Although the Cold War produced no armed aggression on the battlefield between the Soviet Union and the West, there were casualties. Some spies and counterspies died, of course, but a major battlefront was in Berlin after the wall was erected in 1961. The film The Tunnel (Der tunnel), an expurgated version of a three-hour German television production directed by Roland Suso Richter, is an account of an effort to build an escape route from West Berlin into East Berlin. The Tunnel is clearly a more accurate German retake of the American film Escape >From East Berlin (1962). In the current movie, the driving force behind the construction of the tunnel, Harry Melchior (played by Heino Ferch), was arrested for his role in the 1953 uprising in East Germany, jailed for four years, and then resumed his athletic career to become the freestyle swimming champ of Germany on August 12, 1961. Although East German authorities are eager to reward his victory in exchange for a propaganda coup about the virtues of life under Communism, Melchior refuses, saying that he is retiring from athletic competition. On August 13, construction of the wall begins, and on August 26 he passes through Checkpoint Charlie with a disguise and a fake passport to freedom. His friend Matthis Hiller (played by Sebastian Koch), an engineer, escapes through the sewer and soon organizes an effort to construct a tunnel so that he can be reunited with wife Carola (played by Claudia Michelsen). Melchior joins to liberate his sister Lotte (played by Alexandra Maria Lara), her husband, and their infant daughter. Other coworkers are similarly motivated by the goal of family reunion, including Fritzi (played by Nicolette Krebitz), who gets wind of the year-long project and then demands to join the team in order to rescue her fiancé Heiner (played by Florian Panzner), who later tries unsuccessfully to go through the barbed wire to scale the wall. Much of the early part of film develops the personalities of the tunnel diggers and their families on the other side of the Berlin Wall, but the most gripping part of the movie is the digging and the efforts to avoid detection by East German authorities, as personified by Oberst Kruger (played by Uwe Kockisch). Some casualties result, but heroism is the motif of the project, which is financed in part by NBC-TV, some footage of which reappears in the German documentary Der Tunnel (1999). When the tunnel is completed, nearly thirty persons escape, including Matthis's baby boy, as his wife Carla serves a decoy to permit the escape on the fateful day. Titles at the end indicate the fate of some of the principals, including a payment by West German authorities to secure Carla's release, and notes that Hasso Herschel (who is renamed Harry Melchior in the film) continued tunneling and was responsible for the escape of at least one thousand persons. One title states that several tunnels were constructed over the years and that the exact number is unknown. )Less dramatically but more accurately, Herschel was one of a number of students who in fact constructed the first tunnel.) MH
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