Joy and pickaxes, hugs and fire hydrants, bars that rise and floods of oppressed people that flow into freedom, the euphoric daze produced by the shock wave of the train of history when it passes by rattling and whistling so loudly that it is impossible not to notice:
the night of the fall of the Berlin Wall, 32 years ago
, was all this and calling it 'historical' is almost an understatement.
It was November 9, 1989
.
The symbol of the end of the Iron Curtain, of the world divided into two atomic blocs, of the reunification of Germany had been prepared and heralded by the summer escapes of East Germans through Hungary and Czechoslovakia.
But also, on October 18, from the resignation of the leader of the GDR, Erich Honecker, who still in January had vainly predicted another 'hundred years of the Wall'.
That night began shortly before 7pm with the press conference of the spokesman for the GDR government, Guenter Schabowski, in which
the then ANSA correspondent in East Berlin, Riccardo Ehrman,
with one of his questions he triggered others which then led to the announcement: in practice, it was possible to cross the Wall. The live TV showing Ehrman sitting at the foot of the large table from which Schabowski was speaking pushed tens of thousands of East Berliners to the border posts between the two parts of the city. The guards, taken by surprise by such a massive influx, asked for orders on how to behave but still raised the red and white bars allowing everyone to pass without controls: a resistance without anti-riot equipment, after all, was technically impossible or bloody useless. . At first there was amazement and disbelief at the mockery of the Vopos,the agents of the People's Police who for almost 30 years had fired at anyone who tried to cross the Wall and who were more or less directly responsible for the deaths of at least 140 fugitives in Berlin alone.
Then, all night long, only party for the flow of East Germans welcomed by the applause of many fellow citizens of the West: "freedom" is shouted and we embrace, even among relatives forced to live divided for decades. Young people - young was most of those who moved that night - who see places they had only heard of from the older ones, like the elegant Ku'damm boulevard. Bottles are uncorked, torches are lit, flags of Germany are waved and first copies of a tabloid already announcing 'Berlin is Berlin again'.
But the iconography engraved in the minds is made also and, perhaps above all, by the boys who climb the Wall pulling each other up; from the pickaxe that raises only dust from the granite and now crowded top of the barrier; from the work of large and small hammers, of the very first 'Mauerspechte', the 'peaks of the Wall'. And then the powerful fire hydrants that you resist standing up or, mockingly, crouched behind an umbrella with a confused awareness that they are only splashes raised by the faint blow of the tail of a now dying regime: in three days, two million people passed the border sanctioning the end of a world. "The wall was like a time machine.
You passed Checkpoint Charlie and plunged into the past, in the 1950s.
Fewer lights, no signs, even the air had a different smell, plagued by the Trabants, the plastic small cars symbol of the industry in the GDR ", wrote Roberto Giardina, journalist and writer, a witness of those years.
