When the Wall Came Tumbling Down...

“Chaos”

“I remember the bananas. It was the first time I had ever tasted, or even seen(!), a banana”

“Everything happened late, on a Thursday evening. The next day nobody was in school, they all were on a train going somewhere. I was dumb enough to be in school. On Saturday I took a train to Berlin. It was overflowing with people, there was hardly enough room to stand. I got my welcoming money from the government, I had to wait in line for about 4 hours. It was 100 DeutschMarks. I found a Walkman that cost 99DM and bought that”

“Just about a week before everything happened, a classmate of mine got in trouble with the government for calling the wall ‘Die Mauer’ during a discussion in school. That was a term only used in the West. In the East we had to call it the ‘Anti-Fascismusschutzwall’ (Anti-Fascism Protective Wall)”

“Do you remember your first trip into West Berlin?”……

-Excerpts from conversations I recently had with several aquaintances