call sounded, there were approximately 20 minutes until the sirens wailed at full alert. Full alert was a swelling and fading sine wave in the 200-500 MHz frequency range. Particularly outside of the house, if one on the street turned in the direction of Alexanderplatz, as in 1943, then precisely this siren was eerily audible and elicited fear and terror.
On the other hand, when the attack came to an end, a long, sustained tone flowed through, and it was as if this tone relieved the tension of the whole situation. Many people spoke out to that effect, saying, “We have been spared again,” or “We have arisen from this.” I actually still have this sensation, because in the communities of Brandenburg the sirens from the war remain standing. Here in Berlin they have been dismantled. We have them in museums. But when these sirens can be heard from a distance, this is not exaggerated, a light tingling runs over one’s back. The second issue was the blackout, which had a very frightening effect on the children.
Q: Why fear and terror? Why did it elicit that at the time? How do you explain that?
The emergence of this sound, of the siren, wasn’t the most decisive factor in and of itself. Already as a child one picked up on and sensed very observantly the conversations of the adults and everything which happened in the surrounding environment. Often, from my personal experience, adults underestimate children, that at their age they understand and assimilate and process one thing or another quite articulately.
For example, it emerged that thousands of people burned to death in Hamburg. However, that fact wasn’t popularized through the press or the radio, but rather in the form of a whispering campaign and rumors. One didn’t know anything exact, but one knew nevertheless that something had happened. This also stemmed from the approximately 1 million refugees from Hamburg, from whom it spread to the population in the Brandenburg area. And so, concretely related to the situation in the Fall of 1943, one was afraid in Berlin of experiencing such an attack, as the imperial capital.
Q: Did your parents try to prepare you as a child for such a thing? Were there conversations, exercises? How should one picture that?
Yes, as a child one was prepared at an early stage. I can remember well that there were a whole series of picture books, in which one found situations as they presented themselves later in the war. Burning houses for example. There were also games, dice games, which were already playfully introduced in kindergarten. I still have such a game in my work now in the Society of the Berlin Underworlds, with which we show our visitors how early one began in the ’30s to prepare children for such things. It was first and foremost fire precautions, to be afraid of fire, and also questions already of first aid. What do I do if someone is injured? Who do I have to tell?
Q: And in contrast, the reality. How did that look?
The reality was such that the terror and the powerful emergence of the war were not in sync with that which one had read or at least seen. On the contrary, the appearance in 1943 of such massive bombing attacks was a bone-crushing counterbalance to the preparation which one had begun so early.
Q: Can you describe that? What happened then when the alarm was activated?
When the alarm went off, one had to decide which shelter to make use of, if one wanted to go in the building in which one lived, in the so-called “splinter protection cellar” (as one could not even speak of “bomb-proof”), or if one sought refuge in a fortified concrete bunker, for example on Alexanderplatz and elsewhere. The most important thing was to reach the space. When that happened in residential buildings, one had to find the exit from the house the fastest way possible, from the third or fourth floor, without light. At the entrance below, one was already awaited by the air raid warden, whose shouting had a great impact on the people and who, with the lights out, hurried them along. Then one rushed into the cellar, or one had to go still further, and had 