"It would've been impossible to imagine not having the radio on all the time over that period. I was forever waiting for news updates, listening to interviews and commentaries coming out of the speakers. And even at work, that was pretty much all my colleagues ever talked about during the breaks: the fall of the Wall. The bulwark between East and West, the Iron Curtain – on the one side built as a protective barrier, on the other outlawed as a wall against mankind. This thing had lost its threat and it looked as if it'd be just a matter of time before the whole thing would fall. The thought of it provoked an agreeable, feverish feeling in me.
That evening my wife and I wanted to go with the children to the Wall near the Brandenburg Gate. Ordinarily, we would've gone by bike (each with a son strapped into a bike seat), but for some reason, we had a premonition and decided to go on foot instead. Two blocks later, on the Nollendorfplatz, we saw that we'd been right to leave them behind: hundreds of people had decided to do the same thing as us and were walking in large groups on the pavements and in the streets towards the Tiergarten – and the crowd continued to swell with more people pouring out from the side streets.
We could hear snippets of conversation all around us; people were fooling around and laughing. Everyone seemed to be affected by a pleasant tingling sensation. Even our sons were well behaved, holding our hands as they walked alongside us (without their usual whining), taking everything in. We took a shortcut and, together with many others, cut diagonally across the leafy Tiergarten to the Straße des 17. Juni which ended at the Wall in front of the Brandenburg Gate. From a distance, we could see a second wall of people – there's no way we would ever have been able to get just the one bicycle through the gaps between them. And further on, in front of the Wall, we could see car roofs adorned with loudspeakers. The booming pop music drowned out the thousands and thousands of voices. There were cars with radio dishes, antennas, cameras and platforms, and others with dozens of floodlights that cast a glaring white light over everything. Amidst the hustle, in front of the curving Wall, we lifted our children up onto our shoulders and pushed our way through the crowds.
The top of the Wall was jam packed with people. They were pointing down, smoking, laughing, and nudging one another joyfully while we looked up at them with envy. Every couple of metres people tried to get themselves pulled up and if they couldn't make it up, they'd fall back into the crowd like windfall. To the left of us, leaning against the Wall, I spotted a rather off-putting waist-height ladder. I pushed and shoved my way over to it and managed to go up it. When we got up on the Wall, we were so close together that it was like being in the underground during evening rush hour when the two previous trains have been cancelled. To my surprise, the Wall was a good two metres wide and the throng formidable. I was even able to heave our eldest son up the 'chicken ladder'. And now it was our turn to look out over the crowds of people who were in the glaring light and assaulted by blaring music.
But what was behind the Wall? Darkness. About a hundred metres away I saw the mighty outlines of the Brandenburg Gate. And when my eyes had adjusted to the darkness, I could make out the People's Police Officers in their dark green uniforms. Like wax figures, they stood motionless, two arms' length apart along the Wall. They appeared to be watching us. What a contrast.
And then I suddenly remembered what I had predicted to my sons not too long before: 'I won't live to see the fall of the Wall. You for sure will – but you'll probably already be 50 by then.'"
Hartmut Kieselbach
(17 rankings) 
