When the Wall came tumbling down
My first trip to the German Democratic Republic was not the nicest one I’ve ever been on. It was the summer of 1988, and it took my parents all the way from Solingen to the border to lull one-year-old me to sleep. We were on the way to visit friends in East-German city Dresden. “When we got to the border at Herleshausen, I was hoping they’d wave us right through, with you sleeping away on the backseat”, my mum Marion recalls. However, the border guard was not sympathetic. “We had to place you, in your car seat, on the street, they woke you up and then they completely took the back seat of our new car apart.”
The border they guarded is long gone by now. 20 years, to be exact. Communism came to an end in Germany on the night of 9th November 1989, when a slip of the tongue by Günter Schabowski, one of East Germany’s high ranking officials, opened the borders with immediate effect, and allowed East Germans to travel freely into the West.
When the Berlin Wall fell and the borders were opened, many Germans could not believe it. “I first saw it on the news that night, around 7pm. I saw the people pushing through the checkpoints, walking through the death zone and claiming onto the Wall. And all I thought was ‘Thank God! Finally! The border is open and they are free again’”, 82-year-old Hanna Kaufmann remembers. “I was surprised how peacefully it all happened! People were breaking through the barriers, and the East German border guards didn’t shoot!” Marion adds, reflecting on the guards’ order to open fire on everyone who was caught fleeing the state. Although East Germany was in a transition, due to Hungary letting German refugees escape to the West, nobody would have dared to dream that the Wall would fall. “It was unbelievable, the sheer mass of people coming through, taking their Trabis across into the West” 54-year-old Marion explains. Hanna adds “We’d been granted visas seven times, and knew what it was like over there. One time, our friends asked us to bring strawberries and a roast, because you couldn’t get these things over there. But newspapers and books were confiscated.”
News about the new travel arrangements and the opening of the border spread like a fire across both sides of the divide. Mario Ständer was working the late shift when he heard the news. “I planned to take my chance and flee into the West right after clocking off. At that time, all I knew was that those willing to leave could do so – but never return.” However, his mate refused to drive him to the border. “Fortunately, the borders stayed upon, and I eventually made it into the West”, he says.
Bernadette Hartmann was living in Lucerne, Switzerland, when the Berlin Wall fell. “Back then, although I knew something big was happening, it was too far away, in a different country, to really concern me. But now that I live in Germany, I can grasp just how big it was and how good it was for Germany to reunite.”
However, this sentiment is not shared by everyone. “Reuniting with the East only cost the West a lot of money, and we’re still spending more. They should have made the Wall 10m higher, if you ask me”, says one of Marion Kaufmann’s neighbours, who wishes to remain anonymous.
But on the 20th anniversary of the Wall’s demise, especially Berlin is celebrating with thousands of Germans gathering in front of the Brandenburg Gate. A flash-mob had been organised to form a chain of people along the former route of the Wall throughout Berlin. And Moritz van Dülmen spent one and a half years recreating pieces of the Wall out of Styrofoam for a city-wide Domino campaign. “We wanted people to really comprehend what happened back then”, 38-year-old initiator van Dülmen says. “Like a domino-effect, the opening of the Wall changed the world. And that is what we want to show by toppling these 1000 domino pieces that represent the wall over a length of 1,5 km along the former border between Reichstagufer and Potsdamer Platz.”
German Chancellor Angela Merkel was joined by former Polish president Lech Walesa and former leader of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev for the celebrations and a walk across the bridge at Bornholmer Strasse. The checkpoint Bornholmer Strasse was the first to open in 1989 and Merkel, who herself was a citizen of the GDR, thanked Gorbachev for ultimately making a German re-unification possible.
But Berlin resident Karima Wenner says that you can still tell East and West apart – at least in the capital. “The way they talk about each other and still use stereotypes is very apparent.” However, 23-year-old Karima claims that you can even see and feel it in Berlin’s entire cityscape. “The eastern part of Berlin has this trendy vibe to it, even more so than West Berlin. Sub cultures thrive there, probably because they had a lot to catch up on. And they still have events and spontaneous street festivals everywhere, that make the East a really cool place to be.” And then there are the Plattenbausiedlungen”, of course, the high-rise blocks of flats that still dominate East Berlin’s landscape.
“I was only three when the Wall fell, so I didn’t notice much”, says 23-year-old Chris Gramke. Born in the GDR, his family finally moved to the West when he was seven. “In my new West German primary school, the kids pointed at me, and shouted ‘There’s the Ossi!’” His parents told him, that their lives are now much better, than they were on the other side of the Wall. “Apparently, you always knew when there were Stasi spies around. They’d sit in a bar all day and would be the only ones not drinking anything.” However, Chris’ parents also mentioned, that the way of life might have been a little easier in the GDR, because they didn’t know the concepts of debt or unemployment. “These things just didn’t exist in a communist state.”
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