Take a Random Walk Around the Berlin Wall Just Months Before Its Sudden Fall (Summer 1989)

Offi­cial­ly, the Berlin Wall fell on Novem­ber 9, 1989. Demo­li­tion would take more than four years, and a few sec­tions remain for memo­r­i­al pur­pos­es, but it was on that date that pas­sage between East and West Berlin — and thus East and West Ger­many — opened to all cit­i­zens of both coun­tries. To say that it came as a sur­prise would be a seri­ous under­state­ment. Ear­li­er that year, even the best informed observers were pre­dict­ing that the wall would stand for at least a few more decades. Ear­li­er that day, for that mat­ter, the offi­cials involved in the open­ing did­n’t fore­see that Social­ist Uni­ty Par­ty of Ger­many Sec­re­tary of Infor­ma­tion Gün­ter Sch­abows­ki would, that evening, mis­tak­en­ly declare on nation­al tele­vi­sion that the lib­er­al­iza­tion of bor­der trav­el was effec­tive “imme­di­ate­ly, with­out delay.”

When the bor­der guards final­ly gave up their attempts to hold the line around 11:00 that night, the sur­round­ing scene in both Berlins had turned into what atten­dees now remem­ber, 36 years lat­er, as the biggest street fes­ti­val of their lives. To those of us unable to join in the cel­e­bra­tion at the time, it may seem unlike­ly that such an event could real­ly have occurred with no inti­ma­tions what­so­ev­er.

Yet the footage shot by a trav­el­er in Berlin dur­ing the sum­mer of 1989, right there in the vicin­i­ty of the wall, depicts a city where events seem to be frozen. Though the built envi­ron­ment isn’t with­out touch­es of fad­ed grandeur here and there (and as many West Berlin­ers were soon to dis­cov­er, the real urban state­li­ness was over East), the over­all impres­sion giv­en by what was then the red hot cen­ter of Cold War geopol­i­tics is that of a dullsville.

The most out­ward­ly inter­est­ing fea­ture in these parts of Berlin at the very end of the nine­teen-eight­ies is, of course, the wall itself: the brutish­ness of its form, the hum­drum men­ace of its guards, the accu­mu­la­tion of graf­fi­ti both polit­i­cal and apo­lit­i­cal. At one point, the tourist’s cam­corder cap­tures the memo­ri­als for fall­en wall jumpers, the most recent of which, a cer­tain Chris Guef­froy, had made his fate­ful escape attempt from the East that past Feb­ru­ary. His­to­ry would soon immor­tal­ize him as the last per­son to be shot try­ing to get over the wall, though not the last to die doing so. That title belongs to Win­fried Freuden­berg, who in March of 1989 fell from a bal­loon he’d rigged up to fly across the bor­der. At this point, when the rapid urban evo­lu­tion of the reuni­fied Ger­man cap­i­tal has long since made it one of the most pop­u­lar cities in Europe, nei­ther she nor Guef­froy would rec­og­nize the for­mer East Berlin they were des­per­ate to escape — nor, for that mat­ter, the West Berlin of which they dreamed.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How the Berlin Wall Worked: The Engi­neer­ing & Struc­tur­al Design of the Wall That For­mi­da­bly Divid­ed East & West

See Berlin Before and After World War II in Star­tling Col­or Video

The Gold­en Age of Berlin Comes to Life in the Clas­sic, Avant-Garde Film, Berlin: Sym­pho­ny of a Metrop­o­lis (1927)

The Dos & Don’ts of Dri­ving to West Berlin Dur­ing the Cold War: A Weird Piece of Ephemera from the 1980s

Bruce Spring­steen Plays East Berlin in 1988: I’m Not Here For Any Gov­ern­ment. I’ve Come to Play Rock

Watch Samuel Beck­ett Walk the Streets of Berlin Like a Boss, 1969

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.