I was a young whipper-snapper when the wall fell. I had been to Germany the previous summer and had fallen in love with the people and culture. I was not there when the wall started to fall, but luckily it didn’t all happen at once.
I was given an opportunity to go to Germany in December of 1989. I stayed through the new year and was able to make it to Berlin on a cold Sunday morning after a long train trip from Dortmund. I was in a hurry to make it to the East, since I wanted to see the Brandenburg Gate. When I arrived in East Berlin, I saw almost no one. It was surreal and quiet. I walked maybe a half-dozen blocks to get to the gate from the S-Bahn station.
I have to say that it was anti-climactic on the East-side of the wall. I had expected to see East Germans hammering at the wall in a symbolic effort to get through, but as I approached the wall, I still saw no one. But I did hear something. From somewhere far away, there was a tapping. I figured out that the source of the sound was an echo coming from the other side of the wall bouncing off of the buildings on either side of the wall. It was the only sound I could hear. It was perhaps symbolic that the West was more interested in the act of tearing down the wall, the East Germans just wanted out.
I tried to cross back at the Brandenburg checkpoint, but the rule was still that you had to cross back in the same place that you arrived. So I hurried out of the spooky silence of East Berlin and took the S-Bahn to Checkpoint Charlie.
The scene there was completely different. As far as my eyes could see, there were people hacking away at the wall with hammers and chisels, people selling things and gawkers snapping pictures of the scene. People played music and almost everyone had a smile on their face.
The typical image of the wall, a graffiti covered canvas, was disrupted from the ground to about 7 feet up by people working on taking a piece of the wall, and preferably with graffiti. I wanted to have a hammer and chisel, and luckily there was a guy renting them from a little table a few feet from the wall.
“Sprechen Sie English?”
“Hell yeah, I’m from New Jersey!”
He rented me the hammer and chisel for 5 marks and let me use it as long as I wanted.
I don’t think I knew the whole history of the wall when I was there. I didn’t have the kind of context that my parents had, but I knew that what I was doing was historic, exciting and revolutionary. It was truly something to experience, but I am not at all disappointed that my kids won’t get to experience it. I prefer bridges to walls.