Divided Families and Enduring Legacies: How the Berlin Wall Shaped Generations

This feature is the first in a series examining how artificial borders reshape daily life, divide families, and force loved ones to navigate the human cost of political geography. Erich Guetinger was 18 years old when he first saw his uncle’s family as an adult. Having last seen them as a small child, Guetinger was both excited and nervous to see his uncle, aunt, and two older cousins after so long. It was the summer of 1969 – the Beatles were recording Abbey Road, the United States had begun withdrawing troops from Vietnam, and Neil Armstrong was about to become the first person to walk on the moon.

By then, Germany had been divided for two decades. The Federal Republic of Germany, or West Germany, was a capitalist democracy aligned with the US and Western Europe. The German Democratic Republic, or East Germany, was a Soviet-aligned socialist state governed by the Socialist Unity Party. Berlin itself had been divided since 1945, and the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 had hardened that separation. The two states differed sharply in size and population. About 51 million people lived in West Germany and about 18 million in East Germany, separated by a nearly 2,000km (1,242 miles) border running from the Baltic Sea to the Czechoslovak border. By 1969, West Germany’s population had grown to about 61 million, while East Germany’s had fallen to roughly 17 million.

With most of his family in their hometown of Babenhausen, Bavaria, and his uncle Hans, aunt Frieda, and cousins Dieter and Guenter in Brieskow-Finkenheerd, a village near Frankfurt an der Oder in East Germany, the Guetingers were directly affected by Germany’s political partition. A journey that would take just a few hours by car was, back then, a trip requiring visa approval, designated transit corridors, and border guard inspections. It was the lengths they had to go through that had caused the young Guetinger some unease. “My dad and I set off for our trip on a Saturday afternoon,” recalled Guetinger, a genial 75-year-old historian, author, and grandfather, who today lives in what would have been West Berlin. “After a visa process lasting two to three weeks, during which we had to inform GDR officials where we were staying and the purpose of the trip, we set off for one of the three transit corridors that served as official points of entry and exit between the two countries,” he explained.

They travelled by train through a Bavarian border crossing into Probstzella, in the GDR. “As soon as the train entered GDR territory”, Guetinger said, “we were stopped, and border guards checked our visas and IDs”. The pair stayed in Frankfurt an der Oder for a week, meeting the family’s friends, eating fresh meat, and spending quality time at the small family home. “My uncle was keen to introduce his brother from the West to all his friends,” Guetinger recounts with a smile. “It was a nice trip, and while we hadn’t seen each other in some time, we got along well.” They returned home to Bavaria just in time to see Armstrong take his first step on the moon, which they watched with Guetinger’s other uncle, Erich, and some of his friends.