On November 9, 1989, the Germans tore down the wall.
The first person to jump over the wall was Private Conrad Schumann, he was 19 years old when he started running towards the barbed wire that divided Berlin. This story led to his death, but it became a symbol.
On November 9, 1989, the Germans tore down the wall. With hammers, picks, shovels and a clean hand. There are several stories of those who had tried to flee from East to West Berlin, the first to succeed was the soldier Conrad Schumann.
Conrad Schumannel first to achieve it was Private Conrad Schumann. He was also the one who understood the fastest what was coming and what to do. His story, epic and tragic, that of a Greek hero, weighed him all his life and led him to death.
From that story, the only thing that remains is a symbolic photo of his desperate leap, half bird, half despair, over the barbed wire that was the cornerstone of the Berlin Wall.
Schumann jumped on August 15, 1961, when the Wall was not even two whole days old. And if there is one photo, and there are many, it is because there was a photographer. The first German defector from the communist world had gotten away with it.
On August 13, 1961, when East Germany divided Berlin in two and the country in four, Schumann was a 19-year-old boy who had been born on March 28, 1942.
Schumann was born in Zschochau, Bavaria, into a family of sheep herders, and at the age of nineteen he enlisted in the police in the East Berlin sector, dominated by the USSR.
Conrad Schumann was one of the soldiers who participated in “Operation Rose”, as the operation to divide Berlin became known. In the next forty-eight hours, along with his young comrades, many like him in their early twenties, he saw what he had never imagined: entire families divided, loves and friends separated.
Schumann decided his fate in two days. On August 15 he learned that he was going to jump to the other side, that he was going to leave his home and family behind to start over in West Berlin.
On the other side of the barbed wall, was the other part of the story. A boy barely a year older than Schumann named Peter Leibing, who made his living as a photographer for the Conty Press agency in Hamburg. He was looking for an image that would make history. Leibing saw Schumann probing the barbed fence with his boot several times, so he wandered the area without losing sight of him and with his camera ready, light and distance, for whatever was to happen.
Leibing didn’t even think about it, he took his camera and focused on Schumann who, at four o’clock in the afternoon that Tuesday, threw down his cigarette, started running forward, barely stepped on, in the middle of the jump, the barbed wire, got rid of his rifle and fell almost into the arms of the Western police.
Leibing made his living as a photographer for the Hamburg Conty Press agency and was looking for an image that would make history
Schumann had ceased to be who he was to become a symbol of the Cold War. Leibing’s photo went around the world, won awards and medals. Schumann settled in West Berlin, met his wife, Kunigunde, had a son, and was lost in history.
In 1987 he was interviewed by the media, where he revealed that he had fallen into alcohol, that he had been a bricklayer, a nurse and an employee of the Audi car factory in Ingolstadt. He then photographed himself in front of the Wall still standing, with the enlarged photo that Leibing had made famous and that Schumann had in the dining room of his home in Bavaria.
He said that he had never regretted that jump: “I am proud of what I did,” he told Corriere della Sera, “I was in great danger, I broke with my past and began to endure intense pressure.”
Conrad Schumann was one of the soldiers who participated in “Operation Rose”, as the operation to divide Berlin became known
However, once the wall fell, nothing was the same. “When I returned, I discovered that my gesture had never been accepted by some relatives and old friends who no longer wanted to talk to me. But the truth is that it was only since November 9, 1989 that I felt really free. “
Schumann could never bear neither the emptiness of his friends, who reproached him for his betrayal of the Communist world, nor the reproach in similar terms that his parents and brothers made him, whom he doubted to visit in the old family home in Saxony.
On June 20, 1998, he was found hanging from a tree near Riesa and the town of Kipfenberg in Upper Bavaria, almost on the banks of the Elbe. He was 56 years old.
Paul is a talented author and journalist with a passion for entertainment and general news. He currently works as a writer at the 247 News Agency, where he has established herself as a respected voice in the industry.
