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The Week in Germany: Culture June 8, 2007 TWIG Interview: Honorary Consul David Murdoch Talks About His Trip to East Berlin in August 1961 Two weeks ago, TWIG reported on the 75th anniversary of the Experiment in International Living (EIL), an exchange program that has organized hundreds of thousands of international exchanges since the early 1930’s. Those experiences have transformed countless lives, and TWIG caught up with one former Experimenter whose stay in Germany in 1961 resulted in a close brush with history. The Pittsburgh attorney and current Honorary Consul of the Federal Republic of Germany David Murdoch traveled with a group of EIL participants to East Berlin just days after East German authorities closed the border and began erecting the Berlin Wall. Why did you decide to study abroad in 1961? At that time, Kennedy was president, and his brother-in-law Sargent Shriver was leading the Peace Corps. Shriver had been an experimenter in Germany in the 1930’s. So, through various personal and professional contacts, the faculty at Harvard was very interested in international exchange and the Experiment in International Living in particular, and my advisors recommended that program to me. At the time, a 9 week program cost 1200 dollars. I applied for and won a $400 scholarship, saved up the remaining $800, and off I went. How did you choose Germany as a destination? I had traveled to Germany in 1957 with the Boy Scouts, and I was really impressed with the German Wirtschaftswunder. I thought that the German recovery from the war, as compared with the British or the French, was just remarkable. I was amazed by the ingenuity and industriousness. What were your first impressions of Germany aside from the Wirtschaftswunder? Did you also see evidence of the destruction from the war? In 1957, I had not seen much evidence of the war, but in 1961 my host family in Mannheim made a point of showing me the destruction that the war had wrought. We talked about the firebombing of Dresden and they brought me to Würzburg, which had been very badly destroyed by bombing. I believe they wanted to impress on me the destructive power of war and the importance of taking that into account in every political decision. They were also very open in discussing the Holocaust with me, unlike a lot of German families at the time. The best thing that my host mother told me was that living in a totalitarian regime is like wearing blinders that only allow you to look in one direction. When she was in school in the 30’s, her parents would ask her what she learned each day, and then spend most of the evening unwinding what she had been taught so that she could continue developing as an independent thinker. You traveled to Berlin that August, shortly after the East German regime closed the border. All summer, we had followed the situation in Berlin, with rising tensions between the occupying powers and refugees pouring in from the East. Just days before we arrived in Berlin, twenty-four-year-old Günter Litfin became the first victim of the wall when he was shot and killed while trying to swim across the Spree. I also saw Chancellor Adenauer give a speech in Mannheim addressing some of those issues after visiting Berlin with Lyndon Johnson. Of course, that all gave us cause to wonder about the status of our trip to Berlin, but we went after all, and we also crossed over into East Berlin. I wrote the following entry in my diary that day: "It seemed so easy after all to cross that border for us. Perhaps things weren't quite as serious as we thought. Such fleeting notions were quickly swept away by propaganda signs in front of an East Berlin newspaper which said that Americans had continued World War II; West Germany was again raising the horrors of German militarism known under Hitler. The distortion of truth in the the anti-Western propaganda caught us off guard. We had heard about these approaches to political indoctrination, but here they were in front of us. […], we met our first East Berliners to talk with under the shadows of the Brandenburg Gate. Yes, they were living under a difficult situation. No, the East German police had not been on every street corner before August 13. We talked with a man whose home had been just down the street during the war, and it was still in ruins. We talked to a student at Humboldt University in East Berlin who was later to show two of us some very sobering sights of life under Communism--her university and the East Berlin propaganda street called Stalinallee. She took us to the university art-history department, where one of the curators showed us many objects, including prints of rabbits by Albrecht Dürer. I asked her to show me a picture of his ‘Praying Hands’. Her response left me very sad. ‘We don't have the ‘Praying Hands’ in East Berlin, she said. ‘We have a Communist government.’ ” How did your experience in 1961 impact your life? The experience was truly transformative. The Experiment prides itself in transforming people’s lives and creating intercultural competence, and my stay in Germany was really a watershed event in my life. It affected my outlook on the cold war and what the West stood for. It also marked the involvement of a lifelong engagement with Germany. I served on the American Council on Germany and worked with German-American businesses for years as an attorney before becoming the Germany’s Honorary Consul in Pittsburgh. My law firm recently opened an office in Berlin, so things have really come full circle. I also encouraged my three children to gather international experience, which they did. Two of them even traveled abroad with the Experiment in International Living. Links: |
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