Officially, the Berlin Wall fell on November 9, 1989. Demolition would take more than four years, and a few sections remain for memorial purposes, but it was on that date that passage between East and West Berlin — and thus East and West Germany — opened to all citizens of both countries. To say that it came as a surprise would be a serious understatement. Earlier that year, even the best informed observers were predicting that the wall would stand for at least a few more decades. Earlier that day, for that matter, the officials involved in the opening didn’t foresee that Socialist Unity Party of Germany Secretary of Information Günter Schabowski would, that evening, mistakenly declare on national television that the liberalization of border travel was effective “immediately, without delay.”
When the border guards finally gave up their attempts to hold the line around 11:00 that night, the surrounding scene in both Berlins had turned into what attendees now remember, 36 years later, as the biggest street festival of their lives. To those of us unable to join in the celebration at the time, it may seem unlikely that such an event could really have occurred with no intimations whatsoever.
Yet the footage shot by a traveler in Berlin during the summer of 1989, right there in the vicinity of the wall, depicts a city where events seem to be frozen. Though the built environment isn’t without touches of faded grandeur here and there (and as many West Berliners were soon to discover, the real urban stateliness was over East), the overall impression given by what was then the red hot center of Cold War geopolitics is that of a dullsville.
The most outwardly interesting feature in these parts of Berlin at the very end of the nineteen-eighties is, of course, the wall itself: the brutishness of its form, the humdrum menace of its guards, the accumulation of graffiti both political and apolitical. At one point, the tourist’s camcorder captures the memorials for fallen wall jumpers, the most recent of which, a certain Chris Gueffroy, had made his fateful escape attempt from the East that past February. History would soon immortalize him as the last person to be shot trying to get over the wall, though not the last to die doing so. That title belongs to Winfried Freudenberg, who in March of 1989 fell from a balloon he’d rigged up to fly across the border. At this point, when the rapid urban evolution of the reunified German capital has long since made it one of the most popular cities in Europe, neither she nor Gueffroy would recognize the former East Berlin they were desperate to escape — nor, for that matter, the West Berlin of which they dreamed.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
