Institute of Contemporary Arts

Death in Plumstead

Date: 20 August 2007

Dominik Danielewicz plays Peter Fechter. Photo: Yung Kha.

Left off the high street, under the railway bridge and through the gates, says Mark's email, and you should see something resembling the Berlin Wall.

And there it is: a little piece of East Berlin in the White Hart Road depot in Plumstead. Mark and his friend Clive have spent the week building a replica of the Wall as it stood on Zimmerstrasse in 1962: concrete, topped with breezeblocks and a Y-shaped strip of barbed wire. Far from plumb or true, it looks like a wall built in a hurry by inexperienced conscripts. But even then, all is not as it seems: the bottom part is a timber frame, faced with plywood and skimmed with concrete, and the barbed wire is novelty plastic.

This is the first day of rehearsal and preparation for Mark's live re-enactment ‘The Death of Peter Fechter', a re-enactment of the death of an 18-year old builder shot by East German border guards and left to die in the no-man's land beside the wall while guards on both sides looked on: one of the earliest and best-documented killings on the Wall.  I'm playing an American soldier, and soon my fellow Americans, East Germans, and the two actors playing Peter and his friend Helmut (who made it to the West) are all on site too. With one other exception, the performers are all professional or semi-professional actors. The last time I did any acting was for CSE Drama.

Mark shows us the performance area, and how the cameras capturing the event will be set up. We try on the uniforms - my boots are agony - and discuss how the performance might go. Unlike being given direction for a play, Mark allows us to think about our roles and how we want to react to the escape, the shooting, and the presence of the crowd.

On day two, we run through the first ten minutes of the performance: it turns out to be tricky getting Helmut over the wall. We start to develop our roles: the hard-ass sergeant, the corporal who nearly loses it, the grinning private. Photographer Lydia Polzer turns up to take some pictures of the wall and reconstruct one of the well-known photographs taken of Peter being removed from the death strip by DDR guards. She was born in the DDR, and is working on a photographic project documenting the architecture and infrastructure of East Germany that has become derelict since die Wende.

Saturday comes, and the performance proper. The crowd extras turn up early, to be primed on their roles, before hiding round the back of the depot so they can mingle with the audience when the coaches from central London arrive. The armourers turn up with blank-firing theatrical AKSU semi-automatic rifles and the DDR guards fire off a few test rounds. Mark is visibly delighted when the armourers ask him to fire a few rounds on fully automatic.

Then we're in uniform and on patrol, guarding a gap in the wall, as the audience turn up. We chew gum and give them our GI grins. Some of the audience attempt conversation, ask us where we're from: a backstory appears in my head. At noon, Peter and his friend Helmut leap from a window and scale the wall. Helmut balances precariously on top, and the audience of West Berliners help him down and over the barbed wire. The DDR guards fire their weapons: it's deafening; Peter falls and starts to cry for help.

So much we've rehearsed. But the new factor is the audience. The extras, and some members of the audience, start to shout at us, calling on us to help and try to push through our line to help him themselves. Twice they make a concerted group effort to push past us. Our job is to hold the line, keep the crowd under control. I find myself barking STAND THE FUCK BACK and poking people with the barrel of my rifle. Heads are (accidentally) knocked with the butt. The audience assume roles (the extras are all really excellent) and personalities: a couple of blokes are aggressive, trying to stare us down; one man calmly pleads with us to do the right thing; a young woman remonstrates, asks us if we have family, kids, what if this was our son? One man spits at us. Behind us, Peter writhes, bleeds, and pleads. I glance over my shoulder. People throw bandages and first aid kits over the wall.

The panic is tangible: I find my heart genuinely pounding, my breath coming roughly. Part of it is performance anxiety, part of it becoming the soldier. Having been in similar situations myself, confronting lines of police, I think the anger coming from the crowd feels genuine: I experience the raw hatred directed at me that I've so often projected myself. It's intimidating. You're always just a whisker away from losing it. But you also realise the logic of holding a line: positions aren't defended by argument, not because those arguments aren't tenable, or because you don't really believe them, but because the argument is simply irrelevant when you're armed. So you lose the grin, and start to avoid the eyes. They keep shouting. It becomes harrowing.

After fifty minutes, Peter dies, and the DDR guards cart him away. We GIs disperse the crowd, send them back to their coaches. We can't tell if they are bemused or angry: there's no curtain, no applause, just a patch of scrubby ground in Plumstead, empty again. We go to the pub for a drink and talk it over. It might just be the way that I was holding my rifle, but a couple of hours later, I'm still shaking slightly.