On August 15, 1961, Konrad Schumann, 19, was on guard in East Berlin where they had started to construct the Berlin Wall. Schumann waited as fellow soldiers left his side and then stepped on the barbed wire pretending to check it. A crowd gathered on the other side ...
A West German police car stopped ten meters away from the wall with a door open. Schumann smoked nervously before gathering the courage to make the leap, tossing off his gun and jumping to the other side he quickly scrambled into the waiting car. The entire incident took six seconds.
Photographer Peter Leibing was the same age as Schumann. The nervous soldier standing close to the fence smoking one cigarette after another caught his attention. The photographer installed a camera and focused on the barbed wire and then stood across from the soldier for one and a half hours, watching afraid to blink.
Leiblings resulting photo garnered a lot of attention and inspired a statue to memorialize the event ... Schumann's story was not to end as happily. He worried that he couldn’t get in touch with his family and he believed that Stasi agents from the GDR were following him, blaming Leibing’s photograph that made him famous and prevented him from blending in, in Western Germany.
