Leap into freedom

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Leap into freedom
Photographer: Peter Leibing Photo
taken: August 15, 1961
Link to the photo
(please note copyrights )

Photo gallery of the escape. In the foreground you can see the later SFB cameraman Dieter Hoffmann, who filmed the jump.

The photo Jump to Freedom was taken on August 15, 1961 in Berlin . The then 20-year-old photographer Peter Leibing photographed Conrad Schumann , a 19-year-old police officer of the People's Police Readiness of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) at the exact moment when he fled the GDR jumping over barbed wire.

The photo immediately went around the world and became one of the media icons of the Cold War . The leap into freedom has been part of Germany's UNESCO World Document Heritage since 2011 .

history

Emergence

The Politburo of the SED under the leadership of Walter Ulbricht , in close consultation with the leadership of the Soviet Union under its President Nikita Khrushchev , decided to have a wall built across Berlin. Construction work initially began by sealing off the sector boundary on August 13, 1961.

Conrad Schumann was a member of a unit of the People's Police Readiness, which in turn was part of the barracked units of the Ministry of the Interior of the GDR. Schumann was assigned to "secure the border" during construction work on the wall. His unit was therefore sent from Dresden to Berlin on August 12th.

Bernauer Strasse and Ruppiner Strasse in 2007
The jump in the East Side Gallery

Schumann did his job on the sector border in Bernauer Strasse , the specialty of which was that the sidewalk belonged to West Berlin , whereas the (still inhabited) houses belonged to East Berlin . On August 15, 1961, Conrad Schumann was posted as a post on the corner of Ruppiner Strasse in the French sector , directly on a provisional border drawn with barbed wire .

Since in the days of the building of the Wall, dramatic escape scenes took place in the East Berlin houses on Bernauer Strasse, some of which - such as B. several jumps by residents out of windows into a jumping mat of the West Berlin fire brigade - were broadcast on television, a large crowd had already gathered on the west side.

Peter Leibing was a volunteer at the Hamburg picture agency Conti-Press , which sent him to Berlin on August 14th. Leibing immediately went to Bernauer Strasse and first watched Schumann pacing up and down or smoking a cigarette leaning against a wall. The first photos were taken. Passers-by told him that the "soldier" had already been to the barbed wire several times to check its height and to push it down a bit. Once he is said to have whispered "I will jump" to a spectator. The man thereupon informed the West Berlin police, who reversed an Opel Blitz van near the barbed wire and opened the rear door to signal Schumann that a vehicle was waiting for him.

In the meantime Leibing had his Exakta camera , equipped with a 200 mm telephoto lens, focused on the scene and was waiting. The GDR soldiers and people's police officers had received orders not to be photographed by people from the West. Next to Peter Leibing, not far from him, was the photographer Klaus Lehnartz. Both of them knew this order, and so they aimed their lenses at two soldiers on the opposite side of the street from Schumann. The soldiers then immediately turned away, went in the opposite direction to the barbed wire and could no longer see Schumann at that moment. Schumann used this moment to jump over the barrier to the west at around 4 p.m., where he was photographed by both Lehnartz and Leibing. While he was still jumping, he brushed his weapon, a Russian PPSch-41 submachine gun , off his shoulder and dropped it. She fell to the ground “in the west” where she was recovered by a police officer. Then Schumann ran into the Opel Blitz, which was waiting with the engine running, and quickly drove away with him to get him to safety. Lehnartz took Leibing to the Bild newspaper , which printed Leibing's photo full-page the following day.

Schumann's jump was also recorded on 16 mm film by the cameraman Dieter Hoffmann, who worked as a freelancer for the broadcaster Free Berlin . Another photographer was standing at right angles to Schumann when he started to jump and also took photos.

Legal dispute over image rights

Shortly after the events, Lehnartz claimed that he had taken the photo and also sold it under his name. Leibing later went to court against Lehnartz, who was finally forbidden from 1981 by an injunction to impersonate the author of the photo. However, since Leibing had taken the photo on behalf of his employer Conti-Press , the fee for using the photo went to the agency.

After Conti-Press went bankrupt in 1980 , the negative inventory was confiscated by the tax office for corporations due to tax debts. In 1989 the entire stock of photo negatives was auctioned by Prof. Dr. Hans-Dieter Loose (Director of the Hamburg State Archives) and Joachim W. Frank (Head of the State Archives' planning chamber) were auctioned. Another legal dispute ensued over the rights to the image and the associated fees, this time between Leibing and the archive. It was finally agreed that both sides would own the rights of use. Since then, the negative of the leap into freedom has been in the Hanseatic city's archive.

Media reception

Monument of the Jumping Soldier from 2009.

Leibing was able to take exactly one picture that shows Schumann jumping over the barbed wire while stripping off his weapon. In doing so, he benefited from the experience he had made while recording show jumping tournaments in Hamburg. In a very short time the photo went around the world and became a symbol of the escape from the GDR. The government in East Berlin ignored the picture, but in the West it was celebrated. The SPD politician Egon Bahr , then head of the West Berlin press office, shortly afterwards described it as a “ray of hope”.

In the same year, the leap into freedom was named "Best Photographer" by the New York Overseas Press Club . To this day, the photo has been published again and again - increasingly outside of its original context. B. on postage stamps, on consumer goods, for advertising purposes and as ( alienated ) art objects. 2009 the brothers Florian and Michael Brauer created with Edward Anders in Berlin, the Monument of the Jumping Soldier (Memorial of jumping soldiers) , a life-size image of the leaping Schumann. It's not far from the vanishing point.

In 2010, Jochen Vogt edited the story of Conrad Schumann's leap into freedom and the photo for a 40-minute television documentary for WDR under the title The Flight That Never Ended .

Friendship between Leibing and Schumann

The photographer and those who were photographed were bound by a long friendship that lasted until Schumann's death on June 20, 1998. In 1986, on the 25th anniversary of the construction of the Berlin Wall (and the photo), they met again at the corner of Bernauer and Ruppiner Strasse.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Film on youtube Film recording of the jump This video is no longer available due to Ruth Leibing's copyright claim.
  2. ↑ a b Ulrike Pilarczyk, Ulrike Mietzner: The reflected image. The serial iconographic photo analysis in the educational and social sciences. Klinkhardt, Bad Heilbrunn 2005, ISBN 3-7815-1409-9 , p. 76.
  3. ↑ a b German world document heritage building and fall of the Berlin Wall and the two-plus-four treaty , which also includes the leap into freedom .
  4. ↑ Escape from Bernauer Straße (film documentation in English)
  5. ^ Official image film of the Berlin Wall Memorial
  6. ↑ Information on the Conti-Press picture agency in the Hamburg State Archives
  7. ↑ a b c The photo of the fleeing border soldier is still going around the world. Bernauer Strasse, August 15th: “He's about to jump over”. In: Berliner Zeitung of August 11, 2001.
  8. ↑ Frederick Kempe: Berlin 1961: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Most Dangerous Place on Earth. GP Putnam's Sons, New York 2012, ISBN 978-0-425-24594-1 .
  9. ↑ a b 50 years of building the wall: Peter Leibing - A Hamburg writer writes photo history / In 1961, the later Abendblatt editor Peter Leibing photographed how the GDR police officer Conrad Schumann jumped into freedom. by Irene Jung on abendblatt.de on August 18, 2011.
  10. ↑ Information on Klaus Lehnartz at the DHM
  11. ^ Martin Stief: Desertion in divided Berlin. Combating desertions from the ranks of the riot police in the year the wall was built. BStU (ed.), Berlin 2011, p. 6.
  12. ^ Federal Agency for Civic Education : The Wall and its Pictures
  13. ^ Photo of the approaching Schumann, shortly before the jump , today in the police history collection of the police chief in Berlin.
  14. ^ Jeanette Konrad: the photo: Conrad Schumann. In: Karambolage 344 - November 9, 2014.
  15. ↑ Information on “Leap to Freedom”, 1961 , House of History
  16. ↑ Wall Jumper returns to where he jumped. In: Berliner Morgenpost
  17. ↑ leap into freedom ( Memento of the original September 24, 2016 Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link is automatically inserted and not yet tested. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.wochenpostonline.deIn: Wochenpost, Sunday, August 14, 2011.
  18. ↑ leap into freedom - The flight that never ended. ARD program announcement from 2010.
  19. ↑ An Abendblatt editor met his famous “motive”. Reunion at the Wall after 25 years In: Hamburger Abendblatt from May 26, 1986.
  20. ↑ Photos by Conrad Schumann, including together with Peter Leibing  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / www.sz-photo.de  

Coordinates: 52 ° 32 ′ 20.5 ″  N , 13 ° 23 ′ 56.5 ″  E