Some had heard an unbelievable rumor, others wondered what was going on at the normally heavily guarded border crossing point, and others still simply believed what they had heard on the news broadcast by western television stations, whose chief anchor had gone out on a limb in interpreting the news from East Germany.  Here are six stories of how Berliners from both sides of the wall experienced November 9, 1989.

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Hans-Martin Fleischer

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Hans-Martin Fleischer today works for the Senate, but in 1989 he was 26 years old, a student in West Berlin. Rumors began circulating at the university that the border was to open. "I was the only one who had a car," he reminisced. Without any further ado, six of his fellow students bundled themselves into his Volkswagen Beetle, and they drove across town to the Bornholmer Straße.

The young man's eyes filled with tears of pure happiness. It was a truly historic moment, as he said. The feeling of excitement at a new dawn came later.

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Kathrin Katzek

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From East Berlin, a young woman came across the bridge, and they began to talk. She ended up following the economics student to West Berlin.

They were together for several years, Hans-Martin Fleischer and Katharina Katzek (then 24). In that fateful night she was afraid to cross the border at first, she recalled. "I was afraid that they wouldn't let me back in."

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Liane Müller-Knuth and Herbert Müller

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Liane Müller-Knuth didn't quite understand the East German party spokesperson Günter Schabowski and his momentous stammering.  How could she?  Asked at a press conference when loosened restrictions on travel for East Germans would take effect, Schabowski answered, "As far as I am aware ... with immediate effect").

When the West-German nightly-news anchor Hanns-Joachim Friedrichs interpreted his words to mean that the border was open, she didn't hesitate. Her husband Herbert gunned up their Trabant, and they drove across the border to visit an old friend in West Berlin. They celebrated until six o'clock in the morning. Then it was time for the Müllers to go to work.

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Hans-Jürgen and Heike Legler

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Heike and Hans-Jürgen Legler understood immediately what Günter Schabowski meant -- with the result that they were among the first to cross the border at the Bornholmer Straße.

"She thought we were crazy," the then-29-year-old still recalls the reaction of her cousin, when she and her husband phoned from the "Kudamm" where some West Berliners had invited them to drink a beer. For Heike Legler the 9th of November will always be a special day, and one to be celebrated. It's her birthday.

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Ingrid Schulze

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Her grandson is not much older that the reunified Germany. On that November evening he was fast asleep. Ingrid Schulze too was in bed. Her son-in-law woke her around eleven o'clock. One glance out the window was enough to see that thing were very different from usual. People were dancing and singing in the headlights of the column of "Trabis" as they made their way across the otherwise so heavily guarded bridge. "It was totally surreal," recalls the pensioner from Fürstenwald.

She still talks a lot with her grandson about these times, and how two German states became one.

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Elke Leier and Günther Fiedler

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Elke Leier too had gone to bed. The news was really pretty ambiguous. Her boyfriend, Günter Fiedler, then 38, wanted to know what was happening though. Although the first police officers on duty at the Böse Bridge told him he would have to fill in the right forms the next day, he walked straight on -- and one hour later was sitting on the couch in his brother's home in West Berlin.

His western relatives were "pretty surprised," he reports, to find him popping in, "but then again, not really." Why? A few weeks earlier he had been in West Berlin to attend a wedding, although the East German authorities had turned down his application for an exit visa. He took the scenic route from East Berlin via Hungary to West Berlin. And then came home again the same way. Those were crazy times.