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No sooner had Schabowski ended his press conference than East Berliners began streaming to the Wall. Guards at the various crossings suddenly found themselves besieged with demands that they throw open the gates: after all, the authorities had officially pronounced the border open. The guards, who knew nothing of the new order, naturally kept the barriers down. Exasperated, people began chanting “Open the Gate! The Wall must go!” Finally, at a little after 8:00 P.M., the command came to allow people to pass through the Wall. The gate at Bornholmer Strasse was the first to swing open, followed by those at Sonnenallee and Invali-denstrasse. Thousands surged through, some in their nightshirts. Many carried large plastic bags, as if off on a shopping spree. When the automobile-crossing at Checkpoint Charlie opened, a long line of Trabis rumbled West, honking and belching smoke. What those enthusiastic travelers did not realize was that the stamp they received on their documents that night meant that they had been ausgebürgert (denaturalized); had not subsequent developments been so dramatic, GDR citizens intending only to visit West Berlin (the majority of this group) might not have been allowed to return home.

On the other side of the Wall thousands of West Berliners were waiting, their arms laden with flowers, bottles of champagne, and toys for the kids. They greeted the easterners with hugs, kisses, and whacks on the back. They drummed on the roofs of the Trabis and thrust bottles of beer in the windows. When a bus advertising “Gorbachev Vodka” came in view, a huge cheer went up. Asked by reporters what they thought about this turn of events, virtually everyone shouted “Wahnsinn (crazy).” This was an understandable reaction, but, as Peter Schneider has noted, what was really crazy about this situation was not the opportunity to walk from one part of the city to another, but the impossibility of doing that simple thing for the past twenty-eight years.

The party next to the Wall soon turned into a party on the Wall, as hundreds of people scaled the barrier at the Brandenburg Gate and began dancing on the top. This was no mean feat, considering the narrowness of the space and the dancers’ rather less than sober condition. Some folks celebrated by chipping away at the Wall with hammers, a gesture that would soon evolve into the lucrative business of selling “Pieces of the Wall” (or of any old cement structure that happened to be handy) to tourists. On that heady evening few revelers were inclined to ask themselves how the world’s most formidable political barrier could have been transformed, in a matter of hours, into the world’s most exuberant dance stage. We now know that the GDR regime had actually been thinking about bringing down the Wall earlier as a way of staying afloat economically. In light of the GDR’s dire financial condition, a planning committee had proposed on October 24, 1989, to open the Berlin border in exchange for credits from Bonn. Krenz ultimately vetoed this idea, but the fact that it was seriously mooted points up the desperate straits of the regime. When we realize that the Berlin Wall had almost gone up for sale in the weeks prior to its fall, the events of November 9 seem a little more explicable, as does the fate of the GDR in the wake of Wall’s demise.

Reunification

Just as the construction of the Berlin Wall in August 1961 had thrust the erstwhile German capital to the center of the world stage, so the Wall’s fall in November 1989 focused all eyes on the divided city. Western news agencies rushed their top reporters to the Spree metropolis so that they might report “live from the Brandenburg Gate” on the collapse of the most important symbol of the Cold War. With the press rushing in, the politicians could not be far behind. West Berlin’s mayor Walter Momper hastily organized a fete at the John-F.-Kennedy-Platz on November 10. The West Berlin CDU scheduled a rival ceremony for that same evening at the Gedächtniskirche. An infamous symbol of political division might be coming down, but the spirit of partisanship in West Berlin was alive and well.