Bernauer Straße and Brunnenstraße: The Window Jumps of 1961
Why is it significant?
Stand at the corner where Brunnenstraße meets Bernauer Straße and imagine the south side of the street as it was in the summer of 1961: a solid row of four- and five-storey tenements, their windows opening straight onto a pavement that belonged to another country.
Key Facts
| Place | Bernauer Straße and Brunnenstraße: The Window Jumps of 1961 |
|---|---|
| Address | Bernauer Straße, corner of Brunnenstraße, 10119 Berlin, Germany |
| Geo Coordinates | 52.53740, 13.39660 |
| Part of Walk | The Wall on Bernauer Straße: Escapes, Tunnels and the Mauerpark in Berlin |
| Generated | Generated |
Stand at the corner where Brunnenstraße meets Bernauer Straße and imagine the south side of the street as it was in the summer of 1961: a solid row of four- and five-storey tenements, their windows opening straight onto a pavement that belonged to another country.
In the days after the 13th of August, the people living in those houses could still look out onto the West, but they could no longer walk out into it. The front doors were bricked up. Then the ground-floor windows. Families watched the bricklayers work their way up the building towards them. And some of them decided not to wait.
On the 22nd of August 1961, Ida Siekmann, a fifty-eight-year-old nurse, threw her bedding down from her third-floor flat at Bernauer Straße 48 and then jumped after it. She was badly injured and died on the way to hospital. She is counted as the first person to die at the Berlin Wall, just nine days after it went up. Her photograph is one of the first in the Window of Remembrance.
Others followed. West Berlin firefighters stood below with jumping sheets, and people on the pavement shouted encouragement while East German police tried to drag residents back through the windows from inside. An eighty-year-old woman, Olga Segler, also jumped that September and died of her injuries the next day. Soon the residents were moved out entirely, and over the following years the houses were demolished, until only the lowest part of the façades was left as a wall. Later even that was replaced.
A short walk further east, on the 15th of August 1961, a nineteen-year-old East German policeman named Conrad Schumann leapt over the barbed wire into the West, and a photographer caught him in mid-air. That picture went around the world as an image of hope; the window jumps were its darker twin. Now leave Bernauer Straße for a moment: head a few blocks east and south through the side streets to a leafy square called Arkonaplatz.