Wall Is Gone, But Anguish Endures

It's 50 years since the Berlin Wall went up, splitting the city in two, dividing families, and leaving some people plagued by a sense of imprisonment. Many still bear the psychological scars.

 

Even today Gitta Heinrich doesn't have walls around her home in Berlin. Her fences are made of trees and bushes rather than bricks. Inside, she keeps the doors open between rooms. She avoids confined spaces with crowds of people.

 

 

Gitta was born 20 years before the Wall went up - and lived with it for the next 28 years

Gitta suffers from "Mauerkrankheit" - Wall Sickness - and it stems from her life right up against the Berlin Wall in the village of Klein-Glienicke on the edge of the city.

 

It's a strange place, though not as strange as it must have seemed on August 13, 1961 when the barbed wire was rolled out to cut it off from the neighbouring houses only a street away - only a jump away for some, who went to their balconies and dropped over the wire.

 

When the Wall went up, Klein-Glienicke became an island of East Germany in West Berlin. The boundary between the Soviet Zone and the American Zone zigged and zagged in that part of Berlin near Potsdam.

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