I saw the Wall come tumbling down

By Chris Heard
BBC News, England desk

Chaos and confusion reigned in the early hours of the announcement

It was late into the night on 9 November 1989 when from the corner of my eye I caught a Ceefax headline on the TV.

I was sitting in a West Berlin apartment playing Trivial Pursuit with some British friends when I saw the news that travel restrictions had been eased for East German citizens.

We were just a few kilometres from the border, yet blissfully unaware of the momentous events unfolding nearby.

While Brian Hanrahan was busy broadcasting to the world, I was halfway through a board game, drinking Berliner Kindl lager in a nondescript third-floor flat in Theodor Heuss Platz.

I had been relaxing with friends who were working as civilians for the British army. The BBC was available via forces television, and its trusty breaking news service starkly announced this sensational moment in world history.

Something extraordinary

It had been brewing for weeks, all rumour and whispers under the radar, but here finally was the official confirmation.

Confusion and suspicion greeted the first reports, but it soon became clear that something extraordinary was happening.

Early in the morning we raced outside and jumped on the underground train, at the site of West Berlin's eternal flame commemorating the defeat of Nazism, to make our way towards the Wall.

All around, groups of people hugged - some with loved ones, some with strangers - as the horns of the emerging Trabant cars sounded

Normally this was a 20-minute jaunt, but the news was spreading quickly and our efforts to get there were hampered by the sheer numbers of excited Berliners who had clambered onto Tube platforms or climbed into their cars.

Eventually, after more than an hour, we made our way through the thronging crowds and edged towards Checkpoint Charlie. There was chaos and confusion as several hundred people milled around the border crossing amid uniformed guards and West BerlinPolizei.

Then the amazing truth dawned on me: The barrier at this heavily fortified checkpoint had been raised, and East Berliners were simply walking through - streaming through - in their hundreds; smiling, cheering, waving and laughing as the air crackled with the shocking electricity of the moment.

Pick axes

I saw a stunned-looking teenage girl walk across from the East, holding her hand to her mouth as she sobbed, unable to contain her raw emotion. All around her groups of people hugged - some with loved ones, some with strangers - as the horns of the emerging Trabant cars sounded, the air thick with the smell of their two-stroke engines.

Later I crossed the border into East Berlin, greeted by the incongruous sight of East German border guards standing on top of the wall, while ordinary Berliners, souvenir hunters and black-clad anarchists hacked away with pick axes at the concrete below.

Former West Berlin resident David Bowie was an inspiration

I had come to West Berlin two years earlier as a wide-eyed 21-year-old with a one-way ticket and £50 in my pocket, drawn by the romance and danger of a divided, claustrophobic city in which art, culture and politics collided in a heady and explosive mix.

I was in thrall to the city's famous former residents, David Bowie and Iggy Pop, and in search of the spirit of Bowie's anthem Heroes, recorded in a studio by the Wall. I found it in abundance, in the coffee shops of the Turkish quarter Kreuzberg, among the industrial wastelands of Neukoeln, and on the overground trains that rattled across the divide to East Berlin.

A week after watching the fall of the Wall, I was lucky enough to find myself in Prague at the dawn of its own Velvet Revolution, dancing away the last few hours of Soviet austerity in the company of some beautiful girls in a club in Wenceslas Square. But that's another story.