Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and end to Germany's Iron Curtain, David Molyneaux returns for the celebrations. This is his fourth blog.
In late October 1989, when there were two Germanies, The Plain Dealer of Cleveland, Ohio, sent me to West Germany to write articles for the Travel Section. Dour East Germany, behind the Soviet Iron Curtain, was not much of a vacation destination.
During the first week of November 1989, I wrote that some residents along the Iron Curtain believed that the border fences, in place for more than than 40 years, would fall by Christmas.
Molyneaux in Berlin, November 1989
Folks I interviewed said citizens on both sides were ready to cross the border, and they believed that security personnel would not stop them. Before my story was published in Cleveland, German wishes came true.
On Nov. 9, Berliners scaled the hated wall. On Nov. 10, Germans on both sides of the Iron Curtain demanded that highway gates be opened and began tearing down border fences where country roads once met. Not a single border guard fired a shot.
On Saturday, Nov. 11, I joined thousands of Germans who streamed through new holes in the fences to find neighbors and villages they had not visited in decades.
Near Bad Harzburg, on the western side of the border in north central Germany, hundreds of West Germans formed a welcoming chute, like cheerleaders at a college football game ushering the home team onto the field.
As East Germans crossed into West Germany, West Germans waived and cheered, laughed and cried.
Building a bridge, marching triumphantly
During the night, workmen in hard hats cleared trees and widened the path on both sides of the border. A stream flowed along the fence, and volunteers placed wood planks across the water for walkers. Early on Sunday a West German crane arrived and a truck with pre-cast concrete.
By late morning a bridge could carry cars between West Germany and East Germany at Bad Harzburg for the first time in decades. Some East Germans drove their little Trabis, smoke belching from their two-cylinder engines, but others ditched their cars off the road and marched across triumphantly.
A West German woman met each car with bananas and oranges, two items seldom found in East Germany.
By 11:30 Sunday morning, the line of cars on the four-lane road leading into Bad Harzburg from the west was stalled 3 miles from the border.
The crossing was abuzz with East Germans flowing west, West Germans headed east — walkers of all ages, often groups of several generations in a holiday spirit. Police stood on either side of the new bridge and waved travelers on. I peeked inside dozens of East German cars as they crawled across the bridge. Seldom did I see a suitcase.
For most East Germans, this was not an escape; it was a delicious Sunday drive into a strange foreign country that housed their own countrymen.
Pollution and empty restaurants
I trudged east, over the border into East Germany. No one asked for a passport. Several of us — including my son Miles, then 16, from Ohio's Shaker Heights High School, an exchange student in Goslar, Germany — walked for more than an hour until we encountered a bus stop, where we hailed a country bus driver who was willing to accept my West German marks as payment for a ride.
The old East German bus spit balloons of diesel fumes.
The ride was like a time machine, taking us backward several decades to a post-war land of shabby buildings and dour inhabitants.
Twenty years ago, rural East Germany looked as if someone had turned off the color television set and fired up an old black and white model. Farms and houses were gray, covered with soot from coal used as heating fuel. In many villages, shop windows were empty.
Everywhere we went, pollutants hung over us like a cloud, obscuring the sun.
Hungry for lunch, I entered an empty restaurant where each table held a "Reserved" sign. I was told later that the restaurant put up the signs because it had no food to sell and didn't want to admit it.
Eastern Germany churns to catch up
Twenty years later, color is as plentiful in eastern Germany as in the West. House painters put the grays away. Shops and restaurants are full.
Except for some remaining Soviet-style drab apartment buildings, you wouldn't know west from east, externally, though eastern Germany's economy still lags far behind the west's.
Next: Talking with Eastern Germans whose lives were lies
Information on Planning a trip to Germany
Also from Berlin: Coffee at Brandenburg Gate
To read the entire series:
Back in Berlin again, 20 years after the fall of the wall
Poking about pieces of the old Berlin Wall
Guns, dogs, and fear along the old Iron Curtain
When East met West on peaceful soil in 1989
Lies and dreams east of the old Iron Curtain
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