Take a Random Walk Around the Berlin Wall Just Months Before Its Sudden Fall (Summer 1989)

The Berlin Wall fell on November 9, 1989, when passage between East and West Berlin opened to all citizens of both countries. Demolition took more than four years, and a few sections remained for memorial purposes. The opening came as a major surprise because many observers expected the wall to stand for decades. Officials involved in the opening did not foresee that Günter Schabowski would mistakenly declare on national television that border travel liberalization was effective immediately, without delay. After border guards stopped trying to hold the line around 11:00 that night, both cities turned into a large street celebration remembered decades later. Footage from summer 1989 shows a city where events seemed frozen despite the impending change.

"Officially, the Berlin Wall fell on November 9, 1989. Demolition would take more than four years, and a few sections remain for memorial purposes, but it was on that date that passage between East and West Berlin - and thus East and West Germany - opened to all citizens of both countries. To say that it came as a surprise would be a serious understatement. Earlier that year, even the best informed observers were predicting that the wall would stand for at least a few more decades."

"Earlier that day, for that matter, the officials involved in the opening didn't foresee that Socialist Unity Party of Germany Secretary of Information Günter Schabowski would, that evening, mistakenly declare on national television that the liberalization of border travel was effective "immediately, without delay." When the border guards finally gave up their attempts to hold the line around 11:00 that night, the surrounding scene in both Berlins had turned into what attendees now remember, 36 years later, as the biggest street festival of their lives."

"To those of us unable to join in the celebration at the time, it may seem unlikely that such an event could really have occurred with no intimations whatsoever. Yet the footage shot by a traveler in Berlin during the summer of 1989, right there in the vicinity of the wall, depicts a city where events seem to be frozen. Though the built environment isn't without touches of faded grandeur here and there, and as many West Berliners were soon to discover, the real urban state"

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