I was studying at the University of Bamberg in West Germany, during the 1989-90 school year. Late in the evening on November 9th, 1989 I was at a bar with a TV on, and suddenly everyone got quiet, and then they started cheering wildly. The Wall had fallen. My friend Alex and I immediately started making plans to hitchhike to Berlin the next day.
Recently I scanned lots of photos of my experiences 20 years ago, and uploaded them to CNN to commemorate the 20 year anniversary of the fall of the Wall, after which they called and asked to do a short webcam interview and show the photos, etc. More photos and the whole story after the jump.
Additionally, I traveled back to Berlin a few more times that year to see the progress of the dismantling of the Wall and also to see Pink Floyd (sans David Gilmour) play the entire The Wall album at Potsdamer Platz. For those photos and for those who don't have the time to read my detailed account of Berlin 20 years ago (see below), here's a 3-minute montage I put together.
Soo, for those who're interested, here's a more detailed version of that year in Berlin:
The Night The Wall Fell
After we heard the Wall had fallen, my friend Alex and I immediately started making plans to hitchhike to Berlin the next day, packed a backpack and because of some unforeseen delays, got on the road just before sunrise on November 11. When we got to the East German border-crossing in Hof, I could see hundreds of Trabant cars on the other side waiting to be let out. As we travelled north into East Germany, there were thousands and thousands of Trabant cars in a massive traffic jam waiting to exit the country. They were out of their cars, cheering and hugging each other, and waiting patiently. We drove north for one hour from the border at 100km per hour, with cars backed up headed the other way. That means there were approximately 100 kilometers of cars queuing to leave the country.
As we entered Berlin, the couple who had picked us up tried to drive towards the Brandenburg gate. As we took a left at the Siegessäule, the roads were totally blocked, so we said our goodbyes and headed out towards the Wall in front of Brandenburg Gate. We arrived about 1 hour after the East German troops had kicked all the partiers off the Wall in front of the Brandenburg Gate, and just after a group had pulled down a piece of the thinner wall just to the right of the gate. Troops now occupied the Wall as we arrived. Tom Brokaw was elevated high up in front of the Gate in a cherry-picker providing live coverage. I started taking pictures and joining in the euphoric revelry.
Alex and I walked all along the wall between Brandenburg Gate and Potsdamer Platz, then dumped our things in a small apartment of some friends of Alex where we were going to crash later. Afterwards we hit the streets again and attended a free concert in a large arena to commemorate the fall of the Wall. The crowd was so big in front of the arena that we couldn’t get in and I got separated from Alex, but ended up with one of the girls from the apartment, which I was not sad about because she was very good looking! We managed to get in after a door randomly opened to let someone out and we were squeezed into the arena. I remember that the concert was free and included Joe Cocker, Melissa Etheridge, Die Toten Hosen and I think Udo Lindenberg. Then we headed off to the Kurfürstendamm in the evening where there was a massive spontaneous party happening with hundreds of thousands of East and West Germans. We drank beer and wine in the streets with strangers until the wee hours.
But we only slept for three hours or so, because there was to be a big border-opening event early the next morning, November 12, at Potsdamer Platz. This would be an official new border crossing, and the mayor, Walter Momper would be there to greet the East-Berliners with flowers and fanfare. The first cars and pedestrians began to stream across the no-man’s land at 8am, which is about when Alex and I arrived. There were so many thousands of people watching that we quickly got separated from one another. There were a few dozen people standing on top of the thin, tall wall on the right side of the opening, with one man standing for a long time directly on the edge, egging the crowd on to cheer and holding his hands up making the V-sign.
At that point no one had yet climbed up on the left side. As I was standing near the wall, a man produced an extensible ladder and started climbing up. I was right behind him and I watched as many people started to follow me up. After getting settled on the wall, which had a rounded top, I could see on my left into the no-man’s land with all the East German soldiers lined up and on my right in West Berlin I could see thousands of people trying to get a glimpse of the ecstatic East Berliners crossing into West Germany, some for the first time. Someone passed around a bottle of champagne and I took a huge slug of it, even though it was about 9am and bitterly cold. I was up there for about 45 minutes, until I heard some East German soldiers barking orders and they began to line up in front of the wall in the no-man’s land. When they started unrolling water hoses I started to think about getting down, and when the ladder came back by me, I took advantage of the moment and climbed down. In the meantime Alex had climbed up into a tree and could see me climbing up on the wall and was cheering me on from afar.
As we walked along the Wall one last time, from Potsdamer Platz to Brandenburg Gate, Alex pulled a hammer and chisel from his backpack and we began in earnest to try to get some souvenirs, knowing full well that the next time we were in Berlin, this portion of the Wall would most likely be gone. I still have a nice bag of Berlin Wall pieces, and my grandmother actually made a pendant out of one small, particularly colorful piece. As we hitchhiked back to school in Bamberg and to reality, it began to sink in what we had experienced and that we would be telling these stories for the rest of our lives.
The Dismantling of the Wall
A few months later in the Spring of 1990, I wanted to see what was happening in Berlin and witness for myself the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, which I assumed was no easy task. In many places there were actually two walls, one on the outer perimeter, and then another interior perimeter wall separated by a "no-man's land" about the width of a football field. All this had to be taken down and I wanted to check on their progress.
In April, 1990, the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) still existed and there were still border posts throughout Berlin, although the rules had become fairly lax. For example, I had entered East Germany that April at the border crossing just north of Coburg in northern Bavaria. I used my University of Bamberg student id to get a 2-week multiple-entry tourist visa to visit East Germany. If I had said I was American (which I am), I would have not been allowed to enter. But West Germans had no problem entering. So I lied, of course and said I was West German, and that I was born in Bamberg. By putting on my best Bamberg accent I convinced the guard that this was true, paid a few Marks and they let me in. This was risky but worth it. After travelling through Leipzig, Dresden and other cities normally closed off to western tourists, I ended up in East Berlin. Much had changed since my last visit.
The Wall at the Brandenburg Gate consisted of 8 feet of solid rebar-reinforced concrete. Huge jackhammer machines worked day and night for months to chip it all away. By the time I arrived in mid-April, they had chipped away about half of the Wall there,and the Gate itself was covered in scaffolding to undo 30 years of neglect. I came back again late at night around 2am, and the jackhammers were pounding away loudly , with what was left of the Wall bathed in bright working lights. Nearby there was a payphone, and I called my father in America. I could barely hear him over the din of the jackhammers, and I had to yell into the phone. I could barely hear my father ask "What in the world is all that racket?!?", and I yelled back "It's the Wall LITERALLY coming down!!"
Not far away was Potsdamer Platz, historically one of the most important parts of Berlin and once a vibrant economic zone before WWII. Before the Wall fell it was a no-man's land covered with barbed-wire, mines and automatic machine guns. A few months before on November 12, I had witnessed the re-opening of the main road going through Potsdamer Platz and had seen the first East Berliners streaming across, met by the mayor of Berlin and thousands of welcoming West Berliners. Now it was a fast-moving thoroughfare and border-crossing, although still quite bleak and desolate, as the reconstruction would not be under way for some time.
All along the Wall between Brandenburg Gate and Potsdamer Platz, the Wall was perforated with holes, with kids climbing up the exposed rebar to sit on the top, and everywhere entrepreneurs were chipping large colorful pieces of the Wall off to sell to tourists.
Around Checkpoint Charlie, much of the Wall had already been demolished, with nothing but vacant lots and piles of yet-to-be-removed concrete Wall rubble.
Despite the bleak, crumbling pieces of Wall and lonely fields of weeds filled with piles of rubble strewn in a wide swathe throughout the city of Berlin, there was a new feeling of lightness to the city and its residents, which I had not felt during my previous visits. Even with the euphoria of November 9th, there was still an underlying disbelief and fear that perhaps there might still be violence, or that the order to open the borders might be suddenly rescinded. Five months later, however, the feeling of euphoria was gone, replaced by a sense of peace, and a mutual determination to rebuild their city as a unified Berlin.
Pink Floyd’s The Wall Concert at Potsdamer Platz
As I said I was a student at the University in Bamberg, and I had a job at a beer garden there, working illegally as a waiter. When I heard that Pink Floyd (sans David Gilmour) was going to play the entire The Wall album at Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, I dropped everything and immediately hitchhiked to Berlin. I was supposed to work that day, and I called my boss from Berlin to say sorry, but I cannot miss this. A man has his priorities after all.
The concert took place at Potsdamer Platz. The stage was set up right in the former East Berlin 'no-man's land', and the exact place we were standing was filled with mines, automatic machine guns and barbed wire, just 9 months before.
The stage was HUGE, with massive white styrofoam blocks rising up almost 100 feet on each side of the stage. There were large jumbotron video screens throughout Potsdamer Platz so that the hundreds of thousands of fans could see the concert. There were colored search lights beaming into the sky, helicopters buzzing, and floating figures from the movie The Wall. Every so often the Wall of stryofoam blocks would slowly but dramatically change colors along with the music.
Pink Floyd played the entire Wall album - loud - and the crowd was ecstatic. My buddy and I got as close as we could during the concert, drank a six-pack of beer and enjoyed the slow sunset. At the grand finale, the entire Wall on both sides of the stage came crashing down and the crowd went crazy. I couldn't help but get goosebumps as I thought about the significance of this place and what had happened here just 9 months before. It was all the more moving to me since I had been here at Potsdamer Platz to see the Wall open on November 12 and had sat on the Wall just a few feet away from where I was standing now, watching a free Berlin enjoying a Pink Floyd concert in the former no-man's land.
After the concert, we streamed into the city to party. Later that night, I'll never forget the guy I saw passed out on the sidewalk. The remarkable thing was that he was sleeping on top of one of the huge styrofoam Wall blocks from the concert, clutching it for dear life, lest someone steal it. Although drunk, you could tell he wasn't going to let anyone take his souvenir.
That night we slept in sleeping bags in the large Tiergarten Park, and woke up in the morning mist to see thousands of little cottontail rabbits hopping all around us.
I have since been back to Berlin many times, and Potsdamer Platz is now a sea of high-rise buildings, a far cry from the dramatic transition period of 1989-90.
CONGRATULATIONS, BERLIN!!!!