I don’t have a single picture from when the wall came down. That Thursday in 1989, I didn’t even take my camera with me, on purpose, and mind you, I never stepped outside without my Minox.
The night of the 9th November, I was carried along with the crowd, like everybody else, laughing, and staring these strange people, the Ossies, herded together and still a bit suspicious, but radiating a feeling of happiness that was irresistible and contagious.
It was Marlies who taught me that taking pictures without a deep understanding of what is happening was immoral. Because being a photographer requires discipline, each shot demanding tension and an ongoing inner monologue on morality. In those days I belonged to a circle of militant photographers, and Marlies was our teacher and leader. We met once a week at the Volkhochschule in Kreutzberg, we shot only black and white, did the developing ourselves, and spent hours discussing whether giving a title to a picture forced an interpretation on the viewer, and was therefore inherently fascist.
I don’t have a single picture from when the Wall came down. And I didn’t take any picture in the following days, weeks and months that followed.
Because rule #1 is that you don’t have the right to take pictures if you don’t understand what is happening.

No, before you ask, I don’t regret it. Just like I don’t regret that I never carved a piece of the Wall. Actually, I still remember the discomfort in watching them, first just the Berliners, then from all over Germany and then from all over the world, people climbing the wall and hammering and smashing and destroying it, piece after piece. It didn’t feel right. Souvenirs are for tourists, and they rarely tell anything about the place they are supposed to represent.
But not having taken any picture doesn’t mean that I don’t keep the images of those days safe in my mind.
PICTURE NUMBER 1 is black and white, of course – they all are, it’s the night when the wall came down, midnight or so, but there is plenty of light because we are in Ku’damm, the centre of West Berlin. In the background KadeWe, the largest department store in continental Europe, second only to Harrods. KadeWe which means Kaufhouse des Westens, “department store of the West” had been designed to show off opulence. A bonanza of over 60 thousand square meters (think about 50 Olympic swimming pools) full of stuff. So, picture number 1 is Kadewe with its windows full of stuff, and hundreds of people crowded, those in the front pushing their hands against the glass of the window, staring. In their eyes disbelief and wonder, think Pinocchio in Land of Toys. But study the picture, look closely and you can already see the craving and the want and that sense of unfairness that will start spreading around very soon. But not yet, tonight is only bewilderment and awe, disoriented like rabbits in front of car beams, eyes wide open, palms stretched against the pristine glass firmly pushing against the display window at KadeWe, unaware to have become themselves a display item for the world to wonder at their wonder.
PICTURE NUMBER 2 is inside Penny, the cheap supermarket at the end of my street, Nieburhstrasse. It is the toothpaste isle. It never occurred to me before that there are a couple of dozens of toothpaste brands, all in different colours and size, all responding to an accurate buyer segmentation. I am in a hurry, I just want to grab my usual brand and go to pay, but a woman grabs my attention. She is Aussie. In those first days it was easy to spot an Aussie, because of the clothing and the paleness of their skin and because they always looked uncertain, puzzled, scared. This woman uncertain and scared, as she moves her eyes from one box to the other, unable to understand the difference, incapable to decide. And I suddenly remember myself, just as puzzled as she is now, me standing in front of a shelf in that shop in East Berlin, years before, a shop with shelves but those shelves only had one can of beans, yes, one single can of beans in the entire shop. I feel pain for this woman unable to navigate the logic of so many brands of toothpaste. This woman, paralysed and unaware that she too will become part of a market segment very soon.
PICTURE NUMBER 3 is a talkshow on tv. It is a few weeks after the wall came down, well before any decision could be taken about the future of former East Germany. Everything has happened so fast that governments don’t really know what to do. I mean, one thing is for West Germany to say “come, I’ll be taking care of you if you manage to escape”, and something else is dealing with the fact that Europe is terrified at the idea of Germany becoming this huge power, some even fearing that Austria might want to come to the party.
Well, in this picture you see these men discuss the future of Germany, one is the French ambassador, he is answering to the question “what now?” he smiles and looks very relaxed, confident, and although the picture only captures a fragment of still reality, I know exactly why he is smiling, and I can almost hear his heavily accented voice when he answers: “We French love Germany so much that we want to keep on having two of them!”
PICTURE #4 I’m inside East Berlin, it’s winter already, the first since the wall came down. It’s cold and everything is grey. Two months have passed but it’s still strange to walk here, mostly we don’t know where to go because there are no maps of East Berlin, and people have been taking down street signs, because they mostly celebrated the communist party. And tearing down street signs is a huge problem for the emergency services that don’t know where to go, but people don’t care, they just want to get rid of whatever reminds them of the past.
At each street corner there are piles of books, lots of Das Kapital and pictures of Erich Honecker and Egon Krenz in cheap frames, broken glass everywhere. They are also starting tearing down statues. In the middle of the picture, a little van with a huge sign of the roof, it reads “Kaufe alle alte sachen” - “I buy anything old”. Someone, somewhere, is already burning the archives of the STASI.
PICTURE #5 is a portrait, and it actually exists in real life, not just in my memory. It’s a close up of Wolfgang and his huge beard. One of the measures to welcome the east Germans into the west was to give them money, exactly 100 Deutsche Mark literally called Begrüßungsgeld (welcome money). With the 100 marks begrüßungsgeld Wolfgang has bought a camera and joined our militant photo circle. We have paired to shoot portraits and because you cannot take a picture unless you know and understand, we are sharing stories. Me about my home-island Sardinia, and me studying German to be able to watch Fassbinder and read Kafka in original, and Wolfgang about the 20 years he spent in jail because the STASI had found a typewriter in his apartment.
The last picture…
PICTURE #6 I know exactly the day it was taken: 25th December 1989. I have decided to go to Bertold Brecht historical theatre, the Berliner Ensemble, to watch Die Dreigroschenoper – the Three Penny Opera. I had never been here before, I mean before the wall came down one couldn’t just “go to the theatre” like that, it was a bit more complicated. I know Die Dreigroschenopera very well, I have a tape with the songs sung by Kurt Weill, I know it by heart. The stage is almost entirely occupied by a tall scaffolding, like in a building side. Brecht had a thing that he didn’t want people to forget that they were watching a paly and one of the ways in which he reminded people that it was all only theatre, he often gave his plays a second ‘final scene’ – now we are at the second ‘final’ of Die Dreigroschenoper, the play has almost finished, the entire ensemble on stage, many of them hanging from the scaffolding, they are singing the song “Denn wovon lebt der Mensh”, what keeps mankind alive, they are singing at the top of their voices, screaming “Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral”, first food, then you can think later about what’s moral and what’s not. And in this surreal Christmas day, watching a play in East Berlin, around me the audience is crying.
So, there you go, I gave you a handful of pictures of those days after the wall came down.
30 years later, today, and I still don’t think I understood. With the wall coming down, Berlin went from being toyland to becoming just another European capital.
And thinking of those crazy days, still today, it still feels a bit like it was in West Berlin in the late Eighties: lots of people talking about what they believed was good for the world, lots of free people who had chosen they wanted to live in West Berlin and who, deep down, thought that East Berlin and the communist party weren’t that bad after all.