In recognition of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, I read a memoir by Mildred Raynolds Triver, a member of the occupying forces in the American sector of Berlin, in which she describes life in Berlin immediately before the wall went up in contrast with life thereafter. Triver published the piece in the Virginia Quarterly Review in 1981, about eight years before the Wall came down. Thus, she writes from the perspective of a person who could not believe it had gone up, and thereafter could not believe it would ever come down. Emotion permeates her well-organized piece as she expresses to fellow Americans the profundity of German division.
She begins her piece with an excerpt from her diary shortly after her arrival in Berlin in 1957. Triver writes of the Berliners:
“They share the same language, the same culture, the same church and, until recently, the same history. They have known together Berlin’s greatness when it was the capital of a world empire and they have suffered together the Allied bombing and the destruction and capture of the great city in the final days of Hitler’s War. They are Berliners, all, sharing a common pride in the past and sharing, each in its own way, in the suffering of a divided and unhappy present.” (¶2)
Trivers, thus, charges her piece emotionally from the beginning. Even before the wall was erected, she writes, the city was divided, one people in two worlds. The grief she transfers to her readers seeps from her pounding repetition of “the same.” The Berliners, East and West, are the same. Decades before the chant of “Wir sind ein Volk” or “Wir sind das Volk” would arise from the Monday Demonstrations, Triver expresses the common sentiment. It is profound that even an American citizen living in Berlin would feel so strongly that the Berliners are one, and having written of it so early on, Trivers is given credibility on the matter, despite not being a Berliner.
She continues on to describe East Berlin as “poor, neglected, row on row of bombed buildings that had neither been removed nor restored, and everywhere that gray, that sad anonymous look with which socialism manages to cover over what may once have had charm” (¶7). Again, pathos is her primary strategy to appeal. The haunting tone in enhanced by Triver’s choice of diction, in particular her description of the sad anonymity of the place. Trivers, in a few words, paints the picture of a depressing city, separated from its historical identity as the seat of great Prussian kings, and replaced with faceless socialism. Even as she writes in 1981, she does not seem to fear the Soviet threat, but rather to feel sympathy for those under its influence.
She ends the piece rather curiously, writing: “No one wanted war, certainly not the Berliners who kept saying at every crisis previous to the Wall, ‘Not war! For God’s sake, no war! Not for this city!’ And how could war have been avoided so long as soldiers barred the way?” (¶24). Such an ending can only spark in her readers a great sympathy for the Germans. They were done with fighting and wanted only peace, but peace gave them a wall. If Triver aimed to make her audience feel the presence of the Wall from America, she certainly achieved her goal.
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