‘Everyone started running... So did I’

Berlin: “Suddenly they opened the gate!” recalled Berliner Andreas Falge, one of the first to cross the East German border into the West on November 9, 1989. Still in wonder 30 years after the epochal event, Falge told AFP: “Everyone started running! And so did I.” A smile on his face, the 61-year-old is back on Berlin’s Bornholmer Strasse, once a sealed border point in the long-impenetrable Iron Curtain, recalling that “incredible night”. When the Berlin Wall cracked open here after 28 years, Falge was part of the roaring, jubilant crowd of East Berliners who were first to head west. The masses were shouting “Open the gate! Open the gate!” said Falge, a technician at East Berlin’s storied Babylon cinema at the time.

The roadblocks of the Cold War era have long since disappeared, and a discount supermarket and train station now dominate the nearby square, renamed November 9, 1989 Square.

GUARDS DIDN’T KNOW

The news was the announcement, made by a confused Communist state official at a press conference, that East Germans would be allowed to travel to the west “immediately”. That bumbling

performance was broadcast on West German TV, which many easterners watched clandestinely, and it kicked off a human avalanche. Falge said he stared at the TV, then jumped up, pulled on his leather jacket

and grabbed 100 West German Deutschmarks and a map of West Berlin.

BRIGHT SHINING LIGHTS

All were stunned when the guards finally relented

around 11:30 pm, allowing pedestrians and honking Trabant cars. Being one of the first to cross, Falge was afraid he would not be able to come back in and so he followed regular procedures by going to the guards for his passport to be stamped. Eventually, the flow of people became so large that they stopped checking papers altogether. “I went there, right across the street, you know?” said Falge, pointing at the western Wedding district. Soon he saw police officers whose uniforms were a “weird brown and spinach green. That’s when I realised: I’m in the goddamn West!”

SLEEPLESS NIGHT

Although he’d never considered fleeing the GDR, cinema and music fan Falge had a few friends in West Berlin, and now was the time for a surprise visit. He telephoned one of them, Wolfgang, who had in the past been able to visit him in the East. “He tells me he’s happy I’m calling him. I told him: ‘stop talking and come and pick me up instead’.” After a silence, Wolfgang said: “Pick you up? But where are you?” When Falge explained he was in Wedding, his friend couldn’t believe it. “Well, yes, they just opened the Wall,” he said. “And then I hear on the other end of the line: ‘Holy crap’.” He ended up taking a taxi to Wolfgang’s and on the way he remembered thinking the West did not look so different to his side of the city — except for the “neon-lit shops” and their eye-watering prices.

The next day, he went back to work in East Berlin, but the cinema was almost empty. “So we closed the Babylon,” he smiles.

— AFP