Politics Flare Amid Berlin Wall Rites

Germans flew flags at half-staff and laid wreaths Monday to mark the 40th anniversary of the building of the Berlin Wall, which divided the city for a generation and became a potent symbol of the Cold War.

The focus of the commemorations was the roughly 200 East Germans killed while trying to cross what their rulers called the “anti-fascist protection barrier” and the many more who died trying to get across the frontier between East and West Germany before the wall fell in 1989.

But this year’s anniversary has been hijacked by political bickering ahead of city elections in October.

As Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder laid a wreath of roses at one of the few sections of the wall still standing, he was booed and jeered by those angry that his Social Democrats might form a coalition at Berlin City Hall with the Party of Democratic Socialism, or PDS, the successors to East Germany’s Communists.

“Traitor!” shouted one protester. “The only good Communist is a dead one!” yelled another as bodyguards ringed Schroeder.

“The fact that we remember what happened puts us in a situation, no matter what our political affiliation, that we make sure that something like this never happens again,” Schroeder said.

Earlier, members of a group representing victims of the repressive East German regime carried away two wreaths laid at the wall by the PDS and trampled on the flowers. Police carried away one man.

In the early hours of Aug. 13, 1961, about 40,000 East German soldiers and police rolled coils of barbed wire along the border to stop a flood of refugees from the west. Berliners awoke to find themselves cut off from family, friends and jobs.