The Night the Wall Came Down November 9, 1989

That night I kept waking up in my small apartment in the heart of West Berlin. A few months ago I had moved to the “Big City” to start my first job as an engineer at Siemens in Berlin. It was Thursday night, and I needed to be well rested for a big project the next day, but the cars going up and down the Kurfürstendamm, the central artery of downtown, seemed to be honking more than usual, and the people seemed to be noisier and singing a lot.

“Maybe a wedding,” I thought, “or maybe a soccer game just ended.” A check of my alarm clock showing 2 a.m. in the morning rendered this theory unlikely.

Now I was awake. I switched on the lights, got up and looked out the window. I could see cars and lots of people moving up and down the Kurfürstendamm, obviously in a festive and excited mood. I scanned the radio for any news, but nothing, just the regular late-night music and talk. I had to check for myself what was going on.

I got dressed, questioning my sanity to have moved smack into the center of this busy metropolis. Right outside my apartment building, I bumped into a group of younger people drinking champagne and singing. Pretty annoyed, I asked them what this was all about. They looked at me with wide, shiny eyes, either from joy or alcohol or both, proclaiming: “We are from East Berlin. Some of the checkpoints are open, and we drove here with our Trabi. Then we drove up and down the Kurfürstendamm, and we are drinking champagne.”

This was too bizarre to believe, and too bizarre to be made up, but there it was, an ugly East German Trabant car parked proudly right in the middle of West Berlin.

I don’t remember how often I asked, “Is this true? Are you really from East Berlin?” I don’t remember whether we hugged or shared the champagne; I only remember floating up and down the Kurfürstendamm that night in a wave of people overjoyed. I remember Trabis parading up and down the street, honking their horns, and I remember lots of singing.

The next morning as usual, I took the underground to work, but trying to get home in the afternoon was an entirely different matter. Huge crowds of people, Berliners from East and West, were trying to get downtown to the Kurfürstendamm, to the Wall at the Brandenburg Gate or to one of the checkpoints.

Even though trains were running as usual every three minutes during the rush hour, I couldn’t even enter the subway station, which was filled to the brim with people. Finally, bus bridges were set up, which got me to the outskirts of the completely gridlocked city center. I walked home through masses of euphoric people.

Not much later that evening, I set out with a couple of friends to make it to the section of the Wall by the Brandenburg Gate. I don’t know how long it took us to walk the few miles, but I remember a huge crowd assembled around the Potsdamer Platz and people standing on top of the Wall, which of course was unthinkable even a day earlier.

Later, I was standing on top of the Wall. From there, I could see East German soldiers armed with machine guns, patrolling the area on the East Side of the Wall. I was excited and scared standing on top of the Wall that was built the year I was born in 1961.

I grew up in a Germany divided into East and West, and divided was normal for me. When old folks talked about a reunited Germany, I believed that they were out of touch with reality, the only reality I had known.

The next few weeks were amazing and chaotic in Berlin. East Germans were flooding into the city, receiving 100 “welcome” Deutsche Marks in hard west currency and standing in long lines at the grocery stores to buy oranges, coffee, magazines and other items not easily available in the East. Gradually, all the checkpoints were opened and people began taking down the Wall.

I remember knocking pieces out of the wall with a hammer and chisel, and I was surprised at how hard it was. A solid piece of German workmanship. My hand was hurting, but I didn’t care.

A lot of people had been hurt by the Wall from 1961 to 1989. Families and friends had been torn apart. They were arrested for digging tunnels under the Wall. Arrested for trying to smuggle people in cars or trucks through the checkpoints. People had died trying to escape the communist regime, usually by being shot while making a run for it and trying to climb the Wall. We were fiercely hammering at that Wall.

Soon our friends from Cottbus, located in East Germany not far from Berlin, came to visit us in the West for the first time ever. How we became friends is a story for another day, but I remember the afternoon when we proudly and in disbelief strolled arm in arm down the Kurfürstendamm and shopped at KaDeWe, a beautiful department store, and the pinnacle of western materialism.

A few years later I moved to California and my friends from Cottbus came to visit. We sat around the kitchen table chatting, fully aware that not long ago this mundane scene of an East and West German friend together at a table in America had been a far away dream, a dream brought to reality by the many people who believed in freedom and stood up for freedom.

From Tanja Beshear
Lafayette, Colorado

Photos provided by Tanja Beshear