For twenty-eight years it separated Berlin, tore Germany apart and was a symbol of the Cold War. And it has been exactly twenty-eight years since it disappeared: the Berlin Wall. Now it has been gone for as long as it stood.
As late as January 1989, Erich Honecker, at that time State Council Chairman of the GDR, declared, “The wall ... will continue to exist in fifty and even a hundred years.” He was wrong. Hundreds of thousands of people called for free elections, the legalisation of opposition groups and freedom of movement. Many had already left the GDR via Hungary, and more left daily. The mass exodus, the economic crisis, the peaceful demonstrations in cities like Leipzig and Berlin, the reforms of Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev – all of these factors brought about the end of the GDR regime.
On the evening of 9 November 1989, I, soon to finish my studies, was sitting in front of the television in Hamburg watching the news. It was hard to believe that what we had all grown up with seemed to be dissolving. Under pressure from hundreds of East Berliners, on the evening of 9 November 1989, the barrier was lifted at the Bornholmer Strasse border crossing. All at once, nothing was as it once was.
Twice I had been in the former GDR as a pupil. It meant nothing to me. My family had no relatives there. France and Italy were closer. Or so I believed. But then, I was so mesmerised by what I saw on the news that I burst into tears and spent the night, deeply moved, in front of the television. In the early morning hours of 10 November, I drove to Berlin with two friends.
The days in Berlin in November 1989 are indelibly etched in the memories of all who were there. Dancing people on the Brandenburg Gate, the first wall breakthroughs, crowds on the Kurfürstendamm, in the U- and S-Bahn, everywhere cars from East Germany. We were not yet permitted to enter East Berlin, though, until the New Year.
And soon the questions arose: What’s next? A united Germany? Two independent states? Critical voices as well as hopeful. A mad time began. Suddenly, everything seemed possible.
Since 9 November 1989, the world has changed, the firmly cemented blocks have disappeared and new problems have arisen. For example, that so many people in East Germany voted for the xenophobic AfD. The New Right, which snags votes with primitive populist slogans, has now moved into the Bundestag.
The Wall is history and its remains are a tourist attraction in Berlin. When I see the film at the memorial on Bernauerstrasse about this cruelly erected dividing wall of 1961 with its death strips, I still get goose pimples today, twenty-eight years after its disappearance. The freedom that its fall brought about is a matter of course for many today. But even it is fragile.
