I’m not entirely clear about everything that happened that night. Perhaps you’re the same way about certain New Year’s Eves.
I remember that well before midnight I sat atop the Berlin Wall beside a teenaged East German, our legs dangling off the western side. He’d never been beyond the wall. Looking back west there were dozens, maybe hundreds of American flags. There was a lot of love in the air.
Out there in the crowd, wearing a costume that twinkled like a Christmas tree, American performer David Hasselhoff sang while standing on one of those heavy-lift cranes they use to work on utility poles. Looking back I thought I must have made that part up, until I saw video confirmation.
One thing I’m sure of is that the Berlin Wall was made to be very, very hard. There was a great crush of people as far back to West Berlin as you could see, and everybody was determined to chisel out his own piece of the wall before the whole thing went away.
I borrowed a hammer and chisel and pounded away. You’d isolate a golf ball sized bit of concrete and the final blow would send it skittering along the ground where someone else would happily scoop it up and be gone.
I eventually carved out my pieces, which are now encased in plastic with the date 31 December, 1989.
Before the new year was out, East Germany was gone. The magazine Der Spiegel has captured the zeitgeist of the country that is no more, in 45 photos taken just before and after reunification in 1990, in this online gallery.
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