The Fall of the Berlin Wall

November 9, 1989

What did I know about the Berlin Wall during my Soviet childhood? Nothing, or almost nothing. In August 1961, the East German authorities (the GDR, as we knew them) slammed shut the door to West Berlin, hurriedly stringing barbed wire and then erecting a gloomy concrete barrier that stretched more than 100 kilometers and extended almost six meters high. I was too little at the time to remember any of this.

And later, as far as I can remember, nothing was ever said about any of this. The wall was not mentioned in textbooks, which simply informed us about a very "democratic" German Democratic Republic and a "reactionary" and "revanchist" Federal Republic of Germany. There was certainly no mention of any wall on radio or television, and nobody wrote about it in the newspaper. For the Soviet people, it simply did not exist. And when you get right down to it, why should people used to living behind the iron curtain get upset about a concrete wall? But there was something puzzling here.

I lived in a home where every evening we listened to the "voices of the enemy." We, like most Soviet households, had a VEF transistor radio that resourceful friends had adapted for us to receive shortwave frequencies, using contraband components. My grandfather took up his listening post around five every afternoon, starting with the Voice of Israel and moving on to Deutsche Welle, the BBC, and Voice of America. He was a bit deaf so, despite my grandmother's anxious admonitions, he turned up the volume full blast. Every evening a variety of western news programs resounded through our apartment.

In Moscow it was hard to pick up Radio Liberty, but where our dacha was, the jamming was not as effective for some reason. Furthermore, I had a cousin who knew his physics and had strung a wire up to the closest pine tree to serve as an auxiliary antenna. In the evening, the whole family would gather around the radio to find out what was happening in the free world.

The free world did not talk much about the wall either. The "voices" broadcast speeches by human rights activists, news of the latest arrests or protests, and readings of banned books, but there was almost no mention of divided Berlin. You got the feeling that, in the late 1960s and 1970s, the wall was somehow perceived as a disagreeable but unalterable fact. What would be the point of talking about it?

I never managed to see the Berlin Wall when it was serving its original purpose. Two attempts to go abroad – to Bulgaria when I was still a schoolgirl, and to Poland when I was a university student – were ultimately unsuccessful. I do remember what my father had to say about it (he had been to the GDR on a tour and had gotten as close as he could while wandering the area around the Brandenburg Gates) – just that it was gloomy and unpleasant. That was about it.

Here we were, not thinking about the wall, while dozens or even hundreds of Germans were desperately trying to get across it, starting with the 19-year-old border guard who jumped over some partially completed barriers that he was supposed to be guarding and ending with the unfortunate Chris Gueffroy, who was shot by an East German border guard on February 6, 1989, just nine months before the concrete barrier came down.

When I finally got to Berlin in the 1990s, I visited the wall museum and was amazed by the energy, imagination, and effort the East Germans put into reaching the free world – a long underground tunnel, a specially designed car small enough to make it under the checkpoint boom barrier, cables going from one side of the wall to the other, and much more. No other socialist country had such enthusiastic defectors, and it is not hard to understand why, what with the free world so tantalizingly close. You could flee communism without losing either your native land or language.

It's hard to say what life would have been like in Moscow if a few blocks from home a whole different world had teemed. Maybe we also would have been willing to dodge the bullets of border guards. But in Moscow there was nothing of the sort. Just to visit our socialist brothers, to say nothing of the West, we had to fill out demeaning questionnaires, endure interviews where we were asked if we wanted to go abroad because we had already seen everything there was to see in the USSR, and had to demonstrate our knowledge of the Communist Party leadership in the country we had the audacity to want to visit. The free world remained a distant abstraction. You could not see it through the window the same way you could from Alexanderplatz.

In London during those same 1990s, I met a man from Russia who had gone to the GDR on a tour in 1956 and left for West Berlin on the metro (back when there was no wall and the trains went from one part of the city to the other). At the time, he was a young graduate student and, when he defected, he left behind his parents and a settled life in order to live in the free world. The only thing this fugitive managed to take with him when he walked out of his hotel in East Berlin was a little volume of Pushkin's poetry, which seemed suspicious to the Americans who interrogated him in the West. He had to spend a long time trying to convince them that the book was a memento of Russia and not a way to smuggle out a code for deciphering secret messages.

Before I and countless others were able to get to Berlin, or London, or many other wondrous places, the wall had to come down. And I'm ashamed to say that this is an event that for me (and, I suspect, most of my compatriots) passed almost unnoticed.

This is not to say that I missed it entirely. I clearly remember the November evening in 1989 when the evening news showed crowds of people on the streets of Berlin who, having heard that travel restrictions to the Federal Republic of Germany were being eased, walked, ran, bounded to the wall, flitting through checkpoints, and clambered on top of it, covering it with graffiti, and trying to break it down with hammers, sticks, or their bare hands. As I now know, on the other side of the wall, half the world was converging on Berlin. Later I met many people who proudly talked about what they saw there, how they pounded the wall and helped break it to pieces.

But here is what strikes me as strange. In 1989, the fall of the wall did not make any particular impression on me. I was not able to take part in its shattering. Like 99% of Soviet citizens, in 1989 I still had no international passport. And, to tell the truth, at the time I was much more concerned about what was going to happen at the next Congress of People's Deputies in Moscow and how Gorbachev would handle the mutiny of the Soviet Union's many republics that were talking about seceding. In short, the fate of Estonia or Georgia was of far greater concern to me at the moment than some wall I had only a hazy notion about and that was already being covered in graffiti by artists from all over the world. The distant free world was still about as real to me as Mars. Interesting, but obviously I was never going to see it.

A half year later, during the spring of 1990, I first found myself on foreign soil. No one in our group had ever been abroad before, and when we crossed the Soviet-Hungarian border at Chop we all let out a cheer. By the time we got to Italy, we had convinced ourselves that even the air was completely different beyond the iron curtain. Nobody thought about the wall, but you could say that our train had passed through the same hole that the East Germans had broken through in November 1989. We just didn't realize it.

Actually, the guardians of the wall quickly understood that their days were numbered – and not just in Berlin. I heard stories about aged KGB veterans enjoying a cushy retirement who suddenly died the evening of November 9, succumbing to heart attacks or strokes in front of their televisions.

The wall was a lot more than concrete. No wonder so many artists were eager to leave their mark on it.