts on Peter Fechter

Berlin

It is three months now since the young East Berlin workman Peter Fechter was shot down by the Vopos while trying to escape over the wall and lay in the gutter calling for help until he bled to death. On the opposite side of the concrete barrier from the spot where he died groups and individuals still come with tributes of wreaths and bouquets. Others have even tried to plant flowers there in the caked city earth, and someone has set up a wooden cross. The wreath-draped wall is enough of an attraction to have developed an informal car park close by. Tourists, with the insensitivity of those rootlessly wandering in a foreign country, have pictures snapped with the wreaths as a background. Eighty yards away is Checkpoint Charlie. It is not difficult, and much quicker than at the Friedrichstrasse station, to cross over if one has a foreign passport. All shades of Africans, Turks, Scandinavians, English, filter through the East German controls. Poles, Czechs and the like go right through. Americans, just to rub it in, have to wait the longest.

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Francis Russell

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Berlin

It is three months now since the young East Berlin workman Peter Fechter was shot down by the Vopos while trying to escape over the wall and lay in the gutter calling for help until he bled to death. On the opposite side of the concrete barrier from the spot where he died groups and individuals still come with tributes of wreaths and bouquets. Others have even tried to plant flowers there in the caked city earth, and someone has set up a wooden cross. The wreath-draped wall is enough of an attraction to have developed an informal car park close by. Tourists, with the insensitivity of those rootlessly wandering in a foreign country, have pictures snapped with the wreaths as a background. Eighty yards away is Checkpoint Charlie. It is not difficult, and much quicker than at the Friedrichstrasse station, to cross over if one has a foreign passport. All shades of Africans, Turks, Scandinavians, English, filter through the East German controls. Poles, Czechs and the like go right through. Americans, just to rub it in, have to wait the longest.