The first water sports enthusiast in the GDR to cross the Blue Border into the West was Siegfried Mitschard. Soon after, two yachts broke up in the west and crossed over. On board: Undine Schaper from Hamburg. The YACHT brought them together six years ago on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The recording of the conversation at the time is also a document of contemporary sailing history: the closely guarded maritime border, where more people were killed when trying to escape than at the wall, the “no-go area”, which left only a narrow corridor off southern Sweden and the Lübeck Bay cut through - everything was gone, all at once. Sailing on the Baltic Sea also changed dramatically with this date, November 9, 1989.
Mitschard's “Latovia”: the first GDR boat that legally crossed into the West
Siegfried Mitschard was out with a group of anglers when he heard on the radio what was going on in Germany and spontaneously decided to dare to cross the border, without nautical charts, without navigation aids. Only when the men were checked at the “Paradise Guard”, the warship that was supposed to watch out for the supposed socialist paradise, did they feel queasy: “If someone goes crazy here, then they'll sink us and no one will notice.” After all: It GDR law was still in force, the order to shoot was in effect. But miraculously, the crew was allowed to leave, and seasoned men hugged each other and wept.
A few weeks later, two west yachts set off from Lübeck for the east, the J 24 “Unglaublich” and the SprintSport “Cooled only”. "We felt queasy too," said Undine Schaper, who drove as a crew on the "Incredible". They too were checked, but they reached Wismar and were greeted by a cheering crowd. "It was the same everywhere these days," reports Schaper, "on all streets, in all places: the people waved, hugged and were incredibly happy."
The coveted PM 18: Without this permit, you weren't even allowed to go fishing
In the 23/2014 edition of YACHT, the two of them remembered dramatic days and their trips full of risks and uncertainty. Their impressive descriptions give an idea of how moving it was back then. Mitschard soon understood that the repression by the GDR dictatorship was over: “We thought: Man, now we can go anywhere, now we don't need to ask any more! When that was clear, I immediately bought a sailboat."