At the end I didn’t meet Franca, and my friend Michaela was in Spain on a study trip. Can you believe it? You are one of the few people who was actually born in Berlin, and you miss it. For a stupid study trip to Spain.

Being born in Berlin (I’m talking West Berlin of course; this is all before the wall came down) being a real Berliner was a big deal. Because everybody came from somewhere else in those days.
You see, you had: antimilitarist boys who had moved to West Berlin before turning 18 to avoid the military service that was compulsory in Germany; then you had lots of old people from East Berlin, because if you were a pensioner you were allowed to apply for a permit to visit the West; after all the official reason for building the wall was to stop people leaving the East to go and work in the west. Then you had artists, activists and people who moved to west Berlin because… it was cool.

I had moved to Berlin because I was learning German.

You’ll love Berlin, come visit! And finding a job is not difficult, you need to buy the paper every day, or enrol in a job centre. You get a job in one-week time, well you cannot be choosy of course, I am working as a waitress for example but it’s fine!

I got hooked on the German language reading Kafka and watching Fassbinder, in Italian. I enrolled at uni to study German but I realised that it wasn’t enough to read or understand. So, I moved to Berlin.

No, scusa Cristina, ma prima non eri andata a Monaco?

Well, yes, initially I moved to Munich, in Baviera, and I couldn’t stand it. It felt phony, spotless clean but in a fake way, like a gingerbread house. Occasionally people from Munich would visit Berlin and when they came back, they wouldn’t stop complaining how awful, dirty and filthy Berlin was.

The right place for me!

Ma dai, racconta, com’era Berlino allora?

It’s crazy trying to describe you Berlin, people are strange, kind, I think it’s because of the wall. But they don’t see the wall as a barrier, they feel like the wall is there, like a mountain, a river, they never talk about the wall!

Oh, it’s full of very young and very old. How shall I say? It’s the city itself: it takes you, it clings to you, it’s huge, but then when you live there, it’s also like a village, it’s cosy. It feels nice! How shall I say? It’s the people, you have to come to see it, I cannot tell you. You have to come and experience it. Come visit!

E allora, racconta, cosa e successo quando è caduto il muro?
It is Thursday afternoon. The weather is unusually warm for early November but I’ve only just come back from Italy, so it feels cold to me. I’ve been back for a day or so, and I am dying to catch up with Franca. I call her but she is not interested in listening from my trip home, she tells me that people have spotted Trabants in Kreutzberg, and that something big is happening.

Now, Kreutzberg is the the West, and Trabants were only in the East, so, it was really strange.

No, scusa, cos’è una Trabant?

They are these tiny shonky cars – I had seen only a couple of those, despite the fact that I had been in East Berlin more than once.

I loved taking my friends to East Berlin when they came visiting, because it was so scary back then.

You had to apply for a visa, they called it 24-hour visa but it wasn’t for 24 hours, you had to leave before midnight on the same day.

Quindi andavi a Checkpoint Charlie?

Checkpoint Charlie was for tourists. People living in Berlin always went through Friedrich Straße.

You had to take the underground to the station Friedrich Straße, go downstairs and there you cued up in the Tränenpalast – the Palace of Tears. I mean, that was the unofficial name, because it was a barrier between two worlds, lots of tears, shed with long goodbyes.

Imagine a huge station for passport control, you wait your turn for hours, you cannot move or go anywhere, not even to the toilet, in fact, I don’t even know whether they had toilets, you move only when the guards with machine gun tell you that you can move.
When your turn comes, you are waived in to the booth. The window is very high and the guard on the other side always looks down onto you, I have to go on tiptoe to give him my passport.
Above my head and everywhere, in the room there are mirrors placed on an angle, to detect anyone trying to sneak unnoticed underneath. They stamp your passport, tell you that you have to exchange 25 West Germany marks with 25 Est Germany marks, and finally, after hours of waiting, of queuing, of fearing, finally you can go to the other side.

So, how is everybody? Oh, the other day I went to East Berlin. It is so romantic. The streets are so wide and you never see people outside. And there are no cars, very few cars. Imagine, such wide streets and no cars, and no people. Yes, it is a bit spooky! That and the fact that the few people that you see, they never look you in the eyes, because they are scared, because, you know, the secret police is everywhere, STASI, everywhere. Oh, and then, imagine, no billboards, no ads, anywhere. Nothing. And because there are no billboards, there is no colour, just grey and black. It’s like being in a black and white movie from the Fifties. Scary, spooky, but very romantic! Oh, you should see it!

So, it is late afternoon and Franca just told me that something is happening. In Berlin there was already the world waiting, lots of journalists from all over the world, because everybody knew that something was happening, it was only a matter of time.
Everybody knew that the DDR was falling apart: just a few weeks before, the leader Erich Honecker, had resigned and had been replaced by Egon Krenz, I mean, it was coming.

With Franca we agree to meet in Tiergarten, at the Siegessäule, and to to towards the wall from there. But we never met. Long before getting there, I was swallowed by a sea of people, I wasn’t the only one who had the idea of going to see what was happening at the wall.

You have to imagine, Strasse des 17 Juny was built by Hitler wide enough so that planes could land there – well, it was invaded by people, you could hardly walk. It took me almost one hour to make my way through the people and be able to reach the wall.
People were passing through a hole in the wall, pouring out from the East to the West. Die Mauer was coming down, and my friend Michaela, the only real Berliner that I knew, my friend Michaela was in Spain, missing it all. Can you believe it?

And the wall coming down, that was just the beginning. Berlin had already changed forever.

Ma scusa, non continui a raccontare quello che è successo? La gente che usciva dall’est, le famiglie che si rivedevano dopo anni, gli abbracci, i brindisi, i pianti… non racconti niente?

Oh yes, sure, I’ll tell you all about the celebrations and what happened after that, how we couldn’t use public transport for weeks, how you couldn’t go anywhere without having in front of you hundreds of people who didn’t know what to do, like the time that that woman stopped me at the market and asked me “What is this?” pointing at an avocado, yes, I’ll tell you everything, in the second part of this podcast.