Sleepless night of happiness: 30 years ago the Berlin Wall fell

On November 9, Germany celebrates the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, which for 28 years divided the country's capital into two different states - the GDR (East Berlin) and the Federal Republic of Germany (West Berlin). This day is generally special in the history of Germany: on November 9, 1918, Germany ceased to be a monarchy, turning into a democratic republic. Five years later, the so-called Beer Hall Putsch, organized by Adolf Hitler, was suppressed in Munich, and on November 9, 1938, the Nazis staged pogroms against Jews, which went down in history as Kristallnacht.

On the evening of November 9, 1989, a member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED), Günter Schabowski, with one phrase and without knowing it, opened the borders of the GDR, answering a question from Italian journalist Riccardo Erman about new rules giving citizens of the GDR the right to enter capitalist countries for up to 30 years. days.

Schabowski leafed through his papers and read out the Politburo's decision that East German citizens would henceforth be allowed to apply for private trips abroad without valid reasons. When asked about the date on which the permit was valid, Schabowski hesitated and replied: “As far as I know, from now,” recalls DW .

That same evening, thousands of East Berliners rushed to the checkpoints. The GDR border guards were not prepared for such a rapid development of events. The authorities were completely confused and soon gave orders to open the barriers.

“The border guards, who had not seen the evening television broadcast, could not understand anything. No orders were received from above. The crowd insisted. After telephone conversations, the confused border authorities gave the command to raise the barrier at the Bornholmer Brücke checkpoint. The wall fell, ” Radio Liberty cites the memoirs cameraman Yuri Veksler. According to legend, the Soviet ambassador to East Berlin, Vyacheslav Kochemasov, simply slept through all the events.

For most Berliners it was a sleepless night of happiness. The people rejoiced. the streets were jammed with cars. Everyone was heading towards West Berlin. Every citizen of the GDR, arriving in West Germany or West Berlin, automatically received one hundred marks ($55 at the then exchange rate) as a gift. They returned home late in the evening with gifts and penny purchases, historian Leonid Mlechin writes on the pages of Novaya Gazeta .

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, more than 400 thousand East Germans moved to the West. It was a real escape from the socialist system. On August 31, 1990, the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic signed an agreement on the construction of German unity. On October 3, the eastern lands already became part of the Federal Republic of Germany. The German Democratic Republic ceased to exist.

In the GDR, the Berlin Wall, erected in 1961, was called the “anti-fascist defensive rampart”; in the Federal Republic of Germany, it was called the “wall of shame.” To get to the other side of the border, residents of East Berlin used sometimes unimaginable routes: from tunnels to hot air balloons and homemade airplanes. Border police shot without warning at those trying to leave the GDR.

According to the director of the Berlin Wall Museum, Alexandra Hildebrandt, 1,902 people died during the existence of the artificial border. “This is very clear. We work and search. And we find, unfortunately. But we assume that there is a little more,” Hildebrandt said in an interview

After its destruction, approximately 40,000 blocks of the Berlin Wall were used for various construction projects in Germany, many were sold or donated to other cities. In Moscow, a fragment of the Berlin Wall was installed near the Sakharov Center, reminds RBC .

Fragments of the wall are also sold in souvenir shops in Berlin. One of the most famous sellers is West Berlin native Volker Pawlowski. Many people sold pieces of fencing, but Pawlowski found a way to stand out from the competition: he was the first to package them, writes Forbes . The businessman received most of the rubble in 1991 thanks to a friend who owned a construction company and signed a contract to remove fragments of the wall. The reserves will last for another 7-10 years.

The BBC Russian service in its project “The Wall. Five Stories” talks about several people whose lives were connected with the Berlin Wall. One of the heroes of the material, 81-year-old doctor Burkhart Weigl, as a student in 1961, helped residents of East Berlin flee to the west.

Weigl and his like-minded people collected passports from residents of the Federal Republic of Germany who were willing to give them up, and pasted in photographs of GDR residents who wanted to flee. After the Stasi secret police tightened their searches of German residents, Weigl and his associates went to Austria and Scandinavia to get passports, which helped dozens more residents of East Berlin escape.

As control tightened, Weigl and other activists staged escapes through tunnels, taking people out in a hiding place under the hood of a seven-meter Cadillac the size of an ocean liner.

Meduza, in its material on the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, draws attention to the fact that British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and French President Francois Mitterrand were most wary of this event. Thatcher believed that the "national character" of the Germans and their position in the heart of the continent would once again make them a destabilizing force.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, at a memorial ceremony at the memorial on Bernauerstrasse, where a section of the Berlin Wall remains, called the day of its fall fateful for German history. “November 9th reflects in a special way both terrible and happy moments of our history, teaching us the need to resolutely confront hatred, racism and anti-Semitism,” Merkel said. “This day calls on us to do everything to protect freedom and democracy, human dignity and legal statehood,” she added (quotes from TASS).

In an interview with the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper, Merkel expressed the opinion that to achieve true unity between the western and eastern states of Germany, more time is needed than initially expected: about half a century or even more.

The German Chancellor called on her compatriots to be patient. “Freedom is associated with the effort required to make any decisions, and this must be learned,” she noted. "You have to be able to take care of a lot of things, and no one is born with this. Life in the GDR was almost comfortable in some ways at times, because certain things simply could not be influenced," Merkel added.