(Checkpoint Charlie now)I was already studying in Germany when Ronald Reagan made his famous speech in Berlin, on the Western side of the Brandenburg Gate (for years the city's symbolic dividing line) on the occasion of the city's 750th birthday urging the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall”. It seemed just as utipic at the time as it had been the idea of walking on the moon before 1969. I had stood many times in front (or behind) the Brandenburg Gate wondering what it would have been like if the two Berlins had finally come together.
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I had crossed the borders at Checkpoint Charlie or at Berlin Friedrichstrasse many times to meet an East Berlin author I was writing my dissertation about. The contrast between West and East Berlin had always seemed huge to me. Walking the few meters into the East side was like walking through a time machine, like leaving the modern age behind and stepping into the past. The contrast was striking, almost unbelievable. I used to “smuggle” writing paper over the border. Can you imagine? A rather famous writer who couldn’t find writing paper and was forced to write on pieces of scrap paper. But that was only a small need compared to what every Berliner felt every day. Like open-air prisoners.
Twenty years have passed since that night when the wall was brought down. I wasn’t in Berlin that night, but about 100 miles away and when the TV images started showing I couldn’t believe my eyes. The impossible dream had come true. All of a sudden thousands and thousands of East Germans finally could move freely in the “other” Germany and I hoped that one of my East Berliner friends could also come over. He wanted so much to see Italy and especially Venice. But the year before that November 1989 he had been caught by the border police while hiding in the boot of a French car somewhere in Hungary.
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Last time his family and friends heard from him he was stuck in a prison in East Berlin. When the wall fell and the political dissidents were freed he wasn’t there. Nobody knew where he was. No papers about him could be found, it was as he had never been there. And nobody knows where he is now. I still hope he’s somewhere travelling around the world as he always wanted to do.
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