When the Wall Came Down

Chapter One A Knock on the Door November 9, 1989. A chilly evening in West Berlin. I was in my hotel room, writing furiously on my laptop. The stories were breaking fast. The Communist government in East Germany was in crisis. All through the autumn, East Germans had been fleeing their country in droves through Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Even greater numbers had been holding regular marches in East German cities, demanding reform. The government's authority was crumbling. Every day there were new changes, new announcements, new surprises. I had just returned from a press conference in East Berlin, at which the Communist leaders had announced new travel regulations for East Germans who wanted to visit the West. That was big news: up to then, the majority of East Germans, like most Eastern Europeans, had been prevented from leaving the East. It was a good story, probably page one, so when somebody knocked on the door around midnight, I was annoyed. It was my assistant from East Berlin, Victor Homola. "I'm busy, Victor," I barked. "Grab something from the minibar and wait." "But, Sergehellip;" "Not now! Not nowhellip;" Then it struck me: Victor? He was an East German! He wasn't allowed to cross into the West; he'd never even been to the West. "Victor! What on earth are you doing here?" "That's what I'm trying to tell you, Serge! The wall is down!" That began one of the most exciting stories I've covered as a foreign correspondent: the fall of the Berlin Wall. For many, the event has come to represent the end of forty years in which Eastern Europe was held captive by the Soviet Union. But it was not only a political story. It was also an intensely human story, about people rising up to break down a wall that had kept them brutally apart-a wall that had divided Germany, and all of Europe, into a free and democratic West and an East that lived under dictatorship. It was about people choosing freedom. I grabbed my West German assistant, Tom Seibert, and with Victor we jumped into a taxi. The streets near the Berlin Wall were quickly filling with celebrating Germans, and the police were trying to divert traffic. The taxi driver, a big woman with a bigger voice, was yelling out the window, "Ich habe hier drei Pressefritzen!"- "I have three press guys here!"-and the police waved us through. We drove right up to the most important stretch of the wall-the spot where it passed by the Brandenburg Gate, once the very center of Berlin. The Berlin Wall was a frightening sight, a twelve-foot-high concrete barrier that divided one of the major cities of Europe right in half. It did more than that-since West Berlin was deep inside East Germany, the wall actually ran all around it, creating a large urban island of the free, democratic, and brightly lit West right inside the tightly controlled Communist-ruled East. The worlds inside and outside the wall were completely different-within its wall, West Berlin looked like any large Western city. Shiny Mercedes and BMW sedans cruised the neon-lit Kudamm-the grand Kurfurstendamm boulevard; store windows displayed the latest in fashions; restaurants and nightclubs were open late into the night. West Berlin had theaters, museums, a university, skyscrapers, two airports, a lake, rivers, canals, parks, even a zoo. West Berliners could easily go to West Germany, or anywhere else in Western Europe, so they felt free and secure inside their walled-in island. On the East German side of the wall, large blocks of anonymousSchmemann, Serge is the author of 'When the Wall Came Down ', published 2007 under ISBN 9780753461532 and ISBN 0753461536.