Recalling the passage of time in East Berlin, November 1989

Twenty years ago, on October 19, 1989, I found myself in East Berlin reporting on a crisis that was to lead (though very few experts predicted it at the time) to the fall of the Berlin Wall only three weeks later. I have been asked many times since then if this was the ”best” story I’ve ever covered, in the dual sense of “biggest” and “most enjoyable”. I have usually answered Yes in the first sense of the question, but No in the second sense.

For the truth is that it wasn’t an enjoyable experience at all. From early morning to late at night, I spent the day attached to a clunky word processor in a grim, East German government-supervised press centre in Mohrenstrasse, very close to the Wall. There I churned out thousands upon thousands of words about the accelerating disintegration of the regime for my pitilessly news-driven employers, the Reuters news agency.

Sometimes I would go out to watch a street protest - I once got talking with Günter Schabowski, a Politburo member, who was trying without much luck to reason with the demonstrators. Or I would catch up with opposition activists at the Gethsemane church in the Prenzlauer Berg district. But before long, it was back to the merciless office grind. I couldn’t go to the big anti-communist protests in Leipzig and other provincial cities, because my East German visa restricted me to East Berlin.

At night I would drive from Mohrenstrasse to an apartment rented by Reuters on Schönhauserallee. This is today one of Berlin’s busiest shopping streets. But in late 1989 East Berlin at night was a city as dark and silent as a corner of hell. On the ground floor below the apartment was a Kneipe, a pub. After the Wall fell, it emerged that the Stasi secret police used the pub as a base to monitor the goings-on in my apartment. How they must have enjoyed hearing me swear at the top of my voice about the iniquities of a) East German communism and b) Reuters.

During the entire three weeks, I only made it once across the Wall to West Berlin for a night out. And it is this little episode, not the dramatic events of November 9, that is most vivid in my memory now. For as I returned to Checkpoint Charlie just before midnight and handed in my passport for inspection, I detected something extraordinary - the flicker of a smile on the face of the uniformed East German border guard in his booth.

Comparing my features with the photo in my passport, taken several years earlier, he had clearly observed that I had lost a considerable amount of hair. He peered at me behind his thin-rimmed glasses, sighed and said, “Das ist der Lauf der Zeit” - which, loosely translated, means “That’s what the passage of time does to you.”

It was almost a human touch - but, like everything in the German Democratic Republic, only almost.