All in All: The Berlin Wall

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All in All: The Berlin Wall

Twenty-five years ago this week I was in Munich, working in my IT consulting job for a tiny company that had a second office in Berlin. On Thursday that week, I walked through the front door into the reception area of the office, to see our receptionist staring at the phone receiver she held in her outstretched hand.

“They’re not answering in the Berlin office,” she said to me, livid. Our receptionist was also the boss’ wife and also our accountant, and she knew exactly how much every employee cost her and her husband, every day. She made sure we knew she knew. Taking a day off without telling her first was a personal affront.

It was weird, though. Employees in the two small offices collaborated by phone all day – marketing people in Munich, programmers in Berlin – so someone in our office was ALWAYS talking to someone in Berlin. “They’re just not there,” she said.

A few minutes later the phone rang and I was close enough to hear exultant laughter coming through the receiver, and the sound of my co-worker Matthias’ voice, from Berlin. “Bananen!” I heard. “We’re taking bananas to the Brandenburg Tor!”

And that’s how I learned, on November 9, 1989, that the gun-toting East German soldiers who patrolled the cement wall running through the center of Berlin had walked off the job in the wee hours, and that residents of East Berlin were streaming through the Brandenburg Gate into West Berlin by the hundreds. Exuberant West Berliners were greeting them at the Brandenburg Gate to give them bags of the fruit that was so difficult to come by in East Germany – fresh bananas.

I started studying German in sixth grade, and we learned about German culture and history in addition to language (good language teachers know it’s impossible to separate the three.) I had simply taken it as permanent fact that there would always be a divided Germany and a Wall. As absurd as it would sound to a 21st century middle schooler that a major European city could simply be dissected in two: that’s how absurd it sounded to me in 1989 that the Wall had fallen.

Just imagine how it sounded to my young German co-workers, one of whom was my boyfriend, all of whom were born after the Wall was built. It was verrückt. Crazy. Unimaginable. Joyful. Worth incurring the wrath of the boss’ wife to skip work and take bananas to the Ossis, as the Easterners were called. The emotion and excitement swept outward from Berlin like a wave and were soon tangible to all West Germans ( the Wessis,) even in the southern state of Bavaria where I lived.

As soon as I could, I flew to Berlin for one of my regular visits to my boyfriend, and we picked up hammers somewhere and drove to a section of the wall and hammered on it. It became something routine we did whenever I visited him in Berlin for the next months: grab some breakfast, stop by the grocery store, hammer on the Wall, visit a museum, make dinner plans. That I personally helped smash that symbol of tyranny and repression down – even if it was only a few square inches of it – will be one of the proud moments that I take to my grave.

The next few months were a mosaic of memories. Being in Berlin on New Year’s Eve 1989, greeting 1990 by walking through the Brandenburg Gate with my nervous/astounded boyfriend, sans passports or guards, stopping at bonfires to share paper cups of cheap Russian champagne with Ossis and toast to new beginnings. Seeing East Germans pick up the “lucky money” due to them from the West German government for getting out– DM100, about $54 – at post offices and banks in the west, while Wessis standing in line cheered and clapped. The ubiquitous abandoned Trabants that sprung up at the side of the road all over Berlin, as East Germans ditched the Ossi car built with a lawnmower engine in to find new rides in the land of Bayerische Motoren Werke. The first grumblings of discontent about what it would cost the West Germany economy to reunify with the East, muttered by drunks on the U-bahn saying aloud what many Wessis were increasingly thinking.

Shortly before I moved home from Germany in July 1990, I went to Berlin for one last visit, and brought along my American friend Kirsten and her German boyfriend for their first time. The four of us we went to the Wall, which had by then turned into a raging center of world class capitalism. An East German soldier “guarding” a six foot by six foot gap in the wall leaned through to us and whispered: “Wanna come through and climb in the guard tower? 20 marks.”

The two Germans with us were speechless. Kirsten and I paid the money and shoved our German boyfriends through to No-Man’s Land, the flat space between East and West that used to be booby-trapped with mines. For another ten marks, we got to wear the caps of the East German soldiers – Volkspolizei, or VoPo – and drive around in their military jeeps. It was something that, eight months earlier, none of us could have ever imagined doing in a million years.

Pretty much freaking out as I climb up an East Berlin guard tower

Oh hi, yeah, I’m up here with my friends in EAST BERLIN. We’ll be right down for the jeep ride.

The view back into West Berlin, and the VoPo booking their next clients at DM20 each.

While the German boyfriend morphed long ago into a platonic friend, the chance to bear witness to his experience that day is something that will always connect us.

The next day was my last in Germany, and there was a little concert we went to see. Pink Floyd playing The Wall. At The Wall. With cameos by Joni Mitchell, Jerry Hall, Thomas Dolby, Marianne Faithfull, Ute Lemper and Van Morrisson (and of course everyone’s favorite German hair band, The Scorps.) It should give you a sense of how enchanted my life felt that year that this spectacular, one of a kind, amazing event isn’t even the thing that I treasure most about living in Germany during that era.

Instead it’s the fact that I got to see, up close and personal, how hope can triumph over cynicism, how insurmountable institutional obstacles can be brought down, and yes, how good can win out over evil. Twenty five years on, on days when I feel so close to giving up on politics and climate change and gun control and equal rights for women, my memories of the fall of the Wall are reminders to keep on chipping away.