It happened more by accident than intention. I hadn’t gone to Berlin expecting to see the fall of the wall or the beginning of the end of communism. Instead, I had travelled beyond the city’s concrete Cold War divide into East Berlin on a very different mission. As a roving freelance foreign correspondent, I had long hoped to visit Cambodia and write a story on the aftermath of Khmer Rouge rule and its infamous dictator, Pol Pot. To make such a visit, however, required a visa, and the only possible way of getting that visa was a visit in person to the only Cambodian consulate then located in Europe, in communist East Berlin.
Not that I was unaware of the winds of change sweeping across the communist world. Barely nine months before my arrival in Berlin in 1989, I had watched the last convoys of Soviet troops roll across the bridges on the Oxus river, leaving Afghanistan in a withdrawal ordered by Michael Gorbachev. By now the words glasnost and perestroika were being openly used. In East Germany the desire for this new openness and transparency was growing fast.
Between September and October 1989, East Germans began organising peaceful weekly protests dubbed “Monday demonstrations” against the GDR government. Many of these focused especially on the loosening of border controls. But with the resignation on October 18 1989 of East German communist leader Erich Honecker, the man responsible for the building of the Berlin wall, the stage seemed set for an upsurge of popular protest.
In the days before the wall was finally breached I had spent some time waiting for my visa in East Berlin, sampling the mood and soaking up the atmosphere of a society on the brink of being transformed. Travelling in trams along streets like Karl-Marx-Allee, past the headquarters of the Stasi state security service and buildings of the communist post-war flagship reconstruction programme, was like stepping into the pages of John Le Carre’s espionage thriller The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.
As a temporary visitor weaned on such semi-fictional depictions it would have been impossible not to have felt a certain romantic and exotic association with such a setting.
For those forced to live under such a regime, however, it was a nightmare out of which they only finally awoke on the night of November 9 1989. Along with an American journalist, I was sitting in a bar off West Berlin’s Kurfürstendamm commercial district that night. By then the GDR politburo, seeing the impossibility of maintaining a firm grip, had conceded minor concessions allowing limited travel across the border. At a press conference a politburo member insisted the order was to take immediate effect. He was wrong. Instead, it should have come into effect the following day, giving security officials time to prepare. But the call to action was already out to those thousands who swarmed around the checkpoints trying to cross the divide that had separated East Germans from the world for the previous 28 years.
The border guards could only look on helplessly as the Berlin wall was finally breached. On Bornholmer Street, I watched as thousands sang, drank, hugged. No blue shirts of the East’s Free German Youth on the streets now: just free youth. Chants of “Wir sind das Volk,” – “We are the people” – echoed around the streets, as did the sound of alpine horns.
In the hours that followed, “Ossies” and “Wessies”, East Germans and their western counterparts, would come together in one massive celebration. In the days that followed, everyone, it seemed, was carrying a tool of some kind. Endless people with hammers, pick axes, chisels and bare hands gouged souvenir lumps from the wall’s masonry that had been torn down, the first of the “wall peckers.” I was no exception.
Twenty years on, in a very different world, those events now seem unreal. Political tensions between East and West take on a new form today, as I was reminded last year while covering the brief but bitter war between a US-backed Georgia and Russia over South Ossetia. Today there remains the danger of relations between Moscow and the West being further soured if Russia is allowed to perceive itself as ostracised from the European fold. On Monday though, this will not stop the celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Doubtless the champagne will flow and the fireworks rise over the Brandenburg Gate. I only wish I could be there to soak up some of the atmosphere all over again.
Read Angus Roxburgh’s essay on the fall of the Berlin Wall in tomorrow’s Sunday Herald
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