Interview with Hank O’Rourke, Hist 150 Spring 2022, Conducted by Lauryn O’Rourke, March 21st, 2022.

Overview to Social Change Interview
In 1961, the construction for the Berlin Wall was started. During the Cold War, tensions between East Germany and West Germany grew due to the influx of communism on the eastern side. The Berlin Wall was created to keep East Germans from fleeing to the western side. Those who lived in East Berlin were unable to cross the wall unless they had special permission. To get through the wall one had to cross through a checkpoint. One of the more famous checkpoints was nicknamed Checkpoint Charlie. Checkpoint Charlie often was used by those in East Berlin to try and escape. The attitudes and lifestyles on both sides of the wall were drastically different. Those living on the West side were able to live freely while those on the Eastern side lived in fear under communist rule. The Berlin Wall finally came down in 1989 reuniting both sides of Berlin. Social change in Berlin has definitely changed since the time of the Cold War. Germany is no longer a communist country and the people of Berlin are all able to live freely. The morale in Berlin has changed significantly now that the city is whole again. Living in a divided country during war time can be a difficult place to be. Hank O’Rourke lived in the U.S. embassy on the eastern side of Berlin and experienced both sides of the wall. In the interview, Hank talked about the drastic change in atmosphere when going to both sides. War time can be hard on a country, especially one so divided. The change made in Berlin shows hope for other countries that are also divided.

Biography:
For this interview, I interviewed my dad, Hank O’Rourke (He/ Him). My father lived in East Germany in 1981-82’ as a child of a diplomat when he was 13-14 years old. They lived on the Eastern side of Berlin. Growing up he had to cross the Berlin Wall more specifically, he had to cross through Checkpoint Charlie. He had to do this every day to get to school. While living in Germany he got to experience what it was like on both sides of the wall. He also got to experience the atmosphere and what it was like being a citizen on both sides

Research:

I chose to research the overall history of the Berlin Wall. This article helped have a better understanding of what life would have been like for my dad living in East Berlin. This article was posted in December of 2009. While this was posted over 10 years ago it was updated in March of 2021. This article is broken down into five different parts. It covers the partitioning of Berlin, blockades, the building of the wall, the stopping of construction, and the fall of the wall. This article allows those who are not as familiar with the wall to get a quick but in depth history lesson of the wall. Overall, this article helped me gain a better understanding of life during the time of the Berlin Wall.

“Berlin Wall.” History.com, A&E Television Networks, 15 Dec. 2009, https://www.history.com/topics/cold-war/berlin-wall.

Interview Transcript:

Lauryn O’Rourke 0:05
All right, so to start the interview, I’m just gonna ask you to introduce yourself.

Hank O’Rourke 0:11
Hi, my name is Hank O’Rourke I’m your dad. Yeah, many titles, but the most important is dad.

Lauryn O’Rourke 0:21
Alright. So, where did you live growing up?

Hank O’Rourke 0:23
Well, my dad was in the army and then in the State Department, so I grew up all over the world, really. So I was born in Arkansas. So I lived in Arkansas. We moved to Germany when I was very young. We lived in Augsburg, Germany. We moved back from Germany, and we moved to Tampa, Florida. And then from Tampa, Florida. I went to Orlando, Florida, and from Orlando, Florida, I went to Columbus, Georgia. And then I moved to Northern Virginia. And then I moved to Bangkok, Thailand. And then I moved to East Berlin, which is in East Germany. I moved back to the Northern Virginia area. And then I’ve lived a couple different places when I was in the Air Force. So I lived in San Antonio for a bit, I lived in Florida for a bit, and Hurlburt field, and then I moved to Maryland, and then I moved to Virginia. And I kind of stayed in Virginia since 1992.

Lauryn O’Rourke 1:25
Nice. All right. What was it like living in East Germnay?

Hank O’Rourke 1:31
Um, it was very interesting. As a as a, What grade was I in? I was in eighth and ninth grade. So however old that is, I don’t really remember the ages. But just remember, based on grades, it was it was an interesting time because communism was was ruling East Germany and ruling East Berlin. And then the West, you know, was you know, Western Germany was divided country and West Berlin was divided city. So there was a lot of Cold War tension between the Soviet bloc and near the western bloc, or NATO.

Lauryn O’Rourke 2:14
All right, describe what it was like to live in Cold War Germany.

Hank O’Rourke 2:20
Okay, so in Cold War Germany, so I’ll talk about the western side. So I got to travel a fair amount from, from East Berlin to West Germany. So remember, East Berlin is is is part of Berlin itself. And it is think of it as an island in a sea that is in another country called East Germany. So to get from West Berlin to West Germany, you either had to fly or take a drive or take a train. So I did all of those. It was it going to West Germany was like, just almost like going to any other like European country. It was very modernized, the, you know, the people were very happy. There was, you know, an abundance of everything, right. So there was lots of, you know, economic prosperity, there was lots of, you know, prosperity in terms of population growth, and all that kind of stuff. So, west, west, Germany, and West Berlin was very vibrant, had a nice cultural scene. And it was a great place to live. To compare and contrast that with East Germany, East Germany. I went to a town called Dresden. And Dresden wasn’t a mountainous city before the war, but because of all the bombings, they pushed all that rubble together and they built the the current city on top of it. So it was it was shocking to drive through East Germany, because there wasn’t a whole lot of rebuilding after the war. And even even on the eastern side, East Berlin, the there was, there was two bombed out churches behind my house behind my apartment building that I lived in. And, you know, they were not repairing them. And this was, you know, some 30, almost 40 years after the war. And, you know, everything on the western side in West Berlin was all rebuilt, and it looked like, like a regular city. So it was and remember the the east, the Eastern East Berlin was the Showplace of all communism. They they built it up, and they said, This is our showcase, because, you know, they did rebuild it, but they, they’re building techniques and their architecture and all the things they did were not very good. So many of the Eastern Bloc countries came to East Berlin to see you know, the height of the power of communism.

Lauryn O’Rourke 5:00
So I know you had to cross the Berlin Wall to go to school. What kind of protocols did you have to follow when going to school?

Hank O’Rourke 5:08
So, we were picked up, so the embassy provided a bus and a driver and the driver was East German. So he was what we would call a national. So a national drove the bus. And it was a you know, like a white passenger van. Right. So they pick up a couple different stops, there was probably, you know, seven kids in total. My friends, you know, who were who were other embassy kids, they would pick us up last since we were closest to the wall. We pile into the van, we drive over to the checkpoint go through drive to West Berlin to our school, where would you get out? We’d go and do our sports, or our school and then our sports activities. And I would typically ride the ubon, which is the underground train, kind of like their subway, the metro, their equivalent of the metro, and I would ride that back to Friedrichstrasse. Er, and then I would walk back through Checkpoint Charlie, and then walk back to my house or my apartment.

Lauryn O’Rourke 6:08
Can you describe what it was like having to cross the Berlin wall when going through Checkpoint Charlie?

Hank O’Rourke 6:14
Yeah, so um, the first, I don’t know, 30 times, it was really, really scary. Because you would drive up, and you would have to kind of drive you know, around barriers, right. So you couldn’t drive straight through, get around, drive around these barriers. And then when you got to the stopping point where there was a big crossbar that came down and wouldn’t let you pass. German soldier with an assault rifle was right there. And in there’s machine guns everywhere, there’s towers, there’s guard dogs, there’s barbed wire, there’s sandbags. And I mean, the it was probably like over a football field long. This checkpoint, and it went from the wall itself, all the way about 100 yards into East Berlin, where there was another wall. So there’s really two walls one one right on the edge of West Berlin. And then there’s what’s called a no man’s land, where there was guard towers and tank traps and barbed wire and probably minefields, and then another wall to contain that. So really two walls, one, the East Berlin Wall, and then the West Berlin Wall. So you pull up to this to this first gate guard. And we had what were called diplomatic Ausweis, which is a diplomatic ID card. And we held them up to the windows with their pictures of our faces on them. And they would, they would wave us through. So we would, you know, so that was the first gate. And then there’s another gate where we would come to before we went into West Berlin. And as soon as that as soon as we got through that gate, we drove past the American checkpoint, which was kind of like about the size of a porta John. That was the American checkpoint. And we wouldn’t have to check in or anything we would just drive into the city. And that was the last checks that we got. So on the way back through, we would walk, when I was walking home. You’d walk through like some switchbacks. So you know, you can’t just drive a car through it or run through it, it take some time. So we go through the switchbacks, we come to a fence with a grilled gate, and we’d show our Ausweis, they buzz us in and then they’d look out the Ausweis some more, we walk through this covered corridor through the checkpoint to the entry checkpoint into East Germany. And we chose our IDs again, and then they would let us out through another one of those gates and then we would walk back to our apartment.

Lauryn O’Rourke 9:04
Wow, okay. What was the atmosphere on both sides of the wall like during the time?

Hank O’Rourke 9:14
Um, there weren’t a whole lot of smiles. I mean, you know, I was a kid. But what you would notice is just the general level of people’s happiness, openness, that kind of thing, right? So I didn’t see a whole lot of smiling on the eastern side. And I saw a lot of, you know, vibrancy and smiles and happiness in West Berlin. But remember, you know, this was the time when we were fearing world war three, and the Germans, the Western Berliners, they were they were a very, very hardy bunch of people, right. So they basically partied in the jaws of the, of the shark. Right. That’s it. So they had a really cool mentality. The folks in East East Berlin, everything was super serious. There was, you know, soldiers would drive trucks down every night, and they would run into buildings that, that were close to the eastern wall. And then at night, there was nobody on the streets, and there would be police walking up and down the street all the time, right, like you couldn’t go a block without seeing a foot cop. And then it was just a very little foot traffic or car traffic at night, and it was just a completely different kind of experience.

Lauryn O’Rourke 10:42
How did you feel when you heard that the wall got taken down?

Hank O’Rourke 10:46
I can tell you exactly how I felt and where I was when it happened. I was sitting in my aunt and uncle’s house in Niceville, Florida. And I was a member of the Air Force at the time, and I was watching TV over there. And the news came on, and they had all the citizens of West Berlin, reaching out to the citizens East Berlin and taken down the wall. And I will tell you, I cried like a baby.

Lauryn O’Rourke 11:15
Yeah, I’m sure that was an emotional thing to see. Considering that you saw what it was like, first firsthand what it was like for those people that have to go through that.

What was it like seeing an actual piece of the wall after it got taken down?

Hank O’Rourke 11:33
It brings back a lot of memories, like so not not so good memories, right? Because there’s the history of how the Wall came up and divided not only not only a city, and the country, but also families. So you know, that it was you know, it represents something really, really negative, but at the same time that it’s in pieces, it also represents something that super positive. So yeah, you know, that’s kind of how I feel when I see pieces of the wall, and one of my buddies actually has a piece of the wall. So it’s pretty cool.

Lauryn O’Rourke 12:07
What are some of your strongest memories that you have of the Berlin Wall, of Germany in general, living over there?

Hank O’Rourke 12:15
So as a, you know, this has taken a lot of processing after the fact right, so it didn’t happen while I was there, but I’m able to put a finger on the emotion and and put a finger on the words that I would use to describe it. I was talking to somebody very recently about it. When I was when I was a child, I saw you know, bombed out buildings that were there. And now I can like in those two, the scars of war, right. The Berlin Wall was also a scar of the war, right. And that division of the people was was a scar on like the German psyche. So when the wall came down, and I later visited Berlin in like 2012. I was able to go back and it was like, all the scars were gone. Right, you know, time heals all wounds. So it was incredible to go back to the exact area where I live on Friedrichstrasse and and Leipzigstrasse and look at those two churches that have been rebuilt. Since 1982. When I went back 20 to 30 years later, they have been completely rebuilt, and they were beautiful. And I am just so happy for Berliners. I’m so happy for Germany.

Lauryn O’Rourke 13:41
Well, that was my last question. But thank you so much for doing this interview and for sharing your story.

Hank O’Rourke 13:47
Sure!

Lauryn O’Rourke 13:48
All right. Thank you so much.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Overview of interview technology and process:

The interview was conducted over zoom and was not edited. I set up a zoom call on March 21st around 7:00pm, he joined the call and we shortly started the interview. I recorded the meeting on my laptop the zoom. I used otter.ai to transcribe the interview.

Bibliography

“Berlin Wall.” History.com, A&E Television Networks, 15 Dec. 2009, https://www.history.com/topics/cold-war/berlin-wall.