In this vivid eyewitness account written in the heat of events, a historian captures the atmosphere of Berlin when the wall was breached late in 1989 and reflects on the wider significance of this great symbolic event of our time.
Robert Darnton
On the morning of 10 November 1989, when both Berlins woke up wondering whether the first flood through the wall had been a dream, the West Berlin tabloid Volksblatt ran two headlines, shoulder to shoulder, on its front page: "The Wall is Gone" and "Bonn Demands the Destruction of the Wall".
Both were right. The wall is there and it is not there. On 9 November, it cut through the heart of Berlin, a jagged wound in the middle of a great city, the Great Divide of the Cold War. On 10 November, it had become a dance floor, a picture gallery, a bulletin board, a movie screen, a video cassette, a museum, and, as the cleaning lady of my office put it, "nothing but a heap of stone". The taking of the wall, like the taking of the Bastille, transformed the world. No wonder that a day later, in Alexander Platz, East Berlin, one conqueror of the wall marched in a demonstration with a sign saying simply "1789-1989". He had helped dismantle the central symbol around which the post-war world had taken shape in the minds of millions.
To witness symbolic transformations on such a scale is a rare opportunity, and it raises many questions. To begin with the most concrete: what happened between 9 and 12 November, and what does it mean?
'Goodbye to all that'
The destruction of the wall began in the early evening of Thursday 9 November, soon after the first wave of East Berliners, or "Ostlers" as they are called by the West Berliners here, burst upon the West. One Ostler, a young man with a knapsack on his back, somehow hoisted himself up on the wall directly across from the Brandenburg Gate. He sauntered along the top of it, swinging his arms casually at his sides, a perfect target for the bullets that had felled many other wall jumpers, like Peter Fechter, a young construction worker, who was shot and left to bleed to death a few feet in front of Checkpoint Charlie on 17 August 1962. Now, twenty-seven years later, a new generation of border guards took aim and fired-but only with power hoses and without much conviction. The conqueror of the wall continued his promenade, soaked to the skin, until at last the guards gave up. Then he opened his knapsack and poured the water towards the East, in a gesture that seemed to say, "Goodbye to all that".
A few minutes later, hundreds of people, Ostlers and Westlers alike, were on the wall, embracing, dancing, exchanging flowers, drinking wine, helping up new "conquerors" – and chipping away at the wall itself. By midnight, under a full moon and the glare of the spotlights from the watchtowers in no-man's-land, a thousand figures swarmed over the wall, hammering, chiselling, wearing its surface away like a colony of army ants. At the bottom, "conquerors" threw stones at its base or went at it with pickaxes. Long slits appeared, and the light showed through from the East, as if through the eyes of a jack-o'-lantern. On the top, at the centre of the tumult, with the Brandenburg Gate looming in the background, an Ostler conducted the destruction, a sickle in one hand, a hammer in the other.
By Saturday, chunks of the wall were circulating through both Berlins. People exchanged them as souvenirs of what had already taken shape in the collective consciousness as a historical event: the end of the Cold War. A sidewalk entrepreneur sold bits of wall from a table on the Ku'damm: 20 marks for a piece of the past. At one point, an East Berliner walked by and objected, with a smile on his face: "You can't sell that. It's our wall. It belongs to us."
Like any powerful symbol, the wall has acquired many meanings, and they differ significantly from West to East. The wall even looks different, if you study it from one side and then the other. Seen from the West, it is a prison wall, which encloses the East Berliners in totalitarianism. Tourists climb on observation towers and shudder deliciously at the spectacle: the monstrous, concrete structure, the no-man's-land beyond it-which, until 1985, was mined and rigged with rifles that fired automatically at anyone who dashed across-the barbed wire, the dog patrols, the turrets with armed guards staring back through binoculars, and the second wall or the windowless buildings on the far side of the deadly, desolate, open space.
East Berliners see a different wall. Theirs is painted in patterns of light and dark blue, clean, bright, and free of all graffiti. It shuts off the view of the repressive apparatus beyond it. If you lose your way or stray into outlying areas in East Berlin, you can drive along the wall for miles without noticing that it is something more than an ordinary part of the urban landscape.
'We are the people! We're staying here'
Just after the metaphorical fall of this wall, I visited an East Berlin friend on his side of the city. A non-party intellectual who has supported the demonstrations and opposed the regime throughout the current crisis, he had one word of advice: "Don't tear down the wall. We need it as a protective barrier. It should be permeable but it should stay up. One of the great mistakes in Berlin history was to tear down the customs wall in which the Brandenburg Gate was embedded in 1867. After that the tragedies of the modern age began."
A young professor from Leipzig had made a similar remark two months earlier. She described the wall as a dike against dangerous influences from the capitalist world. I had thought she was repeating a party line, but the same idea can be heard on East German television, in pubs, and in the streets now that the East Germans are debating their future openly and the wall has changed its nature.
Westerners commonly imagine that East Germans are hungering and thirsting for the chance to earn large salaries and to spend 'them on the consumer goods that are available in the West. Yet a more significant refrain was chanted by the hundreds of thousands who remained home, demonstrating in the streets of Leipzig, Dresden, and a dozen other cities for weeks before the storming of the wall: "We are the people! We're staying here!" Between 500,000 and a million people chanted that theme in the climactic demonstration of 4 November in East Berlin; not a nose was bloodied, not a window broken.
The demonstrations have operated as an Estates General in the streets, sapping legitimacy from the Party and transferring it to the people. In conquering the wall, the people brought that process to a climax. But then they faced a problem: what are they to do if nothing stands between them and the West?
'Charlie's retired. 10 Nov. 1989'
On the Western side, the wall carries its own commentary, because it has been covered with layers of graffiti for years. "Tear along dotted line"; "Make love not wall". Here the wall has been taken over by tourists, who often treat it as a neutral surface for spray paint: "Lisa ti amo"; or whose high-mindedness says little about the divisions of Berlin: "Essex University condemns all forms of political oppression".
In places the palimpsest reads like a dialogue, in which the present answers the past with a comforting reflection: the wall has fallen, even though it is standing before your eyes as a surface on which the writer sprays his assertion of its non-existence. "A pity that concrete doesn't burn." "It falls, though."... "This wall will fall." "We saw it fall, Nov. '89." The graffiti sound triumphant, even when they joke, as in this message sprayed near Checkpoint Charlie: "Charlie's retired. 10 Nov. 1989."
The messages are essentially the same: they distinguish between totalitarianism and liberty. The theme is reinforced by the Checkpoint Charlie Museum, which displays devices used to escape under, over, or through the wall, and by crosses set up opposite places where persons were gunned down while attempting to escape.
This sense of heroism and suffering is undercut by souvenir shops which sell wall postcards and wall trinkets in a kind of fairground that has grown up between the old Reichstag, which is now a museum, and the breach in the wall opened opposite Potsdamer Platz, which was once the busiest traffic centre in Europe and is now an enormous field covered with mud and weeds. The postcards were snapped up by the Ostlers who swarmed through the area after 9 November and who were fascinated by views of the wall that they had never seen. But the vendors had displayed the postcards on stands outside their shops, and the East Berliners, who had never seen goods exposed so openly, assumed they were handouts and walked off with them without paying.
To the Ku'damm and back
One of the radical groups in West Berlin tried to march against the flood carrying a banner which proclaimed "Your liberty is that of the West German banks". But the marchers were lost in the waves of Ostlers, who swept through the wall echoing the chant of the first wave, which arrived on Thursday: Zum Ku'damm, zum Ku'damm und dann wieder zurück (To the Kurfürstendamm, West Berlin's elegant shopping avenue, and then back again.) The zurück was the crucial term in the refrain, because the East Berliners did not come simply to buy up or sell out but rather to see the forbidden city with their own eyes and to return home.
The Federal Republic offered 100 marks (about $50) in "greeting money" to every visitor from East Germany, and many banks stayed open on Saturday and Sunday to provide cash. Individuals also stepped in to help. One West Berliner stood outside a break in the wall and handed out 50 mark notes, for as long as his supply held out, to every Easterner who came through. Another came across a teenage girl crying in front of the McDonald's on the Ku'damm. She said that all her life she had wanted to eat a McDonald's hamburger, and now she had no money. He pressed a 50 mark note into her hand and she disappeared, into paradise.
The incoming Ostlers collided with waves of well-wishers from the West, who thrust drinks into their hands, loaded them down with pizzas and sausages, took them for rides through residential neighbourhoods, and put them up overnight. Ostlers were given free rides on all buses and subways, reduced prices in restaurants and movie theatres, free admission to discotheques. They pressed their noses against store windows displaying fine clothing and Mercedes. And when they had some marks, they spent them for the most part on tropical fruits unavailable in East Berlin; on toys, relatively shabby on the other side of the wall; on books, many of which had been forbidden; on Coca Cola; and on a wide variety of cosmetics, trinkets, and flowers.
Above all, the two populations of Berlin sought to make contact with one another. In exchanging hugs, drinks and flowers, they were performing a collective ritual. As the Volksblatt put it, "In the night when the gates opened, it seemed as though there were no more East Berliners and West Berliners. Everyone felt as though they belonged to a huge family, and everyone celebrated the festival accordingly".
Living in the shadow of the wall
To someone unfamiliar with Berlin, it may be hard to imagine how successfully the wall had divided the city. Soon after 1961, when the wall went up, the million or so inhabitants on the Western side and the two million or so in the East began to lose contact. By 1989, a whole generation had come of age within the shadow of the wall. Most of them never crossed it, even from West to East when that was allowed. They accepted the wall as a fact of life, as something in exorable, built into the landscape, which was there when they were born and would be there when they died. They left it to the tourists, took it for granted, forgot about it, or simply stopped seeing it.
Before the fall, an old woman was interviewed on her balcony, which overlooked the wall from the West. She spent hours every afternoon staring into no-man's-land. Why did she look so hard at the wall, day after day? the reporter asked, hoping to find some expression of Berlin's divided personality. "Oh, I'm not looking at the wall at all," she replied. "I watch the rabbits playing in no-man's-land." Many West Berliners did not see the wall until it ceased to exist.
Little by little West Berliners had come to regard the wall as a source of support. Thanks to its presence, the government in Bonn poured billions into Berlin, subsidizing everything from the Philharmonic orchestra to teenage jazz groups. A whole population of under-employed intellectuals grew up around the Free University, which now has about 60,000 students. As residents of West Berlin, they are exempt from the draft, and they also are able to drink beer and talk politics in pubs throughout the night; for West Berlin is the only place in the Federal Republic of Germany where the pubs can stay open past midnight, the only place where you can order breakfast in the afternoon. Many of these free-floating intellectuals became free-loaders. They lived off the wall; and they may face greater economic difficulties than the Berliners in the East.
To Berliners, therefore, the wall means something very different from what it means outside the city. Most of them realize that their local barrier is bound up with larger divisions, the Oder-Neisse line in particular and the general dividing line between Warsaw Pact and NATO countries. Having gone to bed one day in a world with clearly defined boundaries, they woke up the next in a world without firm national borders, without balanced power blocs, and even without obvious demarcations of time, because it suddenly seemed possible to bring the curtain down on the Second World War. They are living a truism of anthropology: the collapse of boundaries can be deeply disturbing, a source of renewal but also a threat to a' whole world-view.
The mood remains euphoric, nonetheless. In East Berlin especially, the idea has spread that in conquering the wall the people seized power. The demonstrations in the streets sapped the legitimacy of the regime. Combined with the subsequent haemorrhaging of the population across the borders, they brought the government down, without a shot fired. We may never know the details of what happened inside the crumbling power structure of the German Democratic Republic. But whatever produced the occasion, the force that broke through the wall was there for all to see on the night of 9 November. It was the people of East Berlin, with nothing but their convictions, their discipline, and the power of their numbers. They took possession of the wall physically, by pouring through it, climbing on it, and chipping it apart. They did the same thing in West Berlin itself. They occupied space, swarming through the Ku'damm, filling the buses and pubs, parking their tiny Trabants on the noblest sidewalks, and returning triumphantly to the East with a flower for a girlfriend or a toy for an infant.
It was a magical moment, the possession of a city by its people. On Thursday 9 November, under a full moon, between the shadow of the Reichstag and the menacing bulk of the Brandenburg Gate, the people of Berlin danced on their wall, transforming the cruellest urban landscape into a scene of hilarity and hope.
