I Was There

You have no doubt come across some of the news coverage celebrating the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall. The New York Times is running a pretty cool interactive before/after slideshow, a gallery of readers' photos, a graphic detailing the wall complex including the notorious death strip, and the original 1989 NYT article announcing the fall of the wall. Germany's magazine Der Spiegel is offering a "live ticker" running the original press releases by AP, dpa, AFP at the exact time of day they were issued twenty years ago. I have neither graphics nor historical documents; I don't even have photos. But I have a couple of blurred memories:

I was 11 years old at the time and without a clue about the political situation. When I was much younger I somehow thought that it was all a matter of technology: West Germany, West Berlin, and most of the world seemed to be a on a different planet, and traveling to East Germany required an advanced spaceship that we (the East Germans) simply hadn't developed yet. So while everyone could visit us, we could only travel on our own little planet, which included the GDR, Czechoslovakia, Poland, the Soviet Union, Hungary, and Bulgaria. No one ever corrected my space ship fantasy, but once my (step-) grandfather turned 65 and legally left East Berlin to visit his cousin in the West by walking through a much-guarded door at the crossing Tränenpalast, this explanation didn't hold up any longer. During the summer and early fall of 1989 I joined my family watching the (West German) news about refugees who escaped East Germany through Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and about the large protest demonstrations in East Germany in which people demand to travel abroad. In early November, a million people gathered in Berlin to protest the East German regime.

At the time of that massive demonstration, which we could see from my grandmother's apartment windows, my baby-brother needed emergency surgery. We moved into the waiting room of the hospital. On November 9, after successful surgery and a couple of days of supervised recovery, the baby was released home and things went back to normal.

My dad, a civil engineer, and my mom, a lecturer of economics, had, by GDR standard, a pretty good income. We had a phone line, a car, an apartment with gas heat (rather than cockle stoves), and a full bathroom; we traveled twice a year, often to countries in Central Europe. Rent was cheap, food was cheap. Things like color-TV and cassette players, however, were exuberantly expensive. My dad had started working as a cabbie the previous year to buy a Sanyo stereo (which he still owns today), and since he liked driving and since the extra money was nice, he continued to drive a cab a couple of nights per week in 1989. He was on taxi-duty the night of the 9th.

When he returned home, at 10:30 or 11 p.m., he told my mom about this crazy person who flagged his cab to catch a ride to West Berlin. My dad had laughed at him and refused to pick him up. As he was telling the story, my mom interrupted him to summarize the historic news conference she'd followed on TV, during which Günter Schabowski, at around 7 p.m., had announced that new travel regulations would allow private travel to the West (with a visa). Because Schabowski hadn't been part of preparing these regulations and didn't know the details, he responded to a journalist's question as to when these new regulations would come into effect by stumbling sofort ("immediately," rather than the following day, as planned, to allow for border police to adjust to the new situation: that would have been the correct answer). Berlin radio and TV stations declared the wall was open, and tens of thousands of East Germans gathered at border crossings. Faced with massive crowds, the border police, itself without any direction from above, couldn't but let them through. My mom had followed the events on TV while comforting the baby, and she urged my dad to take us (me and my older brother) to West Berlin.

I was asleep at the time. I remember my dad woke me, saying we'd be going nach drüben (over there). I didn't believe him and went back to sleep. Next time I woke I found myself in the back seat of our car, wearing a coat over my pajamas and shoes on my bare feet. My older brother was in the front. We were stuck amidst hundreds of cars at the lesser-known border crossing of Heinrich-Heine-Strasse, and I kept dozing off. It seems to me we waited for hours; my dad says we were moving the entire time. I don't remember much of the crossing; there was a lot of noise and many people were yelling and screaming with excitement. On the other side of the wall Wessis were greeting us, offering my father free beer. He asked for directions to go somewhere kid-friendly, and a West Berlin man took the lead in his car to guide us (and others) to Kudamm, a famous boulevard-style shopping street that was already packed with ecstatic Berliners dancing and hugging each other. We went to Europa-Center (a small shopping mall and once an iconic building of West Berlin) to see the large water clock (picture here). My most vivid memory of the night is standing in my pajamas in front of that clock, with my dad explaining to me how it worked.

My first impressions of the West that night were that things smelled different and that the night--which in East Germany was just plain dark--was colorful and bright. In East Berlin hardly any stores had illuminated shop signs, but West Berlin shone with bright neon signs everywhere. As to the smell: all of West Berlin smelled like a huge intershop (an East German chain of stores offering West German products for hard currency [D-mark or dollars], aimed at Western tourists and, unintentionally, the stuff East German material dreams were made off), an aroma my mom identified as result of the combination of coffee beans, dark chocolate, and washing power, the quintessential content of any West-Paket (a package from the West) arriving in the East for Christmas.

We weren't in West Berlin for very long, and we didn't see the celebrations at Brandenburg Gate. My dad took us home in time to sleep a couple of hours and go to school the next morning. I had math during first period, but our math teacher 'went missing' over night (along with half the students), and a different teacher substituted for him. This substitute teacher happened to be the school's party functionary and, perhaps, even a Stasi informant (thus the rumor). He had spent the night with his sick mother and missed everything. By the time he walked into class he still didn't know what had happened, and he was furious that so many students were absent. We explained to him that everyone was in the West, that most of us present had been to the West already. The man quite literally lost it. He suffered a nervous breakdown that day and was taken from school in an ambulance.

After school my older brother convinced me to go back to West Berlin. At this point people could cross the border but had to provide ID cards. My older brother was 15 and already had his own ID. I didn't, and in retrospect it seems crazy and quite reckless that we crossed the border without our parents. I don't remember what we did that afternoon, but I imagine we wandered among the crowds and were quite happy. My mom went to West Berlin that day with co-workers and she was one of the people who were lifted up to stand on the wall.

Much more could be said, but I do want to keep it short. Just one thing: my parents' marriage, which already was disintegrating before the fall of 1989, fell apart during the next year. My mom met my now-stepfather, who is from West Germany. Within two years of the fall of the Berlin wall I had both, a family in the East and a family in the West. Therefore I don't strongly identify as Ossi but consider myself a child of unification. Everyone in my family has benefited from the 1989/1990 Wende, but one person is bitter about it: my aunt's husband who, as an East German heart surgeon, tried to escape the East, was caught, spent a year in prison, and was eventually 'bought' by the West German government. He paid a high price for his freedom and possibly resents that 17 millions East Germans got it for free.

Anyway. Happy 20th fall of the wall anniversary!