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I Didn't Go Over the Berlin Wall
Jun. 30th, 2006 10:48 amI like to tell the story about how I was one of the last people to be refused entry into East Berlin.
It was October 7, 1989, not quite a month before the Wall actually came down. October 7 is East Germany's "Foundation Day", the commemoration of the date of the founding of the country in 1949. National holiday, with big parades and so forth in Berlin.
My friends and I took the elevated train from West Berlin - you get on in the West and travel non-stop to Friedrichstrasse, a station about half a mile inside East Berlin, and go through the border there. We got out and the station platform was full of border guards, many more than the time I had gone over the year before - there were even police dogs. A big beefy guard and two others came up to us - he shoved out his hand and demanded:
"Passport!"
We handed them over. He looked at them.
"Amerikaner?"
"Ja, sie sind Amerikaner, ich bin Kanadisch." (I, the Canadian, was the only one who spoke German.)
He snapped them shut and poked them back at me.
"Keine Einreise!" (No entry!)
No point in arguing, so we stuck around for 15 minutes until the train went back to the West.
We found out later that no one was being allowed in from the West on that day, because Gorbachev (who was then the poster child for freedom and reform throughout the Warsaw Pact) was in town for the holiday, and big anti-government demonstrations were expected. This was reinforced by what had happened a few days before in Leipzig: the city police had refused to put down anti-government demonstrations, so factory militia had to be trucked in from outside the city to break them up. This was the first visible breakdown in the authority of the East German government.
As it turned out, the East Berliners had a nice holiday with no riots, I'm sure Gorbachev enjoyed himself, and we went to the open-air flea market.
A few days later, I left Berlin. And a few days after that, people began to travel through the Wall without hindrance. I had missed the Freight Train of History by a couple of weeks.
The End.
It was October 7, 1989, not quite a month before the Wall actually came down. October 7 is East Germany's "Foundation Day", the commemoration of the date of the founding of the country in 1949. National holiday, with big parades and so forth in Berlin.
My friends and I took the elevated train from West Berlin - you get on in the West and travel non-stop to Friedrichstrasse, a station about half a mile inside East Berlin, and go through the border there. We got out and the station platform was full of border guards, many more than the time I had gone over the year before - there were even police dogs. A big beefy guard and two others came up to us - he shoved out his hand and demanded:
"Passport!"
We handed them over. He looked at them.
"Amerikaner?"
"Ja, sie sind Amerikaner, ich bin Kanadisch." (I, the Canadian, was the only one who spoke German.)
He snapped them shut and poked them back at me.
"Keine Einreise!" (No entry!)
No point in arguing, so we stuck around for 15 minutes until the train went back to the West.
We found out later that no one was being allowed in from the West on that day, because Gorbachev (who was then the poster child for freedom and reform throughout the Warsaw Pact) was in town for the holiday, and big anti-government demonstrations were expected. This was reinforced by what had happened a few days before in Leipzig: the city police had refused to put down anti-government demonstrations, so factory militia had to be trucked in from outside the city to break them up. This was the first visible breakdown in the authority of the East German government.
As it turned out, the East Berliners had a nice holiday with no riots, I'm sure Gorbachev enjoyed himself, and we went to the open-air flea market.
A few days later, I left Berlin. And a few days after that, people began to travel through the Wall without hindrance. I had missed the Freight Train of History by a couple of weeks.
The End.
