By The River

We celebrate the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall this month. The following is a first-person account of those days by my old friend Sybille Brinz, who grew up in Thuringia, East Germany, and now teaches English as a second language at a college in Aberdeen, Scotland:

The very night of the fall I finished work around 9pm and went back to my room in a shared flat - in Potsdam, close to Berlin. I was working in a high-profile international hotel (about as posh as it got in the East) and had been exposed to a fair share of western customers. I could never help feeling jealous when I overheard conversations of recent visits to Paris or the USA for example, but having been only 19 at the time the feeling hadn't been too strong (yet).

There had been a tremendous build-up of tension over the preceding months with the opening of the border between Hungary and Austria and the opening of the West German embassy in Prague to East Germans. There was a mass exodus [to Hungary] from East Germany and it was about impossible to get onto the Dresden-Prague-Budapest trains. The border points were more and more secured, and people discovered to be travelling 'on holiday' with all their family and [carrying their] career certifications were put in investigative custody. A colleague couple of ours ended up in the Potsdam custody cells for a few weeks.

This had been accompanied by the Leipzig demonstrations of course - and all these and the subsequent events were only possible because [Soviet Union President Mikhail] Gorbachev did not follow the usual [Communist] party response of armed intervention.

I guess you are aware of the circumstances of the actual fall of the Wall that night - the last-minute news item that was handed to the news reader and which caused the confusion. That opening was never planned, of course.

Hence when I got back to my room and switched on the telly the news had just passed (I didn't see the clip till it was repeated on a West German channel). Since in Potsdam we were able to receive West German TV (illegally of course) I saw the events unfolding and first didn't believe it. I carried on as usual, having dinner, snuggling into bed, the TV still on, and it gradually sank in. I didn't have a telephone back then (most of us didn't have a landline and mobiles weren't around yet), so I didn't really know what to do.

I just sat there and wondered what on earth was going on. It did occur to me that I could try and go there, but I didn't have a car, either, so I'd have had to go to the nearest public phone, tried to call a friend etc and I decided against it. A) I was in disbelief and b) I was scared! Scared of the masses of people, scared of what might happen - nobody KNEW it would not end in a bloodshed, and scared that they might close the Wall again while I was over there in the west! And I would never ever have left my family, etc., to start a new life in the west even if it had been offered to me.

So I just sat there in disbelief, worried, confused, but certainly not happy or in any euphoric mood! It wasn't until the next day when I returned to work that the real buzz started for me. Some of my colleagues had been there [West Berlin] and the whole day at work was just a chaotic noise of people telling what they'd seen, what they'd heard, what they thought, rumours mixed with the real stories but of course, nobody knew what was going to happen.

What we did know was that the Wall was still open and it was still possible to cross over into West Berlin. Thus I managed to go into West Berlin the night of 10 November, packed into the Trabi of my colleague. It was still a most amazing feeling. The border crossing points were crowded, there were new street parties going on, West Berliners slapping the Trabants and Wartburgs [East German-made cars] as they rolled over the border, spraying them with sparkling wine, shouting fantastic slogans and greetings at us. The border points had re-established some sort of order and every person crossing the border had a stamp put into their passport. What the point of it was I never knew because no note of our passport number was taken, and there were no scanners, etc., there. Just a stamp put in. And you know, even then I worried that I could get in trouble later because of that stamp in case it got all reverted and went back to where we'd been!

Anyway, I was stunned at seeing West Berlin. Illuminated buildings, shop windows still brightly lit so you could see even at night what they were selling during the day (a crazy thought to me then!), and I was most struck by the oriental carpet shops. They looked so luxurious and were so so full of carpets - I couldn't believe that there were enough people in West Berlin to buy so many carpets - and there were about 5 of those shops in the few streets we wandered.When we crossed back to the East at about 3am there were still queues in from the East, of people who had travelled for hours to get a glimpse of the West.

In the weeks that came I travelled to West Berlin quite often, (to buy bananas, yes of course, which had gone up in price overnight to about 5-10x the normal price!!!), mostly to stare at the things for sale. We'd been given 100DM [Deutschmarks] welcome money each, which we were able to collect from banks in West Germany on production of our passport. I spent it on a sewing machine and a good sleeping bag. We were then able to exchange [East German] money at a pretty lousy rate. I enjoyed the variety of food; a different flavour yoghurt ever night in the week!, fruit I'd never seen and had to ask how to eat, and fantastic sweets! I also enjoyed the colours in stationery shops, pens and paper and paper clips and and and - it was hard for me to resist all those 'wonderful' things!

All in all I'm grateful to Gorbachev though he'd never intended the East to unravel as it did. And I'm grateful that the events happened when they did - my education was not thrown into chaos, as it was for so many younger people, and my pension wasn't reduced to a pittance as it was for the pensioners. Neither did I lose a job at an 'unemployable' age and neither was I tempted to take out huge loans to buy Western car, fridge, TV, etc., only to THEN lose my job - as happened to so so many people. Neither did I work in a company that went into liquidation in the hands of the highly corrupt Treuhand organisation that 'sold' East German companies to West Germans who promptly closed them, unravelled them and upon reopening them employed West Germans with the 'right' skills and qualifications.

Anyway, I'll stop here, I could go on and on, but I'm sure you know all the stories and have a pretty good picture of the events.