The people of Berlin reached out for what mattered and did something about it 20 years ago. The going was rough for years, but they worked through it. Let’s hear the stories of before and now. Stories of today’s events are also welcomed.
Here’s a link to a thread I started on a different year. There are many good stories in it. November 09 1989 The Berlin Wall Falls
Maybe I was too young and too far away at the time to appreciate how evil it really was. Then I went to Berlin about five years ago. It’s very powerful to stand in a place that, during my lifetime, was legitimately called the “death strip”. Good riddance.
There was a show about it on the History Channel a few nights ago, and they’ve been known to rerun things a time or two. A lot of it focused on the escape attempts, including interviews with the participants. It was inspiring to see how ingenious people could be in trying to defeat something like that.
I was too young to really understand the significance of what was happening, what all those people on TV cheering really meant – but I remember the impact it had on my mother, who grew up in Berlin during the time the wall was built (she was 16 when it closed). Initially, she got separated from her mother, who if I rightly recall had been staying with friends in East Berlin and suddenly found herself behind closed borders. However, she did manage to get back to her children in the end, though I don’t know exactly how. To me, this has always emphasized the suddenness of the separation – like one quick cut, cleaving country, friends and families in two; what used to be your neighbours became citizens of a different country, subject to a different system, basically overnight.
So yes, good riddance indeed.
I remember that day like it was yesterday. I was studying in Leningrad in the fall of 1989, and the day the Wall came down, my entire program group was getting on an Intourist tour bus to go to the train station to begin a study tour to Moscow, Kiev, and Odessa.
You have to understand that we were in a news semi-blackout in the Soviet Union; we only got very fragmented international news via the Soviet press, and international publications would trickle into the hard-currency hotel down the block from our dorm a few weeks late, if at all. This was in the days before widespread Internet acces; our dorm rooms didn’t have phones, and making a call home involved reservations at an office across town three days in advance, for a specified number of minutes. Combine that with the less-than-fluent Russian we spoke, and well, you can see how we didn’t have a very good idea of what was going on in the world. Most news was transmitted via word-of-mouth, and was sometimes less than reliable.
So back to the bus; one of my classmates grabbed the microphone (it was a tour bus, remember) and excitedly announced “Guys, you aren’t going to believe this! The Berlin Wall has come down, and everybody is streaming west!” Our general reaction was “yeah, suuuuuure, we believe you.”
Of course, we soon found out that it wasn’t just a rumor. Later in the trip, we met some East Germans in the hotel in Kiev, and told them “hey guys, you’re going the wrong way!” They reasoned that they’d already paid for the Soviet trip, so they’d just go west later.
20 years ago I was living in Los Angeles, chasing wannabe rockstars. A friend of mine who was a fellow rock-n-roll courtesan happened to be in Berlin on November 9th because she was following a UK Punk band. Around lunch Pacific time she called me from a public phone at great expense to her to announce that she had just danced on top of the Berlin Wall.
“Because soldiers were shooting at your feet?” I asked in total disbelief.
“No, they just announced that border is open and people are climbing all over the wall, and singing and hugging and helping people climb over from the East. There are guards all over the place and they’re letting us do whatever we want. I just wanted to call to let you know.” Then she held the phone out so I could hear for myself the sound of happy Germans celebrating in the street all around her.
I was so jealous of her for being right there as history was made, but forever grateful that she had thought of me in the midst of all that chaos and called so I could take part - however remotely- in the moment as well.
20 years ago, I was living in LA, celebrating my 27th birthday 
I was living in Denmark as an exchange student. My Danish wasn’t yet very fluent, so it was a bit foggy, but I was fascinated (despite knowing very little about how the GDR/DDR split really worked). My host dad was German, so of course he was very excited and glued to the TV. I found it odd that my classmates and even my host sister were not terribly interested; they didn’t seem to care much.
We visited Germany a couple of times in the next few months and everyone was very happy and excited. The difficulties didn’t really set in until after I was gone from the scene.
Within the next couple of years, two of my brothers did student exchanges in Germany. One lived in the former DDR, the other spent a lot of time there. He took a lot of interesting photos of old East German stuff that is all gone by now.
Happy Birthday, 3waygeek!
I was a senior in high school in California, and while I was an average American kid - unwordly, and without any kind of understanding of global politics - I remember watching the news reports in school the next day, and feeling an enormous emotional reaction that took me completely by surprise.
I was trying (unsuccessfully) to keep from crying, as I watched these people, many not much older than me, standing triumphantly on top of the Wall, or breaking holes in it with seldgehammers to make their own border passages.
In retrospect, I think my reaction was a partly a result of the unconscious realization that the Cold War - which had been an unspoken, but profound influence on nearly every aspect of my life up to that point - was for all intents and purposes, over.
I also recall that it was the first time I saw ordinary people close to my own age, not just on the news as passive subjects, but actually making the news. And what news it was! This was proof positive that ordinary folks can make a difference - that a collective will can stand up to one of the biggest political forces in the world, and win. For a 17 year old kid, nearing adulthood, with all the uncertainty and angst and baggage that comes with that, it was somehow comforting to know that ordinary people like me could prevail against nameless, faceless authority.
I actually got to see a section of the Berlin Wall a few years ago - inexplicably, in Dallas TX, on a business trip. The Hilton Anatole has a couple sections displayed in its courtyard - I actually got to touch them, and it felt like 1989 all over again.
Man, I’m a little choked up as I’m typing this.
I was 4 years old, and I had no recollection of it… I wonder if my parent’s watched it on TV, as I don’t think anything was made of it. Life just went on for me growing up, and I never really had any reactions to it, only that I later would learn that I had been alive when this thing had came down, which was really weird because I always felt like communism was so outdated- that’s like the Vietnam war or something. So far away from me and my childhood. Didn’t really become as aware of these things until High school, and even then it was more of Junior year or so when I got to take a Modern US history class, rather than one that ended pretty much after WWII…
It’d be weird to hear people talk like this about 9-11 and other significant moments in history that I can recall so well… But I know it’s going to happen.
I grew up with the constant background knowledge that at any time, the Final War could start, and there was nothing we could do about it. I was in second year at electronics school when I came down to breakfast one morning to hear that the Soviets had shot down a Korean airliner, and everyone I knew figured that nuclear war had just gotten a lot closer.
And then… it was over. It was like a death sentence of uncertainty over our lives had simply been… cancelled.
The Globe and Mail has a report about the East Berliner who was the first one through.
In the article, it mentions that the (West, later united) German government has spent 1.3 trillion euros in the past 20 years to bring the east up to snuff and help its people adapt. Makes me wonder how a reunited Korea would fare.
I’m glad to see a few stories added. I hope to see more. Any little story you wish to add is welcome even if you think it’s mundane I’m sure it will be of interest…
We’re the same age. All I remember is sitting in my grandmother’s livingroom watching some wall being torn down and all the adults in the room were all excited and happy and I didn’t understand why. I was in 7th grade when we finally got updated textbooks and maps. I think I’ll watch Good Bye Lenin! tonight.
Thanks for starting this thread, I spent a few hours today reading up on the accounts of ordinary people who were there in that night.
I still remember watching it on TV, it’s one of my oldest clear memories. I had just recently turned five, an my family was gathered round the TV. I watched people dancing on the wall and played with my Legos, and on the box there was a sticker celebrating the 40th anniversary of the founding of the BRD.
I have no memories of the politics that came after, of the collapse of the rest of the Eastern Bloc, but it was easy to understand and to remember what happened in that night.
I was eleven years old back then. I remember quite vividly watching it on TV, but I didn’t really understand the politics of the situation at all. Everything I knew about East and West Germany at the time I learned from watching the Olympics.
We have a section on our campus.
Myself being already 28 at that time (and an Army Reservist) I was very aware of these developments. I had been following for a while the initial paroxysms of a system that had been in place for 40 years becoming unsustainable – from the dashed hopes of Tiananmen Square to the heightened expectations of Glasnost…
I had by the early afternoon heard the radio reports that the GDR was going to announce it, like Hungary and Czechoslovakia shortly before, was opening its border. But when I got home in the evening and heard other reports on the radio I quickly turned on the TV…
…The crowd was on the wall, celebrating. Celebrating. Not rioting. The Border Troops not doing anything about it, the opressors having lost the will to opress in the realization of their own pointlesness; while the People reveled in the best kind of victory: joyful victory, the victory of delighting in your great achievement than in rubbing your adversary’s face in his defeat. And I thought, yes, this is the right way. Not a bang; not a whimper; but an exclamation of joy.
I’ve been enjoying the ability to experience the fall second-hand 20 years later. I lived in Berlin, right around the corner from the Bornholmer Bridge for a year while I was in grad school, a couple of years before the wall came down. Actually, it was the year that President Reagan visited. (I cringed and stayed home to make dinner for my German roommates who were out participating in protests. I’d have loved to be there too, but didn’t want to get into a stupid situation as a U.S. citizen.)
I always found it annoying that my housemates could cross the border around the corner and I had to go to either Checkpoint Charlie or Friedrichstrasse to get across.
One of my closest friends had a scholarship in East Berlin. I went to visit her and her roommate fairly often, so the border-crossing became routine. We went from really paranoid to really bold to somewhere in between.
When she first arrived, she was in a dorm, in her own room. This was the really paranoid phase where she was told she was being monitored which led us to think about all the ways they could do this. Yes, we imagined bugs and hidden cameras. She also felt like she couldn’t trust anyone she met.
Later, she shared an apartment with another student (the owner/tenant - not sure which) was an author they’d met (I think) through the U.S. Embassy (or maybe through someone they’d met at an Embassy event). By this point, we’d all become much less fearful, so I stopped taking the midnight curfew quite so seriously. I’d routinely make it back to the border at 12:05 along with others who were very afraid they wouldn’t be let back into the West. I was always apologetic and would either say I’d missed a bus or the bus had been late. Never had a problem until…
My friend asked me to mail a letter to her fiance. She would normally send letters through the Embassy, but didn’t have time to get there and figured it would be just as easy for me to toss it in the German mail. I didn’t even give it a second thought. So, of course, this is the one time they actually looked at what was in my purse and pulled me aside into an office. I got to wait for a while and then someone asked me questions. It felt surreal, but not scary. And, eventually, they decided I was on the up and up and let me go home. Without the letter, of course.
My other Berlin Wall memory is of the wall itself, which was part of the view out my bedroom window. There were gardens between us and the wall and then you could see the S-Bahn (above-ground trains that are part of the city’s public transportation system) running along the wall, looking for all the world like a very large model train.
It was really interesting to watch the German news online (well, on video podcast) last night. Their late-night newscasts were mostly about the festivities. They talked to all kinds of people who were in Berlin that night, including Chancellor Merkel and showed her hanging out with people on the Bornholmer Bridge, along with Mikhail Gorbachev and Lech Walesa (that part might have been a Reuters video on the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung Web site).
It’s very odd to think about how normal it seems for there to be one Germany; it feels like it’s always been that way, even though I lived it very differently.
I remember that night well-the end of communism. Was I surprised? Not really- Soviet-Style Coominism had been rotting for decades. In East Germany-half the population was spying on the other half; the economy was in shambles, nd nobody believed the ideology anymore. In the end, communism was a failed religion-I wonder why we in the USA are so entranced with it?