Sixteen years ago citizens of Berlin started the demolition of the Berlin Wall. I think that this event should be remembered today, especially in the face of current world events. That night the television shows cut to live footage of the Berlin Wall being dismantled by people with bare hands. Though it brought other consequences with it’s removal, it was a landmark event for my generation. I grew up expecting a nuclear war as a kid and this was a mental relief for me. I realize that the threat still exists, but it’s nothing as tense as all the Cold War years. Let’s remember when a generation changed the coarse of history for the better.
Hmmm…I’ll take “Things That Still Give You Shivers” for $400 Alex.
I moved to Germany in August of 1990 so the elation was still very palpable. I lived in Hessen, about 40 miles east of Kassel, and often drove over to Bad Sooden-Allendorf which had actually been split by the wall. What a time. I lived on a farm and at least a couple of days a week we’d have a carload of ex-East Germans drive up looking for work. You couldn’t find a used car anywhere and the electronics stores couldn’t keep TVs or VCRs in stock. It was crazy. I remember trying to tell friends back home what it was like and all I could ever come up with was “Imagine California has been cut in half…”
At this time we should all raise a glass to that one man who made it all happen, whose heroic actions showed the Iron Curtain to be made of papier mache, who looked the Soviets in the eye and made them blink, who came from the West and single-handedly caused the collapse of the Warsaw Pact nations . . .
Matthias Rust.
I’ll take “Things That Happened When I Was 7” for $500, Alex.
I don’t remember the fall of the Berlin Wall. Heck, even after studying history, I’m still not completely sure why the thing was up in the first place.
I was in Berlin as part of a school trip in 1973 as a 13 year old.
For a protected, suburban-raised kid to see firsthand border guards carrying machine guns, going through Checkpoint Charlie into ::gasp:: a communist country.
The museum at the wall showing all the people that died trying to escape, the little diorama showing the minefields, tank barriers, etc.
I guess anyone that didn’t actually live through the Cold War couldn’t get what it was like when that wall came down. I wanted to get there so bad to jump around with the people I saw celebrating there, it was so cool to be watching.
The Wall, and Dachau. Pretty sobering things for a 13 year old to walk through in the space of 3 days.
I went to Berlin in December 1991. The change was still palpable. The tension between the east germans and the west germans was obvious. I stayed in an East German town just outside of West Berlin called Falkensee. The kids there were only on their second year of learning english, because up until the wall came down they learned russian in school. Traveling through Berlin you could literally see and feel the change as you crossed from one side to the other. There was still enough of the wall left up and unguarded that my friends and I got some authentic pieces, which I still have to this day. That was an incredible time - I would love to go back and see how much has changed.
I was in my early-twenties at the time, but 6,000 miles away it was a bit hard to really understand the signifigiance of it.
But about one year ago I went to Berlin. There are still a couple sections of the wall left, along with the gatehouse at Checkpoint Charlie. People make jokes about “shoot first and ask questions later” without thinking of times and places where that was literally true. Walking through an area that was legitimately called the “death zone” really drove it all home to me. Goodbye, good riddance, and may it never come back.
Thanks for the input people, the more stories the better. This is the route I like to see this thread going.
Prior to the fall, the sense of willful disregard of East Germany by some institutions was palpable. For example, an InterRail pass was good for travel in several Eastern-bloc countries, but not in East Germany, unless you were going straight through to Berlin.
Long haul passenger train cars on the Deutsches Bundesbahn usually carried a small placard giving the end points of the the car’s route. The western, northern, or southern terminus would usually be a major city outside Germany like Amsterdam, Paris, or Copenhagen; the eastern terminus would usually be a tiny place like Bad Harzburg, because that was as far as West German trains could go before reaching the inter-German border. For it’s important to remember that not only was there a wall in Berlin, but a huge, patrolled fence that from north to south through the entire country.
I lived in Berlin 14 years and the Wall was there the whole time. As an American, I used to be able to go over to East Berlin for 24 hours at a time. As I was poor when I first moved to West Berlin, I used to go and exchange my meager West Marks for 4 or 5 times the value in East Marks (on the black market of course). This gave me enough money to eat well and party in the East Berlin bars. I made quite a few East German friends and would go and spend the weekends there sometimes…those folks could drink me under the table, which is often why I stayed the night.
It was odd going to East Berlin and running around the bars and partying, and then coming back to West Berlin the next day. Lots and lots of stories of what the DDR citizens thought of the US and West Germans. Some good things, some not so good things.
The only thing that pisses me off is the credit people give to Ronald Raygun for “tearing down the wall”. He had little - actually, nothing to do with the fact.
It was a pretty amazing event when the Wall finally came down, and though there are still quite a few Germans who wish it would be re-built (not everyone is thrilled with Reunification), for the most part, it has been a truly wonderful thing.
One quick story - I knew two guys who were lovers…one lived in West Berlin, the other in East Berlin. Rumors were flying that there was a “hole” in Hungary and they were letting some people out into Austria. My West Berlin friend took over a bunch of money to the East. His lover took the money and bribed his way out of East Germany and then bribed his way down to Hungary and then found the “hole” and snuck across to Austria. From there, he called his friend in West Berlin who paid for a full price airfare to Hamburg. From Hamburg, he paid for another full fare to West Berlin. In all, it cost a fortune but FINALLY, the two lovers were together at last!
Then, the next day, the Berlin Wall came down.
They both walked about 12 blocks to the East, got the lovers clothes from his old apartment in East Berlin and then walked back to the apartment in the West.
Fate was not good to their bank accounts.
But who knew if they waited a week, history would be re-written?
I was old enough to remember - in November 1989 I was one month shy of becoming 15. Even at the time I understood I was watching histroy being made.
I remember it, even though I was only about 10 or 11 at the time. It was really exciting to talk about it in social studies. I just remember everyone being shocked-we never expected it to happen in our lifetime.
More importantly, 16 years ago today David Hasselhoff stood on the wall and sung about freedom.
16 years ago today, I was in the middle of a semester studying in Leningrad. Unless you’ve lived in a heavily censored society, it’s hard to understand just how filterd our information was - we had no clue what was going on when the US invaded Panama, and even a phone call home meant a reservation at an office across town 3 days in advance, for a specific time - if your family wan’t home, too bad.
In a society like that, rumor takes on a life of its own, and is sometimes more accurate than “official” news. So when we got wind that the Berlin Wall had come down, my entire program (about 40 people) was on a tour bus headed for the train station, about to start a trek to Moscow, Kiev, and Odessa. One of my classmates grabbed the mike for the bus’ PA system and yelled, “Guys, you’re not going to believe this! The Berlin Wall is coming down, and everybody is streaming west! It’s the beginning fo the end!” We all looked at each other and decided he had either been sneaking the moonshine, or that he was simply gullible enough to believe the rumor. (Until we got to Odessa, and met a bunch of East Germans in the hotel. We told them they were obviously going the wrong wy - they should really be going west! They shrugged and said they’d paid for the trip months before, and hell if they were going to forfeit it - they could always go west later.) The whole experience was kind of surreal.
I’m of the Cold War generation as well. I remember sitting there, watching the TV with my wife and thinking, " Incredible! It’s over! The whole world just changed".
Thanks for bringing this up.
Does anyone remember the Pink Floyd concert of “The Wall” that was done on the site after the Berlin Wall came down?
Maybe some of you can answer a question that is only a slight hijack. In the early 1970’s, I travelled by train along the border of West Germany and East Germany at night. I was very sleepy, but I think that I remember some of the small towns having a wall that sealed off the rest of the town. This would have been far away from Berlin. Did I just dream that?
Dmark thanks for that story.
Thank you all for the stories and the contemplations. Please keep the thread on track and start a new thread if you must. I wish to keep this important subject on track.
I was in Central America back then. Remarkable time.
I thought the Czechs started all this by opening their frontier with the DDR. Once that happened, the wall was out flanked. I see to recall the Hapsburgs played a role.
I was 14, and felt the same way. I had studied Communism in seventh grade social studies, and got the impression that it was going to be around for a long time.