selenak

I already wrote my post about November 9th as the jinxed date of German 20th century history - when both terrible and good things happened over the decades - last year, so this year, I'll limit myself to our 20th anniversary.

The first time I saw the Wall, I was 14 and it was on a trip with American exchange students. My hometown, Bamberg, isn't that far from the former border, and just about three hours from Berlin if you drive without traffic jams. When the Americans were here as part of a student exchange program, one of the things on the schedule was a trip to Berlin. So there were were, on a bus, German and American students, driving the transit road to Berlin. First passing the border to East Germany with its towers and zone which was referred to as "der Todesstreifen" - the death zone - because the guards had orders to shoot if someone tried to cross it without permission. I think both German and American students felt a bit like visiting a prison, with that kind of guilty awkwardness you sense if you're free and entering an area where no one else is; we were all silent while our pass ports were controlled. But the difference was that we Germans accepted it as normal. This was how things were. Germany was divided all through our lives; we took it for granted that it always would be, never mind the lip service our politicians paid on occasion. The GDR: source of bizarre alternate reality style news (seriously, those news programs were fantastically Orwellian to watch), great literature and the occasional moving "family makes it across the border" story. Also, tv wise, of all those great Czech fantasy series and fairy tale movies. As such a part of our every day lives and there to stay.

During that one week in Berlin, we went to East Berlin for a day, which you could, provided you were back within 24 hours, and that felt like time travel, because a few representative buildings aside, East Berlin looked like photos of West Germany looked - 50, 60 years ago. (Additional flinch of guilt: not only were the East Germans locked up, but they still seemed to bear the results of the war. They never had a Marshall Plan, after all, or a Wirtschaftswunder.) If one wanted to enter a book store, which I did, one had to queue in front, got a green plastic bag and waited, because only a limited number of customers was allowed inside. Our teachers had advised us not to get into discussions with the locals too much, because one could never be sure who was working for the Stasi, and we might end up getting them into trouble.

As I said, my hometown was not that far away. I remember thinking: if the occupation zones had been drawn a bit differently in 45, this could have been my life.

The Wall itself, painted on one side and grey on the other, seemed to sum it up, including the surreality of the entire situation, as it was just there, through the entire city. There were photos showing Berlin before the Wall, and I thought that I would never see it like that, because, well, it was there, and it would stay.

And then came perestroika, and in its wake, 1989, the run to Hungary, to Czecheslovakia, the overcrowed embassies, the demonstrations, and finally, that night.

Some particular highlights, with English subtitles:

The opening of the Wall at Berlin's Bornholmer Strasse, the first border to be crossed.

The opening of the Brandenburg Gate:

The newsreel of November 10th, summing up the night:

And finally, an excerpt from later that year, when Leonard Bernstein directed Beethoven's 9th in Berlin, honour of what happened. The Ode to Joy, except that the word "joy" - Freude - has been replaced with "freedom" - Freiheit. Which, as it happens, was Schiller's original wording, later changed as the French Revolution which inspired it took on some darker colours. The French Revolution, whose 200th anniversary also was in 1989. I always thought it fitting that the Ode to Joy became our European anthem.

So: The Ode to Freedom: