Berlin Wall Falls

I second the emotions of Alison Smale, writing in Friday’s New York Times: “Recalling the spontaneous joy of unexpected liberation, let loose on a city that had always known how to party, makes me tremble with emotion even now, 20 years on.”

Smale crossed the border from East to West twenty years ago today. It took my friends and me seven more weeks, until New Year’s Eve, to get there, but the celebrations and the emotion continued.

You may never in your life stand at the unquestioned most important spot on the face of the planet but that’s what Berlin was twenty years ago, and when I think back now, I most remember the collective dynamic - just the raw emotional feel of the place. Hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people had come from absolutely everywhere, and every single one of them was exuberant, tolerant, exultant.

As soon as we arrived, having rolled across the then-scary corridor through East Germany to West Berlin, we dropped everything and headed straight for the wall at the Brandenburg Gate.

Not that it was tough to find. You’ve never seen a city so utterly overwhelmed – and in a very, very good way. Head out into the street and you’d just be swept up and whisked along to the spot.

I clambered up onto the top of the wall and sat down beside a teen-aged East German boy. We dangled our legs over the side facing the west. “I have never been on this side,” he told me, and so we lowered him down to stand in the west.

The thing to do was to carve out your own chunk of the wall as a souvenir. From another American I borrowed a hammer and chisel and I would work in a little circle to get a piece ready to break off, and people would cheer me on. Then with the final blow the piece would go skittering off and someone would seize it and disappear into the crowd. It took some time, but eventually I got pieces enough for friends and family back home.

It was freezing cold, of course, as midnight and 1990 approached. Standing on the wall looking back up the Tiergarten, with fireworks and American flags and people who had come from all over the world just to stand together in that spot at that moment in time, no one ever even noticed.

I took this photo on New Year’s Eve, 1999. When the wall existed, the Brandenburg Gate in the background was in the east, so this photo looks east from West Berlin.

Comments

[bettina]

What a great historical moment.