Blazing television lights suddenly flip on from the West, silhouetting the wall and the guards, intensifying the eerie scene. Inside his lighted, glass-walled command post, the captain of the East German border guard, a beefy guy with a square face and dark bristly hair, stands dialing and redialing his phone. For hours I’ve watched him vainly seeking instructions. Clearly he is confused. Perhaps he is also frightened; the crowds have grown so fast. Now they have pushed so close to the barriers that their breath, frosting in the night air, threatens to mingle with that of his guards. Once again, he puts down his phone. He stands rock still. Perhaps he has just been informed that the Bornholmerstrasse checkpoint, to the north, had moments ago opened its barriers. Then, at precisely 11:17 p.m., he walks out of his command post, surveys the teeming throngs–and shrugs. “Alles auf,” he orders–open the gates. With a joyous roar the crowds surge forward across the frontier that for five decades divided East from West. Within the blink of an eye, it seems, Germans are again Germans, Berliners are Berliners, no longer “East” or “West.”
I’ve remembered that border guard’s shrug for a decade. Earlier in the evening, just after 6, another man shrugged in much the same manner. Gunter Schabowski, the portly spokesman for the new East German Politburo, had called a press conference. Among other things, he almost casually announced a “reform” fervently desired by the hundreds of thousands of demonstrators who for weeks had marched through Dresden, Leipzig and Berlin–the right to have a passport and travel freely. For a nation locked so long behind the Iron Curtain, this was tremendous news. There was a sudden hush, followed by a ripple of whispers. Then from the back of the room, as the cameras rolled, broadcasting live to the nation, a reporter shouted out a fateful question: “When does it take effect?” Schabowski looked confused. He perched his glasses on the end of his nose, shuffled through his papers–and shrugged. “Sofort,” he guessed. Right now. Immediately.
In fact, the new rules were not supposed to take effect until the next day, Nov. 10. Oblivious to the crisis his words would cause, Schabowski headed home for dinner. Tens of thousands of more ordinary East Germans headed for the exits. Overwhelmed by the crowds, not knowing what to do and receiving no instructions from the military or party elite, border guards took matters into their own hands. Like Schabowski, they shrugged–and threw open the gates to the West.
My notebook for the critical moment records this scrawl: the day the wall came down!!!, marked with the time and a jumble of impressions as chaotic as the events themselves. East German guards grinning and slapping hands with the people streaming past them. Others shaking their heads in disbelief, abruptly consigned to the sidelines of history. A young woman with blond hair, a coat wrapped around her baby-blue nightgown, was among the first to race across the border. “I’ll be back in 10 minutes,” she shouted over her shoulder to a friend who held back. “I want to see if it is real.” Nearby, a middle-aged man seemed distraught: “I can’t go. I have only 13 Deutsche marks.” I gave him money. People thrust champagne bottles into my hands, directed me to drink and write down their feelings at this hour. “We’re so happy!” “It’s crazy!” “It’s the eighth wonder of the world!” People shouted, sang, danced and hugged. They took turns boosting one another up the wall in front of the nearby Brandenburg Gate, lit up by spotlights, the photo-op of the decade. Atop the wall, people became The People, heroes in a drama of their own making. “Die Mauer ist weg,” they cried out, punching the air with their fists. “The wall is gone!”
“A botch,” Schabowski’s boss, party chief Egon Krenz, later called it. Imagine if it had happened as he intended. On Nov. 10 orderly lines of East Germans would have formed to apply for passports and visas. Permission would have been granted, or not. Either way, the wall would not have “fallen.” It would have been opened, not breached. The communists would have done it, not the people. The German Democratic Republic was too rotten to have survived. But change might have come by evolution rather than revolution. And without the drama of The Fall, with all its inspiring visuals, would the Velvet Revolution have followed one week later in Prague? Would Romanians have found the courage to rise up against the hated dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu? Ten years later I am in awe of the role of happenstance, the power of something as simple as a gesture.
I flew into Berlin from London late on the morning of Nov. 9, 1989. Did I know the wall was about to fall in a dozen hours? I didn’t have a clue. What I knew by midnight, as I stood at Checkpoint Charlie watching thousands of wide-eyed Germans pour through the gates, was that this day had delivered the biggest break of almost any journalist’s lifetime. I could ride a plane for 50 years as a foreign correspondent and never–by shrewd planning or another stupidly happy accident–stand witness to such a powerful moment in world history.
I can replay in my mind that night’s events as if they were last night. I’d come to town to report a story on the badly overburdened West German social-welfare system. Hungary had opened its borders with Austria, and 38,000 new refugees–Germans, Poles, others–had arrived that year in West Berlin alone. Of those, 10,000 didn’t have jobs; 23,000 didn’t have homes. Everyone paying any attention knew by now the Iron Curtain had cracks. Few dreamed how quickly the cracks would turn to gaping holes and then… no wall at all! Certainly not the refugees sitting with me that night on the floor of a bankrupt and drafty West German carpet factory-turned-shelter. But somebody had a radio. And somebody actually heard an obscure East German official, Gunter Schabowski, announce that East Germans were free to travel “immediately.”
The news spread through the hall like an electric shock. “Did I leave home too early?” asked East Berliner Ingo Kargel, 17, sitting beside me on the floor. The would-be rock musician had traveled 1,500 miles to end up in a place that was only a 20-minute bus ride from home. “If the GDR opened the gates,” he said. “it’s not the GDR I knew.”
As it turned out, there would soon be no GDR for anyone to know, nor any Soviet Union, nor any cold war. I returned to my hotel room and phoned the unfathomable news to my editor. Then I ran downstairs and out the door. On the corner, a taxi driver sat placidly behind the wheel, reading a novel as he waited for his fare. “Take me to Check-point Charlie,” I announced importantly. “The Berlin wall is falling.” His name was Ermfried Prochnow, 55. He turned his head to the back seat, rolled his eyes at me, paused and smiled. “Spassvogel,” he said, which means “silly bird.” Prochnow wanted me to know he was far too skeptical and well-informed to fall for this one. “No, no,” I begged. “It’s true. Take me to Checkpoint Charlie.” The cabbie decided to play along. A fare was a fare, and the American spassvogel had money.
Prochnow had reason to want to believe. He was a native of East Berlin who’d fled with his parents to the West in 1960. The wall would fall someday, he explained to me, but it would take five–or perhaps 25 years. And then, as we rode along, he saw traffic begin to congeal in ways it shouldn’t have at that time of night. “Is it possible?” he asked. As Prochnow turned the corner into the street leading to Checkpoint Charlie, he uttered words I’d never heard a taxi driver say before. “A traffic jam!” he cried. “A perfect beautiful traffic jam!”
The first hours were confusing. A colleague and I had rushed to Berlin from Bonn late that Thursday afternoon, after hearing that the East German Politburo would make an important announcement the next morning on travel restrictions. While we were waiting in our rental car at Checkpoint Charlie to get from West Berlin into East Berlin, the evening news came on the radio and went live to the Politburo spokesman: starting “immediately,” East German citizens would be permitted to apply for round-trip visas to the West by going to their neighborhood police stations.
But instead of proceeding obediently to their police precinct houses for applications, East Berliners simply began walking out of their apartments and toward the wall. As we drove through the checkpoint into East Berlin, people noticing our West Berlin license plates stopped us and asked if it were true they could leave. We had no idea. We gave a ride to a couple of teenage boys who wanted to test their luck. One of them left his address book in the back seat; I still have it. The last I saw of him, he was slipping into a giant crowd pushing toward the now-open border station. The guards let the crowd pass. People began streaming across the once deadly checkpoints. Many stopped to shake hands with the guards; West Berliners were waiting on their other side with roses, champagne, beer and cheers.
By midnight, the party was in full swing. Hundreds of thousands of people were running through the streets; a huge mob had gathered on the western side of the wall. News helicopters were flying overhead. It was amazing how quickly the desecration of the wall proceeded. First people approached it, next they climbed on it, then they began dancing on top. Before long the whole place was bathed in television lights, giving a dramatic glow to the geysers of champagne. Then I heard the first taps. Someone was trying to hack loose a chunk of the wall. Soon there were hundreds of “wallpeckers” at work, banging and scraping at the grafitti-smeared concrete with everything from hammers to pocketknives. The effect created an urban percussion concert I will always associate with those days in Berlin.
I wanted my piece of the rock. Maybe fatigue and euphoria had clouded my reporter’s detachment. It was by then 2 or 3 in the morning. After chronicling a story I knew would be the best of my life, I could no longer bear being an observer. I didn’t have any sharp objects, so I ran back to the NEWSWEEK rental car we had ditched near the wall and began digging through the trunk and the engine compartment. I pried loose a tire iron, stuck my notebook in my back pocket, and started hacking at the wall.
The Berlin Wall was one of the last pieces of the old Iron Curtain to crumble, the end of a process that began the summer before and happened so quickly that few of us saw it coming. In retrospect it looks inevitable; but at the time no one knew whether it would end in world war, or a new Stalinism. Suddenly that summer East German young people all went on vacation, and instead of the usual beaches in Romania or Bulgaria, they were heading to landlocked Hungary. Word was out that the Hungarians were easing the controls along their stretch of the Iron Curtain, and people could slip across freely to Austria and the West. That lasted only a few weeks. After Erich Honecker’s regime in East Germany pressured Hungary to toughen up, it did. The taste of freedom was too sweet, though, and many thousands of East Germans took refuge in West German embassies in Hungary and elsewhere rather than return home.
The elegant old embassy in Budapest soon looked like a holiday camp, full of kids in cutoff jeans and T shirts, all their belongings in backpacks, and young couples with small children crammed in the backs of their little Trabant cars. The early September heat was stifling, but no one much minded. With the entire world press on hand, the refugees just laughed when East German authorities set up a battered van across the street offering amnesty to anyone who would return to the paternal embrace of the Honecker regime. Instead, at night people slipped off to scout for holes in the Iron Curtain, while more and more arrived each day to take their place.
One night NEWSWEEK photographer Peter Turnley and I hooked up with a dogged little German named Arnold Pfeiffer. Accused of spying for the West years before, he had been imprisoned in East Germany until West Germany bought his freedom. That summer he had given up his machinist job to come to Hungary and help smuggle his countrymen across–a way of repaying what Germany had done for him, he said. Arnold the Passer, as they called him, guided his charges to the last stretch of no man’s land and then gave them detailed instructions on how to sneak across to the Austrian town of Deutschkreuz. He took no money for his services, and ferried all their possessions across in his own car so they could travel light. We set off at dawn with a pair of 23-year-old electricians, Andreas and Holgar, following drainage ditches and crawling through cornfields. Then just 50 feet from a stretch of tattered barbed wire, a pair of Hungarian soldiers on foot patrol stopped them at gunpoint. We knew they were under orders not to shoot, but who could be sure? Andreas hesitated, then took his chance and bolted for the fence–leaping over it in one smooth motion–and was free. Holgar hesitated a bit longer, and was captured; he stared after his disappearing friend with a look of profound regret.
But history moved fast, and within a week the Hungarians threw their frontiers open to anyone who wanted to leave. Holgar was among the streams of tens of thousands of East Germans who fled with whatever they could carry–popping champagne corks as they passed the border controls. That was the first moment of public liberation for Eastern Europeans, the first time they could really vote with their feet and not risk dying for it. The fall of the wall three months later would seem like just another of the dominos as communism inevitably toppled nearly everywhere.
