I was studying in Dresden at the time. On the 9th of November I went for a night out with friends and when we came back to our student accommodation late at night, everyone was celebrating. When they told us the wall had fallen, I found it hard to believe. And the morning of the next day I attended my seminar as usual and even took an exam afterwards, but then we did want go to the West. To Berlin, of course, where else? At the end of the day, I am a Berliner. Rumour had it in Dresden (we didn’t have any Western TV stations) that you needed a visa. So that Friday I queued at Dresden police station for four hours to get my passport stamped. But when I walked into West-Berlin via the Sonnenallee crossing for the first time that morning around six o’clock, after riding the train all night, nobody asked to see my passport. The Western part of the city was nothing more than a white spot on East German maps, so I had no idea that the Sonnenallee was so woefully long. I went to a local savings bank to pick up my Begrüßungsgeld (welcome money). I stood next to a fruit and vegetable shop. Even the plums were neatly arranged in the shop display. It was all so unreal – the fall of the wall was the happiest event of my life, something I had yearned for for a long time. And when it suddenly became a reality, all I saw along the Sonnenallee were people and houses, trees and streets, with the same old granite slabs we had. I’d expected the world over there to be upside down. Everything was so weirdly normal. The same can be said about my first pair of Western trousers. A day later, I used my Western money to buy myself a pair of Levi’s 501 with a light stonewashed effect at Karstadt on Hermannplatz. That was modern at the time. I had wanted those trousers for so long. And when I finally had them on, they were just a pair of trousers.
