 near a section of the wall just around the corner from Wilhelmstrasse, and Max parked behind them. We walked over to Wilhelmstrasse, a broad thoroughfare that comes to an abrupt dead end at the wall. The street was full of people—perhaps two hundred and fifty on foot and at least a hundred in small cars and on motorcycles, scooters, and bicycles. In a few minutes, the march music stopped, and a few seconds later an equally jarring voice came on. “Citizens of West Berlin,” it began, and as it went on, I was struck by the constant repetition of the words “Vest Bear-leen.” Almost at once, the cars that had swarmed into the street and the surrounding area began sounding their horns. The racket was remarkable, and, in the immediate vicinity, drowned out the voice of the commentator. On one side of Wilhelmstrasse is a vacant lot covered with rubble that rises considerably higher than the wall. Standing on this rubble mountain, dozens of West Berliners added to the din by whistling through their fingers, hooting, and catcalling. The demonstration had an impromptu air. People on their way home from work—it was now about a quarter after five—stopped and joined in. “You see,” Max shouted in my ear, “we don’t need any jamming devices!” We climbed up on the rubble mountain to have a look at the other side. Three sound trucks the size of moving vans were parked alongside one another in the middle of the street, about half a block beyond the wall. “They’ve brought up their biggest guns tonight!” Max shouted. “Our transmitters can’t compete with that stuff.” Standing at one side of the trucks were half a dozen Vopo officers, two of them using binoculars. Beside a vacant lot a few feet away, three steel-helmeted Vopos were lying on the ground, their submachine guns pointed toward the wall. Elsewhere in the vacant lot I eventually made out three other Vopos, similarly equipped and positioned, who were partly concealed by weeds and rubble. Directly across the wall from where I stood is the East German House of Ministries, a great gray pile that formerly housed Hermann Göring’s Air Ministry. Here, at several open windows facing the wall, Vopos stood with submachine guns over their shoulders and binoculars at their eyes. There were no civilians in sight.
Up on the rubble mountain, I could hear some of the commentator’s words over the continuing din below. “In West Berlin,” he was saying, “they deny who the real enemy is. The real enemy is the West German militarists. We ask: Do you want to wait until your last bit of security has been played out? The people of West Berlin must realize that the way to peaceful coexistence lies in peaceful negotiation with the German Democratic Republic.” At length, he stopped. The West Berliners immediately broke into a chant. “Mauer muss weg! [Wall must go!],” they shouted in a chorus that developed into a roar. I looked around at the participants. Most of them were men in their early twenties. There were a few young women, a number of older people, and a handful of children, including a couple of boys, standing nearby, who appeared to be around twelve. Each of the boys held a pair of old aluminum saucepan covers, which they used like cymbals. I asked one of them why he was making so much noise. “To get even,” he replied. He explained that the other boy was his brother, and that they lived, with their mother, in an apartment a block away. “Every night, we have crazy words and music,” he said. “It is so loud we cannot practice our piano lessons. We cannot hear the notes. Sometimes they keep up the noise until nine o’clock. Sometimes all night, playing those crazy marches so loud nobody can sleep.” He and his brother took up their task again as the commentator resumed.
Down on the street, a West Berlin television crew had arrived. After recording the scene below, the cameramen climbed up the rubble mountain and began photographing over the wall. This created consternation among the Vopo officers. First, they all raised their binoculars. Then they began talking among themselves. Presently, two Vopos lobbed th