"Once in my life dancing on top of the wall! Once in my life parking my Trabi car on the famous Ku'damm! People got crazy and lost their mind on that unforgettable Berlin night twenty years ago.
On the evening of 9 November 1989, people were hesitant to believe what Guenter Schabowski had announced in his press conference: "Freedom to travel, at once, immediately." But after they heard the news on West German television later that evening, when ZDF anchorman Hanns Joachim Friedrichs interpreted the statement rather generously and pronounced the simple and clear statement "today the GDR opened the doors" - after that, masses came to the border checkpoints. At 11:29 p.m. the first checkpoint was given up by frontiersmen on Bornholmer Street.
"I am completely mad: I am sitting on the top of the Wall and drinking sparkling wine!," a 54-year-old woman from East Berlin cried. Just a few weeks beforehand, her application to visit her 20-year-old daughter in the Western part of Berlin had been rejected. The authorities told her she would be allowed to visit the other side when her daughter had celebrated her 50th birthday. "And now, after these 28 years of the Wall, the whole world is open for me!"
In front of the Brandenburger Gate, the Wall was lower than in other parts of divided Berlin. It was just 2.5 metres high instead of 3.5 metres. Due to hidden anti-tank barriers, this part of the wall was 3.5 metres wide. It was a wonderful place to dance and party, to pull up many other young people from the Western and Eastern side.
Michael Wolfram (36) and Michael Seeger (40), both from the West side, even raised their bikes because they wanted to be the very first people to cross the Wall by bicycle - in sight of thousands of people and in sight of hundreds of policemen. The two men never had been to East Berlin before.
People climbed the wall from both sides. The East German policemen warned them by megaphones not to do this. Three hours after midnight the GDR water cannons stopped people climbing from the East side to the West. But they let people climb from the West side to the East.
A 43-years old auto mechanic who crossed the wall with his dog said: No one on the wall knows, who is West and who is East German! The fact that I can stand on the wall I never had dared to dream this morning!" Now the concrete segments of the wall could be used for social buildings, he suggested. His idea is to go to West Berlin by a East Berlin taxi. This was a big adventure because the taxi drivers knew the road system on the other side of their town as detailed as the lunar landscape.
Two young police officers from the communist side were ready to say something to a reporter. They told me how nervous they were when they were put on the alert standby and posted at the Brandenburger Gate. The one, 25 years old and father of two children, said: "If you are not prepared to the alert and you have to come instantly, you have a lot of very heavy thoughts in your mind. My wife, too, is extremely nervous." They tried to avoid any confrontational situation. The Policemen are posted in five rows but after some time they let people pass.
The police megaphone was shouting in the night: "People of West Berlin, I request you to leave the wall!" It was the first time GDR officials used this word. Officially the wall had been the "antifascist protective wall". But nobody noticed what the officer said. Whistling and yelling was the answer of thousands of people.
Even the young police officer told me that after his duty he wanted to make a short trip to the West, too, for the first time in his life. "This new law is effective for all GDR citizens now, and above all we are citizens, too!"
His 29 years old colleague said: "Most of the older policemen here don't know what to think in this moment. Let me tell you: Here are so many brigade groups close to the wall. Some of these officers had been in duty on 13 August 1961 when the wall was constructed. They might be in struggle with the current situation."
The experience of the 22-year old Tobias Perlick, was very similar, as he passed the border on Bornholmer Street. "You can see it in their face how stonily they are looking. I can feel it: They would prefer to stop this spook immediately."
In West Berlin people of the GDR found an enthusiastic reception. Their Trabi cars were watered with sparkling wine, people drummed on the roof of the GDR cars which blocked the whole city of West Berlin.
A young cook could not believe he got a job offer instantly. Taxi drivers accepted the GDR Mark, which was a soft currency and a tenth part of the West German D-Mark, for 1:1. Many pubs invited the GDR citizens for free drinks. McDonald's on Ku'damm reopened its fast food restaurant this night. A young family was eating one single hamburger and one small package French fries quartered for each the parents and the children and they were looking overjoyed as in paradise.
For 28 years the wall had been the most hated piece of Berlin, and suddenly it has turned to be the most asked collectible. Wherever some concrete pieces of the wall were demolished people took the stones and let the policemen sign it for memory. A worker said: Never before I saw a construction site as clean as this one." On the capitalistic side of the wall some Turkish immigrant workers started to sell the wall pieces for some D-Marks.
The next night they opened the wall on five places to let people go through. It was a shock when people saw the death strip between the two wall lines.
A worker busy in demolishing a segment of the wall with a excavator could not hide his tears when I asked him about his feelings. It was exactly this place where he had to build the wall in 1961, it was exactly this place where he lost his best friend who had tried to escape by climbing over the inner wall and jumping on the death strip, landing on a iron "Fakir" gadget and bleeding to death - "and it is exactly this place where I was told to tear down the wall."
Ewald Koenig, 2009.
Now editor-in-chief of the Berlin-based EurActiv.de, Ewald Koenig is part of a European news and policies network which would have been impossible without the German reunification process 20 years ago.
