A story of punks, spies, sibling betrayal and buckets of white paint
November
3, 1986. A group of five masked men drew a white line on the Berlin
wall. Starting at Mariannenplatz, the line was heading west via the
Checkpoint Charlie border crossing in the city centre.
After
around 5km, the line suddenly stopped. At 11:30am next day, border
guards from the eastern side of the wall had ambushed the line-painters
and put an end to their project.
The wall collapsed almost exactly three years later.
All
five of the wall-painters had been born in the east, in Weimar, but had
begun to rebel against the communist regime's social norms in their
late teens. Frank Willmann read Nietzsche and Solzhenitsyn, his friend
Frank Schuster wore sandals and string vests. Wolfram Hasch grew his
hair long. Jürgen Onisseit played in a punk band called Creepers.
Thomas, his younger brother, was arrested for spraying dadaesque slogans
such as Macht aus dem Staat Gurkensalat (“Turn the state into cucumber
salad”) on to walls around Weimar.
The regime's tolerance for
alternative lifestyles was low. Between 1983 and 1985, after a series of
run-ins with the authorities, the five friends were all granted
permission to resettle in the west and moved to Berlin.
For
Willmann, now a journalist and author, the line was, above all, an
artistic statement, a protest against what other artists were doing with
the wall.
For
Thomas Onisseit, who is now a graphic designer and lives in Dresden,
the line was political rather than artistic. For Schuster, the line was
political, too, but more of a protest against the complacency of the
west.
All of them agree that it was the older Onisseit brother,
Jürgen, who first had the idea. He painted a manifesto on the wall next
to the start of the line: “This line will demarcate the Berlin area anew
and reveal the wall as a ghetto wall. Its beginning and end is here.”
In
2010, Willmann started ordering up documents from the Stasi archive. He
found the white line had yet another meaning for the leader of their
group.
Between 1981 and 1985, Jürgen Onisseit had worked as an
“unofficial collaborator” for the secret police. By naming a group of
people involved in the “Turn the state into cucumber salad” stunt, he
had indirectly brought about his younger brother's imprisonment.
In
a documentary titled “Drawing a Line”, the older brother is asked if he
regrets betraying his friends. “I don't have friends,” Jürgen says.
The
white line on the Berlin Wall had one other meaning. On the eastern
side, border guards used white paint to reiterate the “anti-fascist
barrier” against the west. When the five masked men with the buckets of
white paint were first spotted on the morning of November 3, it seemed
obvious to them that the white line was no art project or political
protest, but the state enemy in disguise, attempting to redraw the
physical border between east and west.
As a consequence, border
guards were ordered to slip through a hidden door in the Berlin Wall the
next morning and ambush the painters. Four of the friends escaped.
But
Wolfram Hasch was seized and pulled back into the east, where he
remained in prison for three months before being released back to the
west.
He no longer wants to talk about the white line.
