THE elderly lady with her shopping bag stood and stared at the armed policeman politely but firmly preventing her from crossing the 8ft-high barrier built across the street. “It’s like having the Wall back,” she said tetchily. But with a smile.
The policeman smiled back. Stretching away on either side, a chain of 1,000 wall-like slabs daubed with graffiti form a new 1.2-mile barrier from the Brandenburg Gate to Potsdamer Platz — now once again one of Europe’s busiest intersections.
Tomorrow night, at the climax of the biggest official party seen in Europe, with Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, hosting Gordon Brown, Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, and Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian president — to name but a few — the slabs will crash into one another like dominos, representing the chain of events that 20 years ago brought the cold war to an end.
The first “domino” will be pushed over, fittingly enough, by Lech Walesa and Miklos Nemeth, the veteran Polish and Hungarian anti-communist campaigners. They will be joined by two other main actors in the drama of 1989: the former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev and Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the then West German foreign minister.
The officially organised street party is costing £4.6m and kicks off with a Daniel Barenboim-led concert at the Brandenburg Gate, followed by Bon Jovi performing their single We Weren’t Born to Follow and an extravagant firework display as the thousand dominos fall.
All of Germany is celebrating what the newspaper Die Welt yesterday called “the unexpected joy” that hit the country on a cold night in November 1989 when popular unrest, democracy protests, and a series of misjudged measures and misunderstandings caused the Berlin Wall to fall.
In today’s difficult climate, nobody is claiming reunification came without economic pain, but with Germany having already climbed out of recession, one newspaper editorial could claim yesterday that “if we are not the happiest nation on earth, at least we are a happy nation”.
On that wintry, chaotic, euphoric November night 20 years ago, I met up on West Berlin’s showy Kurfürstendamm with Kerstin and Andreas, two friends from East Berlin who had escaped only weeks before on one of the sealed trains that brought asylum seekers from West Germany’s embassy in Warsaw through to the West.
On a night of tears, joy, fireworks, inebriation and incredulity — a far more spontaneous celebration than anything taking place tomorrow — Kerstin was reunited with the family she had left in the East and expected never to see again.
Karin, another East German friend, reluctantly trained as an engineer by the communist regime, was expelled from East Germany shortly before the Wall fell — her brother had spent months in prison as a failed escaper — and now runs a thriving business. She has moved to a leafy suburb so far west in West Berlin that, back then, it was in East Germany.
We walked along the banks of the Spree, past the Berliner Ensemble, Bertolt Brecht’s theatre, and Ganymed, old East Berlin’s stuffy, showcase restaurant. Twenty years ago the path ended a few yards along in darkness, concrete and barbed wire across the river.
Today the same riverbank leads to the restored Reichstag, again the seat of parliament, and is lined with restaurants. Instead of patrol boats with machineguns and searchlights, the Spree is home to river cruisers with beer and champagne bars. Potsdamer Platz, near the site of Hitler’s buried bunker, has been transformed from a no man’s land of wall and watchtowers into a bustling, 21st-century streetscape.
Berlin today has seized with both hands its role at the heart of an expanded Europe, symbolised by the vast new Central station, with high-speed trains on three levels hurtling east and west. Workers from western Poland returning from Britain fly to Berlin and catch the Intercity-Express to Poznan.
As the Cafe Varna, not far from the Brandenburg Gate testifies, there are now — thanks to European Union expansion — more Bulgarians, Czechs, Slovaks and Hungarians working in Berlin than there were when they were “fraternal allies” in the Warsaw Pact. More Russians too, if one does not count the 380,000 departed troops.
As part of the celebrations, an exhibition in the city centre is showcasing the Art of Socialist Realism, a collection of Stalinist-style paintings of happy children scattering grain to chickens, or Lenin addressing adoring workers. Nostalgia is a funny thing.
On Ebertstrasse, named after the first president of the pre-war Weimar Republic — save for a brief spell as HermannGöring-Strasse — Japanese tourists queue to be photographed astride the brick line in the pavement that shows where the Wall once ran.
Ironically, it is once glitzy western Berlin that now looks the shabbier part of the city, with the Ku’damm (as the Kurfürstendamm is known) in search of regeneration money.
A few statistics alone illustrate some of the superficial social changes in the old East. The number of cars has almost doubled from 3.9m to 7.5m, while — partly thanks to mobile phones — the number of telephones has soared from 49 per 100 households to 243.
The child mortality rate has fallen by two-thirds, life expectancy has risen from 69.8 years for men and 76.8 for women to 76.1 and 82.2 respectively, and although the number of hospitals has fallen from 392 to 254, they are far better equipped.
But the west’s longer established infrastructure still beckons: the population of the old East Germany has dropped from just under 17m to just over 14m, while that of the former West Germany has risen from 61.7m to 67.5m.
For those of us who lived in the East in the years before the Wall came down and were there to see it crumble, the emotion of the anniversary is still best summed up in the words spoken at the reunification ceremony in 1990 by Lothar de Maizière, East Germany’s last prime minister: “It is an hour of great joy, It is the end of some illusions. It is a farewell without tears.”
Inevitably, there is a new joke doing the rounds: East Berlin and West Berlin used to be fractious siamese twins, one dowdy, prudish and hypocritical, the other stylish, spendthrift and sluttish. Through the miracle of modern science they have been united, and what do you get? Angela Merkel.
Peter Millar’s book 1989 The Berlin Wall (My Part in Its Downfall) is published by Arcadia Books, £11.99.
History’s back from the dead, Bryan Appleyard, News Review, page 6
