I haven’t thought about this in years, but I remember how wierd it was that there wasn’t an East Germany or a West Germany anymore. Just… Germany. I wonder when that stopped being strange to me.
Only one thing good came out of it— David Bowie’s great song “Heroes.”
I remember standing by the Wall
And the guards fired over our heads
And we kissed before the fall
If anything is romantic enough to make me swoon, it’s that song. Now it needs a historical footnote before the youth of today will have any idea what he was talking about.
You’ll regret encouraging me.
Some more Wall stories:
I lived in a working class section of Berlin and once a neighbor guy asked me if I wanted to take a walk with him, at 2:30 the next day. Intrigued, I said yes. We walked to the Wall and there was an observation deck. You climbed up about two flights of stairs and stood on a platform and could look over the Wall. It was about three blocks to the street across the Wall…after the barbed wire and mines and death strip.
The guy told me he was thrown out of East Berlin a few years earlier. From his tattoos and what I had heard from him, I figured he was a “criminal” and the East used to get rid of their crime by sending “those kinds” over to the West. At any rate, we stood there for a few minutes and then he pointed…“over there.”
I looked and there was a young woman holding a baby and she smiled and waved and my neighbor smiled and waved. We stood there a few minutes and then he said, “that is my sister. She just had the baby and wanted me to see it. She wrote me a letter and told me to be here at 2:30.”
There was no internet back then, and few people in the East had telephones, so this was it. This was his first look at his nephew. Across the Wall.
Another story:
My SO was raised in Potsdam, just across the Berlin Wall. He and his mother and his aunt came to West Berlin right before the Wall became impermeable. You used to be able to cross with proper ID. Then, one night without warning, it became impossible to cross over. Suddenly, his grandmother and other aunts were in the East, and they were in the West. The aunt in the West was quite the black market, mover and shaker. She was going to get her mother and sisters to West Berlin, no matter what it took. They worked like crazy to get the money and the plans were set in motion.
Large trucks used to come from West Germany to West Berlin…crossing through East Germany, but controlled and checked at both the entry to East Germany and the entry to West Berlin.
My SO’s aunt found a man who drove trucks carrying televisions to West Berlin. One of the boxes on the truck was a decoy. He would stop the truck at a little wooded area in East Germany, someone would dash out from the trees, climb in the back of the truck and sneak into the decoy box. He would seal it up and then drive over to West Berlin. It cost about $3000 per person back then. A huge amount of money.
The first aunt came over that way.
No problem.
Then grandmother came.
No problem.
Then the last aunt…she was about to get into the truck but heard a noise and ducked back into the forest. Good timing. The East German police stopped to see why the truck was stopped. The driver was clever and said he just stopped to take a quick pee.
He drove off without the aunt in the back.
Two weeks later, he stopped there again, the aunt climbed in the back of the truck and got sealed into the television box and made it through to West Berlin.
Last story this time around:
The night the Wall came down. My SO just happened to be in Berlin while I was in California, watching it on television. It was late in West Berlin - about midnight or even later. He was at a friend’s bar and suddenly heard car horns and out of nowhere, the streets suddenly filled up like it was New Year’s Eve. Thousands and thousands of East Germans were pouring through the Wall and walking, awe-struck, down Kurfurstendamm - (think 5th Avenue in NYC). Like zombies, they walked into bars and just looked and then walked down the streets and looked into shop windows.
Word spread fast and our friend, who owned the bar, put a sign in the window, “Free Drink for the East Berliners”.
Needless to say, people came in droves. They sat in awe, some crying, others laughing. Something they had never expected in their lifetime had just happened.
Germany would never be the same again.
DMark Thank you for the fine narration. With the encouragement of Shirley Ujest how could you resist to further expound on the tales.
I want to thank everyone here for sharing their experiences. I wish to further encourage people to share these tales with others and to add to them. They’re very important in that this is the personal view of individuals that people do not get taught in classes. It’s also a great way to mark how things currently stand in your life to how they did back then.
Please feel free to add your tale, no matter how small or large. Thank You once again for participating.
i was in West Germany (near Frankfurt am main) when the Wall came down. I’m German and had grown up with it. It was an incredible thing to see. I remember that for weeks there were pictures of East German refugees camping out in the gardens and parks of the West German embassies in Prague and Warsaw. How many remember what actually caused the opening of the border. Here is a summary:
Günter Schabowski (member of the Politbüro) was holding a press conference around 7PM when he was handed a piece of paper and started reading it. It said something like: “Private trips outside the DDR can be requested without proof of need. No reason for the trip is needed. The VP (Volkspolizei) will give out visas as quickly as possible. Trips to the BRD (West Germany) will be allowed.”
This wasn’t to have become effective until the next day actually, because it hadn’t been passed by the Ministerrat yet. When Schabowski was asked when this becomes effective he answered “Immediately, as far as I know.” As soon as the West German and West Berlin TV stations started broadcasting “The Wall is open!” East Germans started to collect at the checkpoints demanding they be opened right away. At 11PM the border police actually started opening the checkpoints.
Interesting bit of trivia: there are actually people that fled across the Wall the other way (form West to East). There was a little piece of Berlin called the Lenné Dreieck, which was technically part of East Berlin but was on the Western side of the Wall. It became a haven for leftists and anarchists, since the West Berlin police weren’t allowed to do anything there. It was extensively used to plant marijuana. In 1988 a deal was made and the Lenné Dreieck was exchanged for a smaller piece of land and 76 million Deutschmarks. When the West Berlin police decided to clear out the area, the East German border police actually put ladders up against the wall, and had trucks ready to help all of those that fled cross the no-mans land behind the wall. The people who fled were invited to breakfast in East Berlin, and then sent back to West Berlin via the Friedrichstrasse train station.
I don’t remember that fact being broadcast, which doesn’t mean the American media didn’t. It’s a interesting addition to what I know.
Those are some amazing stories, DMark. Thanks for sharing them.
It was my 16th birthday as well, and I thought getting to see that on TV was one amazing gift.
Sounds like a Temporary Autonomous Zone that Hakim Bey would be proud of. In Berlin, of all places. I can’t think of a better example I’ve ever heard of since the pirate utopias of the 17th century. Fascinating. It’s “Temporary” because The Man will always bust it sooner or later. Time to pick up, move on, do it somewhere else…
In 1989 I was a freshman in college; on November 9 (six days after I turned 18), a friend and I went to get some lunch at The Varsity in downtown Atlanta. We got our chili dogs, onion rings, and cokes, and went and sat in the CNN room. (There was a TV in each room, each turned to a different station.)
We couldn’t quite understand what we were seeing; were those people tearing down the Berlin-freaking-Wall? We figured it was some kind of parody or joke at first. We couldn’t hear the TV set, so we just sat there watching the images, gradually talking through the issue and deciding that the world must be changing.
Thanks for all the great stories. The subject has always fascinated me.
I was 9 when the Wall fell. My family had just moved to a US Army base in West Germany a few months before; I woke up the morning after it fell to see the unusual sight of my mother sitting on the couch glued to the TV set. She explained what had happened, but I didn’t initially care – didn’t fully understand it, and I think I was still mad at Germany because I hadn’t wanted to move there. Later on I caught some of the excitement; they made a big deal in German class in school about distributing maps showing the two countries, and how they were going to be united; it seemed like lots of people were making trips to Berlin to hack off pieces of the wall. I wanted to go at that point; the importance of the event had finally sunk in. A neighbor had lent the family a movie about East German refugees trying to escape to the West, and I think it helped drive home how big an event the whole thing was. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to Berlin for another seven years or so.
On a personal level, the biggest effect the fall of the Berlin Wall had for me was that overnight it rendered obsolete the whole reason my family was in Germany in the first place. Within a few years, the base we lived on went from a thriving community of schools, shops, houses, churches, etc., to a ghost town. Doesn’t sound like much, but one of the saddest days of my childhood was visiting that deserted place after it had closed. (Later it was renovated by the German government and used to house refugees.) We moved to other bases in Germany, but the American military presence in Germany was a shadow of its former self, and it continues to dwindle today. A miniscule price to pay for the freedom that the fall of the Wall represented for hundreds of millions of people, but still a bit sad that that chapter of history is closing.
Try to find a copy of the CNN miniseries Cold War (your library may have it). A truly excellent series that covers the whole period from 1945 to 1989, and I believe two full episodes are dedicated to the Wall – the rise and the fall. (Plus a separate one, I think, on the Berlin Airlift.)
When this subject appears I always think of this memory from Michael Moore (yes that socialist weasel, as some ignorants from the right call him) taking the sledgehammer to the wall:
http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/message/index.php?messageDate=1999-11-08
What I like about that tale is that some on the extreme right risk to have their brains blow up when they picture that. 
In the late 60s and early 70s I was a serving soldier in Germany. This was at the height of the Cold War with Vietnam going full blast. The Inter-German boarder was a dominating reality as was the constant training for The Day The Balloon Goes Up and the Great Tactical Air Battle (Soviet, Czech and East German air forces v. US, British and West German air forces and air defense artillery). The air defense battery and Army Security Agency listening post at Kassel, north of Frankfurt a. M. was regularly overflown by Soviet jets. The armored cavalry regiment in the Fulda Gap were in daily eyeball contact with the East German and Soviets across the scar of plowed ground and fencing that was the boarder from the Baltic to the Danube. Few experiences were as sobering as riding the Duty Train from Frankfurt to Berlin, seeing the monumental, and monumentally ugly, Soviet War Memorial in West Berlin, and the equally monumental and monumentally ugly Wall. The Berlin Brigade was on pretty much constant alert. Things were very, very tense.
When the Wall came down we were hosting the chaperones for a group of German exchange students from a town on Lake Constance on the Swiss boarder at our home in Iowa. One of the visiting teachers and I fell into conversation about what would follow the opening of the boarder, and especially the chances of a reunification. He saw real economic trouble and social and political upheaval if unification came. I argued that the Great Powers would never permit a unified Germany, that the example of the two world wars made it inconceivable that the Powers, especially the Soviet Union and France, would tolerate the reestablishment of German military power in Central Europe. He was right. I was wrong.
It is a remarkable day. It was the beginning of the end, for the Soviet Union as well as for the East German government. I’m not sure it has played out yet.
More Wall stories:
West Berlin, when the Wall existed, was the size of NYC, including all the boroughs. I mention this as many people, myself included, thought West Berlin was this tiny town with a little wall around it. I actually thought I could just take an afternoon stroll around it once I got to the city. West Berlin was also closer to Poland than West Germany, so it really was an island in the middle of East Germany. I mention this as there were only a few ways to get to West Berlin and each route was heavily guarded (other than flying in). You were greeted with East German guards and machine guns when you entered East Germany, and again when you got to the West Berlin border.
A couple of funny stories:
I was in a café in West Berlin and met an American. His name was Bill. Bill told me he had taken the train from Sweden to Berlin. He got off the train in Berlin, checked into a hotel, then went to the Wall and took pictures of the other side, to show his friends back home how they lived over there. He had been in Berlin about a week and ran into some other American tourists. They asked how he liked Berlin and Bill said, “well, it is interesting, but I was expecting more nightlife, more neon and a wilder place.” The American tourists said, “Well, of course it is not like that here, but in West Berlin, it is.”
That is when Bill realized he had gotten off the train in EAST Berlin.
He immediately checked out of his hotel and came over to West Berlin, where it was exactly what he was expecting to find.
But Bill was not the only one to make that kind of error. I met another young American couple traveling from Sweden to Berlin, but they got off the train and knew they were in East Berlin. As they were flying back to the States from West Berlin, they exchanged the last of their money into Marks and then went to West Berlin and checked into a rather nice hotel. The receptionist asked for a deposit and they handed over the Marks. The receptionist looked at them as if they were space aliens and said, “West Marks, please.”
The American couple did not know there was a difference in currency. East Marks were worthless in West Berlin and could only be used in East Berlin. The couple had no other money, East Germany would never allow them to change the money back, and they were forced to call home and have their parents put the hotel bill on their credit card.
The Big Gay Party in East Berlin
Yes, Gay life in East Berlin was pretty good. They had quite a few Gay bars and the nightlife wasn’t bad, considering. I was invited to the Big Gay Party in East Berlin one weekend and gladly accepted. They had people coming from all over the East Bloc. It was well-planned and I wasn’t going to miss this. The weekend was culminating with the East German premiere of the American film, Cabaret.
About 60 people got on a boat and cruised down to a nice wooded area, we all got on a train and went to a tavern in the middle of the woods. I think my first shock was to see three men on accordions playing (seriously) Jimi Hendrix songs. At the tavern they heard an American was in the crowd and I suddenly became quite popular. They all wanted to go to America one day. I asked why, expecting to hear about freedom and human rights. The answers: “I want to see Disneyland”; “I want a hair transplant.” “You have porno films there, don’t you?”
So from the tavern, we took a train back to East Berlin and went to the movie theater. I had seen Cabaret about 12 times, but sat with the crowd. They were loving it and then it came to the song where the young German boy in the beer garden stands up and sings, “Oh Fatherland”.
Dead silence in the theater. From that point on, not one laugh, chuckle or movement in the crowd.
On the way out, I asked one of the guys how he liked the film and he was kind of quiet and then said, “up until that song, I think everyone liked it.”
“Why?”
“Well, up until that point, pre-war Germany looked wonderful and decadent and fun. We’ve never seen a film like that here in the East before. But when that boy started singing Oh Fatherland, we realized how easily we too could have become Nazis.”
And to make this sad ending of a story even sadder, the final event of the day was - at an outdoor beer garden. The mood was gone and people walked in and most turned around and quietly left.
Spies, the CIA and GI’s
I had a short affair with an East German guy who loved to party. His name was Wolfgang. We saw each other for about a year (more about that later), but only on weekends and sometimes not even then. At any rate, one weekend, I took a straight American friend of mine, Rick, over to East Berlin as Wolfgang was planning a huge party. Rick met a woman at the party. To make a long story short, they fell in love and he started going over to East Berlin with me on weekends to stay at her place. Eventually, they decided to get married. Rick put the paperwork through in West Berlin. She put the paperwork through in East Berlin. Although I only found out years later, one night on the way back to West Berlin, Rick was stopped at the border by the East German guards and taken to a small room. An East German man in a nice suit, who spoke perfect English, had a little conversation with my friend Rick.
“So, you want to marry one of ours?”
“Yes.”
“So how did you meet her?”
Rick had the spine of a jellyfish and told about me and Wolfgang and, well…Rick was in love. He wanted to get married, no matter what.
Prior to knowing this, one day I was at my local Gay bar in West Berlin and an American guy I knew from the bar came over and said hello. His name was Gary. He had been in the army and when he got out, he stayed in West Berlin. We always talked a bit when we saw each other. Gary was quite popular, tall – black – witty. His German was rotten, but he had a German lover who spoke English. At any rate, Gary said, “I hear a friend of yours is marrying an East German girl.”
It was no secret and I said, “Yeah.”
Gary nodded and said, “Your name came up.”
In hushed tones, I learned a lot that night. Gary was no longer in the army, but he did have a…well, he had a government job. He saw my name on a report. He told his boss that he knew me and that he would speak with me.
Gary knew about Wolfgang, he knew about Wolfgang’s parties and he even knew about a hotel Wolfgang and I used to go to every once in awhile. He implied there was no problem with me continuing to see Wolfgang, but it might be a good idea to stop having any contact with Rick for awhile. “Just might be good to stay under the radar for awhile,” was the exact phrase. Oh, and Gary told me to never tell anyone we had this conversation.
I never told anyone. I avoided Rick. He married the East German woman, she moved to West Berlin and they got divorced three years later. She fell in love with a German…an ex-East German who was now living in the West.
Oh, and Gary died of AIDS five years later. We had remained friends and I went to his funeral.
I continued to see Wolfgang for awhile. One thing that always impressed me about him is whenever I had to go back to West Berlin, he would accompany me to the border – even on cold, snowy or rainy nights. I once said, “You don’t have to come with me.”
Wolfgang smiled and said, “A good host always sees their guest to the door.”
A Day In The Life
I was at Wolfgang’s apartment one morning and had this bizarre, East/West experience. I was drinking a PEPSI, and Wolfgang was sewing a patch on his LEVIS when his neighbor lady was banging on the door, “Wolfgang – come quick, BONANZA is about to start and my television doesn’t work.”
Even though East German’s were not supposed to watch West television, you could see TV antennas pointed towards the West all over East Berlin. Back then, Dynasty and Dallas were also big hits in Germany but it was always interesting to hear East Germans talk about the show: “Did you see the cordless phone?” “Did you see the Mercedes?” “Did you see the Rolex watch?”
Nobody ever mentioned the plot. They didn’t give a damn who shot JR – they wanted to know who designed Suellen’s dress.
Shortly before the Wall came down, they started to sell VCR’s. They cost a fortune over there. And if you owned one, you were allowed to buy one VCR tape – per year.
So it came as no surprise to me that when the wall came down, West Berlin ran out of VCR’s, and tapes, within days.
Oh, and the biggest sales of pre-recorded tapes to East Germans? What else, but the East German, forbidden contraband – porn.
Thanks for adding to the experiences people. The post is increasing daily in hits so more than I are checking. Everybody is still encouraged to share and post even if you weren’t there. Perspectives from everyone are welcomed, be it short or long. DMark thanks for posting again and your encouraged to keep on posting if you have more stories. All the experiences here have been interesting.
As I said (or meant to say) academically I understand why the wall was up. But when the start of your memory of foreign policy begins with the first Iraq War it’s hard to actually understand it. I was born in the middle of the first Reagan administration and really grew up during the Clinton administration, so it’s hard to get the whole Cold War mentality.