I had stuff to do in Hamburg, and we left our daughters with the neighboring families of playmates of theirs. We arrived at our hotel and turned on the TV news. There was the press conference in East Berlin, and Scharbowski was reading from his prepared text. Stalinist party boss Erich Honecker had already been replaced by Egon Krenz, who was rapidly realizing he was going to be a brief placeholder in German history. Gorbachev had already told the East Germans he would not participate in the inevitable bloodbath that would ensue of they didn't relax the border, which was tantamount to a death sentence for the East German regime. In the chaos that was the norm in the crumbling East German regime, measures were announced with little time to set them up. So, at the fateful press conference on November ninth, Günter Scharbowski announced before the rolling cameras that East Germans would no longer be prevented from crossing into West Berlin. Their own border guards weren't even informed, so that at the wall, soldiers with order to shoot down any one trying to cross into the west were in total panic when tens of thousands of their own people showed up. They didn't have enough soldiers, guns or bullets to kill everyone. Their commanding officers wisely figured out that something must have happened about which they hadn't yet been told, ordered their men to stand down, and opened the barriers.
The next morning, Hamburg was flooded with East Germans, and we saw them gawking in wonder at, to them, was a fantasy world of opulence and plenty. There were panhandlers on the streets, too, which must have confused the hell out of them, as western propaganda never mentioned that (Eastern propaganda ALWAYS mentioned that, so they figured it must be a lie).
I periodically have work in Berlin, and for the next 15 years. The eastern part of the city became a massive construction site, deep holes in the ground, new buildings going up to replace the decrepit buildings and housing that existed under the socialist regime. A changed world from the dark, unsmiling world before the wall fell, East Berlin is now a lively clog of cafés, shops, communities, and things to do. Under the socialists, it was illegal for more than four people to sit together in a café (ideas might get spread, you know).
The big sobering was not long in coming. Millions of people were lost in trying to adapt. One East German couple, staying at a hotel in the west for the first time, asked when breakfast was. They were told "from 7 to 10 in the morning." They then said, "OK, but when is OUR breakfast?" Not understanding why they didn't get it, they were again told from 7 to 10. In East Germany, people were given a specific hour in which they were to take their breakfast. The notion that they were free to choose was so alien to them, they didn't even grasp the concept. The Western hotel employee never heard of hotels ordering their guests when to take their breakfast, so he didn't understand why they kept asking. Thousands of misunderstandings like this had to be overcome. They spoke the same language, and didn't at first realize that they were nonetheless foreigners.
The East German regime kept up the myth that in their socialist paradise, there were no Nazis left, therefore they had no need to combat extreme rightist tendencies. The west, under the watch of France, Britain and the USA confronted the Nazi past directly, and spent decades trying to repress a resurgence. The East made no such effort, falsely claiming there was no need. So as soon as their regime crumbled, extremist rightist tendencies that had been lurking beneath the surface broke out with a vengeance, and the far right has a bigger concentration of supporters in the east than anywhere else.
But all that was for later. The night of November 9th, 1989 was one for gaping at the TV (did you hear what I think I just heard?) and watching East Berliners and West Berliners sitting together on top of the wall, smiling, and just saying, "hi!"
Before the wall fell, I had the "honor" of being the subject of "random" interrogations in East Berlin on my way back to West Berlin. I was the only one in the room without an East German uniform, a gun, or the right to stand up without permission. They were sobering experiences.
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