After being up for 28 years, the Berlin Wall fell on November 9, 1989. It officially fell when a person from the government announced that the people would be allowed to cross the wall freely. On that day, people celebrated the fall of the Berlin Wall. Many families were united once again and people were attempting to destroy some of the wall to represent the official fall of the wall.
On June 13, 1990, the official dismantling of the Wall by the East German military began in Bernauer Straße. On July 1, the day East Germany adopted the West Germany currency, all de jure border controls ceased, although the inter-German border had become meaningless for some time before that. The dismantling continued to be carried out by military units (after unification under the Bundeswehr) and lasted until November 1991. Only a few short sections and watchtowers were left standing as memorials.
The fall of the Wall was the first step toward German reunification, which was formally concluded on October 3, 1990.
On June 13, 1990, the official dismantling of the Wall by the East German military began in Bernauer Straße. On July 1, the day East Germany adopted the West Germany currency, all de jure border controls ceased, although the inter-German border had become meaningless for some time before that. The dismantling continued to be carried out by military units (after unification under the Bundeswehr) and lasted until November 1991. Only a few short sections and watchtowers were left standing as memorials.
The fall of the Wall was the first step toward German reunification, which was formally concluded on October 3, 1990.
Tumbling Down
A great story of that night when the berlin wall came down, everybody was full of joy.
Article
Why did you not take this down 20 years ago?
Graffiti on Eastern side of Berlin Wall, January 1990
It
was a pleasant enough flat, though the rooms were small. From the window you
could see the Reichstag, the Brandenburg Gate and the empty site between the
inner and outer Wall where Hitler's Fuhrerbunker had once been. It was the kind
of property which would command big money when Berlin was eventually united. The
present occupant was finding it difficult to pay the absurdly low rent which the
East German authorities were still charging.
`I have a wardrobe full of expensive suits,' he said. `Before long I may have to
eat them.'
His attractive Russian wife smiled at him and stroked his thin grey hair
affectionately.
He began to smile too, but he was a worried man. All round us were the
accoutrements of a prosperous existence: bottles of Scotch, books from the West,
an expensive hi-fi set, some good records and tapes. And now he had nothing
except these things, and no means of earning a living. He had not been trained
for that. I felt as though I were in the apartment of a Romanoff prince after
the 1917 Revolution. But this was no minor royalty. Gunter Schabowski had been
the general secretary of the Communist SED in East Berlin and a member of the
Politburo: one of the most powerful men in East Germany.
Erich Honecker had been overthrown and was in disgrace, the SED had been thoroughly
reorganized and had changed its name to the PDS - the Party for Democratic
Socialism. All the old figures like Schabowski and Egon Krenz had been thrown
out of the Party by early December. Krenz had become a wealthy man. He had sold
his story to the right-wing tabloid Bild in West Germany for a fee which he
insisted was not as high as 1.5 million Deutschemarks. Gunter Schabowski refused
to do that kind of thing. But he was hoping to earn some money from writing his
own account of the collapse of Marxism-Leninism in the GDR.
I had come to see him to ask about one single episode in the chain of events which
brought about the SED's downfall. Time and again people in East Berlin had
spoken about the miraculous way in which the opening of the Berlin Wall had been
announced to the world on the night of 9 November 1989. In East Germany this had
now taken on something of the supernatural aura of the Angel of Mons or the
leaning Virgin of Albert. Everyone who watched the moment on television had
different versions of it. Some said an East German radio correspondent had come
up and handed him a piece of paper, which he had then read out. Others said the
paper was brought in by a messenger whom no one recognized.
`If you find out how that announcement came about,' a minor government official said
to me, `you must tell everyone. It's the great mystery of our time.'
`There was something very strange about it, I know that,' said a Marxist historian. `No
one has been able to explain it satisfactorily. I'm positive that the Politburo
didn't intend it to come out like this.'
Some senior figures in the opposition, whose lives and careers had been radically
changed as a result of the announcement, seemed to regard it almost as an occult
intervention in Germany's affairs.
`It was a miracle,' said one senior CDU official in East Berlin. `We still don't
know who wrote that small piece of paper which ordered the Wall to come down. It
was read out in a most extraordinary way at the end of a press conference. It
created such amazement. Even the man who read it out was amazed.'
The man who read it out was Gunter Schabowski. I had come to his flat to find out if
it really was the Finger of God which had placed the piece of paper in front of
him. It took him a long time to decide whether to tell me. He had, he said,
refused to talk to everyone else. There was silence. His wife made tea in the
kitchen. His pet parrot squawked. The lift clattered into life outside his front
door. Finally an innate courtesy overcame him, even though he felt he might be
lowering the value of his own exclusive account of the Miracle of the Wall. He
decided to talk.
At the time, Schabowski was the Central Committee's secretary for the media as well
as being a member of the Politburo. He had a reputation as a straight and honest
man. He wasn't scared to go onto the streets after the fall of Honecker and
argue out the unpopular policies of the SED with ordinary people. Shortly before
7 p.m. on the evening of 9 November he gave a press conference to announce the
latest decisions of the Council of Ministers. Much of it dealt with the new
philosophy of the Party. It was now accepted, he said, that the GDR was a
pluralist society. There were details about the forthcoming Party
conference.
Schabowski came to the end of these announcements. There was an awkward pause. The 300
journalists who were sitting there became restless. He whispered something to
the man next to him, and shuffled his papers. The man next to him leaned over. A
piece of paper appeared in Schabowski's hand. He read from it slowly and
hesitantly.
This will be interesting for you: today the decision was taken to make it possible
for all citizens to leave the country through the official border crossing
points. All citizens of the GDR can now be issued with visas for the purposes of
travel or visiting relatives in the West. This order is to take effect at
once.
Everyone started talking at once. A correspondent from GDR radio stood up and asked for
more details. Schabowski had used the expression `unverzuglich' ('at once',
`immediately'); when precisely did that mean? Schabowski gave no clear answer.
He was still holding onto the piece of paper. A crowd of journalists gathered
round him, trying to find out further details. How soon was `unverzuglich'?
Schabowski was confused and tired.
`It just means straightaway,' he said.
The art of politics is to create the illusion of competence. An illusionist who
admits to letting the doves escape from his inside pockets is an illusionist who
has given up all hope of a return booking. Sitting in his flat overlooking the
Brandenburg Gate, Gunter Schabowski was at first unwilling to admit to any
confusion in announcing the breaching of the Wall.
`I finished giving my information about the Central Committee business, and then I
turned to the next item on the agenda.'
I pressed him. Finally he admitted it. The mysterious piece of paper, the note
which had been passed to him by some superhuman agency, written with the pen of
an angel, was the typed-up note of the decision which the Politburo had reached
that afternoon. It had been on top of his sheaf of papers when he came into the
press conference. Somehow it became mixed up with the rest. So instead of
reading it first he had to go through Any Other Business, in the hope of coming
across it later. He discovered it at the bottom of the pile. End of
miracle.
The decision had been taken by the full Politburo a few hours before on the
afternoon of 9 November. It was an acknowledgement of the anger building up in
East German society over the inequity of the rules governing permission to visit
the West.
The fact that some were allowed to go and some weren't was silly and Kafkaesque. It
demanded a solution. But it had to be done quickly. We didn't have time to think
about it carefully. We had to make our draft programme public fast, and that had
to be in it. There was already the draft of a special law on the subject in
existence, and so we in the Politburo decided to instruct the government to take
some of the points from this draft. It had to be written in a way people could
understand. We didn't want it to be in a kind of india-rubber language which
could be stretched in one way or the other. We wanted to make it quite clear: if
you want to go to the West, you can go. Full stop. There would have to be some
transitional measures, because most people didn't have passports. But our aim
was to have a system like you do in the West, whereby if you have a passport,
you can leave the country.
I was unwilling to interrupt the flow, in case he decided that he'd told me more
than enough already. But it was important to know whether the members of the
Politburo understood the significance of what they were doing. Had anyone, for
instance, suggested at the meeting that this was really the end of the Wall, and
might well be the end of Communist government in the GDR - the end, indeed, of
the GDR itself?
No one realized. No one said anything like that. No one really thought about the
result. We knew we had to take this step. As for its leading to the end of the
GDR, none of us expected that at all. And I have to say that none of the
opposition groups in the country expected it either. We hoped, quite simply,
that this measure would create a better GDR, more open to human rights and so
on. We thought the Wall was stable, I must say.
In its way, then, it was a kind of miracle. Without the suddenness of the
announcement, the impact of the opening of the Wall would have been less.
Without the great outflow of surprise and delight at the Berlin Wall, the tidal
wave which swept across Czechoslovakia might not have happened as it did. And
without the suddenness of the revolution in Czechoslovakia, people in Romania
might not have been emboldened to come out and challenge Ceausescu.
The nuclear reaction required a powerful detonating explosion. That had been
provided by Gunter Schabowski. Now he sat in his small but disturbingly
expensive flat overlooking the Wall which he had helped to demolish, wondering
how he was going to make a living. His papers had been mixed up by the finger of
history.
The first news that people could pass freely to the West was broadcast on an East
German television news bulletin at 7.30 that evening. The pictures of the
celebrated press conference by Schabowski were broadcast, but there was little
explanation. Immediately the switchboard of the television station was swamped
with callers trying to find out more. The director of news ordered that
Schabowski's announcement should be repeated at regular intervals through the
evening. By now, too, it was being reported on West German television. People in
East Berlin were switching backwards and forwards, watching the
coverage.
The message was relayed to the West German Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, who was on an
official visit to Poland. A few minutes later he was stopped by a West German
television reporter as he arrived for a formal dinner. Kohl was not a man to
match great occasions with inspired sentiments. His concern was with the outflow
of East Germans to the West:
The solution cannot be for many people to come to West Germany. Living conditions
should be improved in East Germany, so they stay there. It's in our interests
that they should stay.
In Berlin itself, people were starting to head out onto the streets to see what was
going on for themselves. Schabowski's slightly vague expression, that people
would be able to obtain exit visas `unverzuglich', immediately or at once,
seemed unlikely to mean that anyone could cross that night. In a society inured
to waiting for everything from officialdom, it was hard to think that police
stations would issue the necessary piece of paper so quickly. At the
Invalidenstrasse crossing, a little to the north of the Brandenburg Gate, the
first East Germans to arrive there at around nine o'clock were told by the
officer in charge that they would need a stamp in their identity cards. This, he
said, could be obtained only from their local police station. They went away,
disappointed.
About a mile further north, at the Bornholmerstrasse crossing-point, the situation was
altogether different. Shortly before 9.30 a couple in their late thirties
decided to test out the system. They walked through to the glass-fronted booth
where the border guard sat. He gave them a smile and said they could go through
without a visa. He promised them that there would be no problem as long as they
came back through the same check-point that night. Several journalists saw them
coming through to the western side, but they were so matter-of-fact about it all
that it seemed as though they were Westerners returning. No one stopped them to
ask them questions.
Erich Knorr, an engineer in his mid-forties, had been out late that evening in East
Berlin, seeing friends. His wife had left him a few months before, and his
daughter was at university. His flat was cold and uninviting as he let himself
in. Automatically, he went over to turn on the television. The sound of voices
made things seem a little less lonely. He was still not used to living by
himself. It was around 10.30, and the station he had switched on, SFB in West
Berlin, was showing a discussion programme of some kind. Knorr was making a cup
of coffee when he caught the words, `And now we're going over to our reporter at
the Invalidenstrasse crossing-point.'
Idly, thinking there might have been some shooting incident, he wandered back into the
sitting room. The reporter was talking excitedly in front of a crowd of a few
dozen people. As he spoke a young man came running up out of the darkness and
shouted at the camera, `They've opened the check-point in the
Bornholmerstrasse!' Erich Knorr knew now that the unthinkable had happened. He
lived close to the Bornholmerstrasse, in the Schonhauserallee. He rang a girl he
knew to see if she wanted to come with him to the West, but she said she was too
tired, and didn't believe it anyway.
He left his coffee untasted on the table and set off. Out in the street he broke
into a run. As he turned into the road that led to the crossing-point he ran
into crowds of people heading in the same direction. There were people of all
ages, many with young children who had been wakened up so the whole family could
experience this extraordinary moment. Knorr was unencumbered by wife or family.
For the first time in weeks, being on his own was an advantage. He pushed
through to the front.
He could see the check-point now. They were letting people through very slowly,
checking their identity. A big crowd had built up. From time to time there was
chanting:
`Take the Wall down! Take the Wall down!'
There was no anger, but there was real impatience at the slowness of it
all.
Then the border guards came pouring out of the building, about a dozen of them, and
Erich thought there was going to be trouble. He'd worked his way almost through
to the front by now, and he was afraid that if they charged he might be injured.
But the guards ignored the crowd. They fanned out in front of the post and
started shifting the heavy blocks of concrete that lay across the street to
prevent cars from passing through more than one at a time. The gates opened. An
officer made a gesture with his hand, like a doorman at an hotel. There were no
more formalities: the way to the West lay open. Everyone cheered and shouted and
sang, and they surged forward, ten abreast.
At that moment, where the road passes over two Stadtbahn lines, one serving the
East and the other the West, a couple of trains happened to come along at the
same time. As they passed the Bornholmer crossing they both stopped and hooted
their horns, while the passengers waved and blew kisses. Erich Knorr was
shouting and weeping with the rest of them now, and when he reached the other
side of the Wall people came running out of the houses and flats on the West and
offered them things: cups of coffee, glasses of champagne, flowers, and West
German Marks. Erich saw someone throwing a handful of useless Ostmarks, the
non-convertible currency of the East, into the air. The little notes were picked
up by the mild November wind and fluttered over the heads of the crowd. Everyone
cheered to see them go.
I can't tell you what it meant to us. All these years we'd been bottled up in our
little part of Germany, second-class citizens that nobody wanted, in a country
most of us didn't really want to be in. I'd been a prisoner, and suddenly I
wasn't a prisoner any longer. I could have shouted and sung and waved my arms. I
couldn't stop smiling. A girl came up and gave me a kiss, and I thought I was
really in heaven.
A crowd control van belonging to the West Berlin police drove up. Someone made an
announcement:
Everyone should stay calm. No need to get excited. Buses are coming to take you to the
Ku'damm.
The crowd cheered. Erich didn't want to wait for the bus. He took the U-bahn to the
Kurfurstendamm. The city authorities had just decided that it should be free,
since most of the people using it would be unable to pay.
I got out at the Ku'damm station and walked out into the street. The lights just
seemed so bright, and there was so much money about. I felt like some country
cousin, shabby and poor and innocent, somehow. It was a little too much for me,
the emotion and everything. I'd been planning to wander round the shops and see
what there was to buy. But suddenly I didn't feel like that any more. I just
walked down to the Gedachtniskirche [the bombed church which has been left
unrestored as a memorial] and stood there looking at it in the darkness. The
last time I'd seen it was 12 August 1961, the day before they built that
accursed Wall. I was nineteen years old then, and now I was forty-eight. I'd
never been allowed to see the West in all that time. I was too sad to do any
more rejoicing. I just went back to my flat and went to bed. But it was a
wonderful memory, all the same.
A great story of that night when the berlin wall came down, everybody was full of joy.
Article
Why did you not take this down 20 years ago?
Graffiti on Eastern side of Berlin Wall, January 1990
It
was a pleasant enough flat, though the rooms were small. From the window you
could see the Reichstag, the Brandenburg Gate and the empty site between the
inner and outer Wall where Hitler's Fuhrerbunker had once been. It was the kind
of property which would command big money when Berlin was eventually united. The
present occupant was finding it difficult to pay the absurdly low rent which the
East German authorities were still charging.
`I have a wardrobe full of expensive suits,' he said. `Before long I may have to
eat them.'
His attractive Russian wife smiled at him and stroked his thin grey hair
affectionately.
He began to smile too, but he was a worried man. All round us were the
accoutrements of a prosperous existence: bottles of Scotch, books from the West,
an expensive hi-fi set, some good records and tapes. And now he had nothing
except these things, and no means of earning a living. He had not been trained
for that. I felt as though I were in the apartment of a Romanoff prince after
the 1917 Revolution. But this was no minor royalty. Gunter Schabowski had been
the general secretary of the Communist SED in East Berlin and a member of the
Politburo: one of the most powerful men in East Germany.
Erich Honecker had been overthrown and was in disgrace, the SED had been thoroughly
reorganized and had changed its name to the PDS - the Party for Democratic
Socialism. All the old figures like Schabowski and Egon Krenz had been thrown
out of the Party by early December. Krenz had become a wealthy man. He had sold
his story to the right-wing tabloid Bild in West Germany for a fee which he
insisted was not as high as 1.5 million Deutschemarks. Gunter Schabowski refused
to do that kind of thing. But he was hoping to earn some money from writing his
own account of the collapse of Marxism-Leninism in the GDR.
I had come to see him to ask about one single episode in the chain of events which
brought about the SED's downfall. Time and again people in East Berlin had
spoken about the miraculous way in which the opening of the Berlin Wall had been
announced to the world on the night of 9 November 1989. In East Germany this had
now taken on something of the supernatural aura of the Angel of Mons or the
leaning Virgin of Albert. Everyone who watched the moment on television had
different versions of it. Some said an East German radio correspondent had come
up and handed him a piece of paper, which he had then read out. Others said the
paper was brought in by a messenger whom no one recognized.
`If you find out how that announcement came about,' a minor government official said
to me, `you must tell everyone. It's the great mystery of our time.'
`There was something very strange about it, I know that,' said a Marxist historian. `No
one has been able to explain it satisfactorily. I'm positive that the Politburo
didn't intend it to come out like this.'
Some senior figures in the opposition, whose lives and careers had been radically
changed as a result of the announcement, seemed to regard it almost as an occult
intervention in Germany's affairs.
`It was a miracle,' said one senior CDU official in East Berlin. `We still don't
know who wrote that small piece of paper which ordered the Wall to come down. It
was read out in a most extraordinary way at the end of a press conference. It
created such amazement. Even the man who read it out was amazed.'
The man who read it out was Gunter Schabowski. I had come to his flat to find out if
it really was the Finger of God which had placed the piece of paper in front of
him. It took him a long time to decide whether to tell me. He had, he said,
refused to talk to everyone else. There was silence. His wife made tea in the
kitchen. His pet parrot squawked. The lift clattered into life outside his front
door. Finally an innate courtesy overcame him, even though he felt he might be
lowering the value of his own exclusive account of the Miracle of the Wall. He
decided to talk.
At the time, Schabowski was the Central Committee's secretary for the media as well
as being a member of the Politburo. He had a reputation as a straight and honest
man. He wasn't scared to go onto the streets after the fall of Honecker and
argue out the unpopular policies of the SED with ordinary people. Shortly before
7 p.m. on the evening of 9 November he gave a press conference to announce the
latest decisions of the Council of Ministers. Much of it dealt with the new
philosophy of the Party. It was now accepted, he said, that the GDR was a
pluralist society. There were details about the forthcoming Party
conference.
Schabowski came to the end of these announcements. There was an awkward pause. The 300
journalists who were sitting there became restless. He whispered something to
the man next to him, and shuffled his papers. The man next to him leaned over. A
piece of paper appeared in Schabowski's hand. He read from it slowly and
hesitantly.
This will be interesting for you: today the decision was taken to make it possible
for all citizens to leave the country through the official border crossing
points. All citizens of the GDR can now be issued with visas for the purposes of
travel or visiting relatives in the West. This order is to take effect at
once.
Everyone started talking at once. A correspondent from GDR radio stood up and asked for
more details. Schabowski had used the expression `unverzuglich' ('at once',
`immediately'); when precisely did that mean? Schabowski gave no clear answer.
He was still holding onto the piece of paper. A crowd of journalists gathered
round him, trying to find out further details. How soon was `unverzuglich'?
Schabowski was confused and tired.
`It just means straightaway,' he said.
The art of politics is to create the illusion of competence. An illusionist who
admits to letting the doves escape from his inside pockets is an illusionist who
has given up all hope of a return booking. Sitting in his flat overlooking the
Brandenburg Gate, Gunter Schabowski was at first unwilling to admit to any
confusion in announcing the breaching of the Wall.
`I finished giving my information about the Central Committee business, and then I
turned to the next item on the agenda.'
I pressed him. Finally he admitted it. The mysterious piece of paper, the note
which had been passed to him by some superhuman agency, written with the pen of
an angel, was the typed-up note of the decision which the Politburo had reached
that afternoon. It had been on top of his sheaf of papers when he came into the
press conference. Somehow it became mixed up with the rest. So instead of
reading it first he had to go through Any Other Business, in the hope of coming
across it later. He discovered it at the bottom of the pile. End of
miracle.
The decision had been taken by the full Politburo a few hours before on the
afternoon of 9 November. It was an acknowledgement of the anger building up in
East German society over the inequity of the rules governing permission to visit
the West.
The fact that some were allowed to go and some weren't was silly and Kafkaesque. It
demanded a solution. But it had to be done quickly. We didn't have time to think
about it carefully. We had to make our draft programme public fast, and that had
to be in it. There was already the draft of a special law on the subject in
existence, and so we in the Politburo decided to instruct the government to take
some of the points from this draft. It had to be written in a way people could
understand. We didn't want it to be in a kind of india-rubber language which
could be stretched in one way or the other. We wanted to make it quite clear: if
you want to go to the West, you can go. Full stop. There would have to be some
transitional measures, because most people didn't have passports. But our aim
was to have a system like you do in the West, whereby if you have a passport,
you can leave the country.
I was unwilling to interrupt the flow, in case he decided that he'd told me more
than enough already. But it was important to know whether the members of the
Politburo understood the significance of what they were doing. Had anyone, for
instance, suggested at the meeting that this was really the end of the Wall, and
might well be the end of Communist government in the GDR - the end, indeed, of
the GDR itself?
No one realized. No one said anything like that. No one really thought about the
result. We knew we had to take this step. As for its leading to the end of the
GDR, none of us expected that at all. And I have to say that none of the
opposition groups in the country expected it either. We hoped, quite simply,
that this measure would create a better GDR, more open to human rights and so
on. We thought the Wall was stable, I must say.
In its way, then, it was a kind of miracle. Without the suddenness of the
announcement, the impact of the opening of the Wall would have been less.
Without the great outflow of surprise and delight at the Berlin Wall, the tidal
wave which swept across Czechoslovakia might not have happened as it did. And
without the suddenness of the revolution in Czechoslovakia, people in Romania
might not have been emboldened to come out and challenge Ceausescu.
The nuclear reaction required a powerful detonating explosion. That had been
provided by Gunter Schabowski. Now he sat in his small but disturbingly
expensive flat overlooking the Wall which he had helped to demolish, wondering
how he was going to make a living. His papers had been mixed up by the finger of
history.
The first news that people could pass freely to the West was broadcast on an East
German television news bulletin at 7.30 that evening. The pictures of the
celebrated press conference by Schabowski were broadcast, but there was little
explanation. Immediately the switchboard of the television station was swamped
with callers trying to find out more. The director of news ordered that
Schabowski's announcement should be repeated at regular intervals through the
evening. By now, too, it was being reported on West German television. People in
East Berlin were switching backwards and forwards, watching the
coverage.
The message was relayed to the West German Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, who was on an
official visit to Poland. A few minutes later he was stopped by a West German
television reporter as he arrived for a formal dinner. Kohl was not a man to
match great occasions with inspired sentiments. His concern was with the outflow
of East Germans to the West:
The solution cannot be for many people to come to West Germany. Living conditions
should be improved in East Germany, so they stay there. It's in our interests
that they should stay.
In Berlin itself, people were starting to head out onto the streets to see what was
going on for themselves. Schabowski's slightly vague expression, that people
would be able to obtain exit visas `unverzuglich', immediately or at once,
seemed unlikely to mean that anyone could cross that night. In a society inured
to waiting for everything from officialdom, it was hard to think that police
stations would issue the necessary piece of paper so quickly. At the
Invalidenstrasse crossing, a little to the north of the Brandenburg Gate, the
first East Germans to arrive there at around nine o'clock were told by the
officer in charge that they would need a stamp in their identity cards. This, he
said, could be obtained only from their local police station. They went away,
disappointed.
About a mile further north, at the Bornholmerstrasse crossing-point, the situation was
altogether different. Shortly before 9.30 a couple in their late thirties
decided to test out the system. They walked through to the glass-fronted booth
where the border guard sat. He gave them a smile and said they could go through
without a visa. He promised them that there would be no problem as long as they
came back through the same check-point that night. Several journalists saw them
coming through to the western side, but they were so matter-of-fact about it all
that it seemed as though they were Westerners returning. No one stopped them to
ask them questions.
Erich Knorr, an engineer in his mid-forties, had been out late that evening in East
Berlin, seeing friends. His wife had left him a few months before, and his
daughter was at university. His flat was cold and uninviting as he let himself
in. Automatically, he went over to turn on the television. The sound of voices
made things seem a little less lonely. He was still not used to living by
himself. It was around 10.30, and the station he had switched on, SFB in West
Berlin, was showing a discussion programme of some kind. Knorr was making a cup
of coffee when he caught the words, `And now we're going over to our reporter at
the Invalidenstrasse crossing-point.'
Idly, thinking there might have been some shooting incident, he wandered back into the
sitting room. The reporter was talking excitedly in front of a crowd of a few
dozen people. As he spoke a young man came running up out of the darkness and
shouted at the camera, `They've opened the check-point in the
Bornholmerstrasse!' Erich Knorr knew now that the unthinkable had happened. He
lived close to the Bornholmerstrasse, in the Schonhauserallee. He rang a girl he
knew to see if she wanted to come with him to the West, but she said she was too
tired, and didn't believe it anyway.
He left his coffee untasted on the table and set off. Out in the street he broke
into a run. As he turned into the road that led to the crossing-point he ran
into crowds of people heading in the same direction. There were people of all
ages, many with young children who had been wakened up so the whole family could
experience this extraordinary moment. Knorr was unencumbered by wife or family.
For the first time in weeks, being on his own was an advantage. He pushed
through to the front.
He could see the check-point now. They were letting people through very slowly,
checking their identity. A big crowd had built up. From time to time there was
chanting:
`Take the Wall down! Take the Wall down!'
There was no anger, but there was real impatience at the slowness of it
all.
Then the border guards came pouring out of the building, about a dozen of them, and
Erich thought there was going to be trouble. He'd worked his way almost through
to the front by now, and he was afraid that if they charged he might be injured.
But the guards ignored the crowd. They fanned out in front of the post and
started shifting the heavy blocks of concrete that lay across the street to
prevent cars from passing through more than one at a time. The gates opened. An
officer made a gesture with his hand, like a doorman at an hotel. There were no
more formalities: the way to the West lay open. Everyone cheered and shouted and
sang, and they surged forward, ten abreast.
At that moment, where the road passes over two Stadtbahn lines, one serving the
East and the other the West, a couple of trains happened to come along at the
same time. As they passed the Bornholmer crossing they both stopped and hooted
their horns, while the passengers waved and blew kisses. Erich Knorr was
shouting and weeping with the rest of them now, and when he reached the other
side of the Wall people came running out of the houses and flats on the West and
offered them things: cups of coffee, glasses of champagne, flowers, and West
German Marks. Erich saw someone throwing a handful of useless Ostmarks, the
non-convertible currency of the East, into the air. The little notes were picked
up by the mild November wind and fluttered over the heads of the crowd. Everyone
cheered to see them go.
I can't tell you what it meant to us. All these years we'd been bottled up in our
little part of Germany, second-class citizens that nobody wanted, in a country
most of us didn't really want to be in. I'd been a prisoner, and suddenly I
wasn't a prisoner any longer. I could have shouted and sung and waved my arms. I
couldn't stop smiling. A girl came up and gave me a kiss, and I thought I was
really in heaven.
A crowd control van belonging to the West Berlin police drove up. Someone made an
announcement:
Everyone should stay calm. No need to get excited. Buses are coming to take you to the
Ku'damm.
The crowd cheered. Erich didn't want to wait for the bus. He took the U-bahn to the
Kurfurstendamm. The city authorities had just decided that it should be free,
since most of the people using it would be unable to pay.
I got out at the Ku'damm station and walked out into the street. The lights just
seemed so bright, and there was so much money about. I felt like some country
cousin, shabby and poor and innocent, somehow. It was a little too much for me,
the emotion and everything. I'd been planning to wander round the shops and see
what there was to buy. But suddenly I didn't feel like that any more. I just
walked down to the Gedachtniskirche [the bombed church which has been left
unrestored as a memorial] and stood there looking at it in the darkness. The
last time I'd seen it was 12 August 1961, the day before they built that
accursed Wall. I was nineteen years old then, and now I was forty-eight. I'd
never been allowed to see the West in all that time. I was too sad to do any
more rejoicing. I just went back to my flat and went to bed. But it was a
wonderful memory, all the same.