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Germany splits
At least two generations on both Guetinger’s maternal and paternal sides were from Babenhausen, a small Bavarian market town of about 4,000 people in the 1960s. Surrounded by a castle, it was once home to a merchant family said to have been prominent during the Middle Ages.
Guetinger’s father, Ernst, was among five siblings and the youngest of the three boys. Hans was the eldest, followed by another brother, Erich, and there was a four-year age gap between Ernst and Hans. Guetinger said this age difference played a role in his father's and uncle's relationship.
“My dad and uncle Hans didn’t have a very close relationship because they had grown up during wartime,” he said. “When war broke out in 1939, Uncle Hans was obliged to serve as a soldier.”
Soldiers were in short supply, so German boys aged 16 and 17 were drafted as “Flakhelfer” to work with anti-aircraft guns or man the huge lights that tracked enemy aircraft.
“My Uncle Erich was in this age range so served in this role, but my dad, being the youngest, did not have to serve,” he added.
After Nazi Germany’s defeat in 1945, the country was divided into occupation zones and then formally split into two separate countries in 1949.
Hans returned to Babenhausen, Bavaria, after the war and looked for work as a shoemaker. But jobs were scarce, and he had trouble finding work.
Amid their struggles, Hans’s homesick wife encouraged him to try finding work in the GDR, where she was from. They knew they would be welcomed, because the GDR was keen on people willing to buck the trend of those going west - roughly 2.7 million people moved to West Germany between 1949 and 1961 – for better economic and employment opportunities.
In 1958, Hans's family moved east to Brieskow-Finkenheerd, a village near the Polish border, where Hans started working at a power station that also provided their accommodation. He was also able to indulge in his love of hunting as much as he liked.
“He was very happy hunting,” Guetinger remembered fondly. “In West Germany, you could only hunt if you owned land, but since the government owned all the land in the GDR, my uncle was told he could hunt wherever he wanted.”
Hans became so well known for his hunting abilities that when the big cadres wanted to celebrate something and eat some tasty meat like boar or wild swine, they would ask Hans to go hunting.
“The party had its own hunters, but they considered my uncle one of the best,” Guetinger said.
Meanwhile, Hans’s younger brother Ernst, back in Bavaria, became a father to Erich Guetinger in 1951.
In the 1950s, freedom of movement between the two countries remained largely unrestricted, but from the 1960s onwards, tougher measures were instituted. After that, East Germans were generally only allowed to travel to the West for urgent family matters, such as funerals or weddings.
In August 1961 – 65 years ago – the East German government began building the Berlin Wall, a 155km (96 miles) concrete structure surrounding West Berlin that effectively isolated it within GDR territory and severed the capital.
Outside Berlin, efforts to fortify the division led to the installation of new barbed wire fences, detectors, watchtowers, as well as booby-traps and extended powers for border guards to shoot and arrest escapees. Between then and 1989, when the wall came down, an estimated 75,000 people were imprisoned for trying to escape.
Guetinger says that in the early years of the division, there was barely any contact with his uncle and family.
“Eventually, we were able to start sending letters, but we shared very little in these because everybody knew the East German secret police, known as the Stasi, would carefully check the post between families, often reading our letters,” he said.
Like many families in West Germany, the Guetingers would often send Western products to their relatives in the East.
“For Christmas, we made parcels containing things we knew they would like, and which we knew it would be difficult for them to get, such as coffee and blue jeans," Guetinger said.
"Blue jeans were particularly hot property, and my cousins liked this kind of clothing. And even though we would send parcels, there was always a chance that they wouldn’t reach them,” he explained, noting that shipments were closely monitored.
Guetinger says it is still hard to fully assess how the day-to-day disruption caused by the division impacted their family’s sense of safety and unity.
“Even if my parents had a heavy heart back then, they would rarely talk about it, so today, I have to rely on other indicators to try and understand. And one of the indicators is that my dad and his elder brother tried to visit each other as soon as it was possible for both of them.”
