City

"a castle with ramparts and a moat"

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Photojournalist Tom Stoddart describes what it was like to be in Berlin when the Wall came down, ending the division of Germany.​

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In London, I obtained an East German entry visa and by the afternoon was on a plane to West Berlin.  Once there, I took a taxi with the intention of crossing into the East at Checkpoint Charlie before the crossing point closed for the night. In the back of the cab, I was chatting with a young Irish reporter on his first foreign trip. The radio was on, just a low background sound, and suddenly I saw the driver stiffen and sit bolt upright.  He turned up the sound and I asked him what was happening. He said: “It's amazing. They're opening the crossing in an hour.”​

 We arrived at Checkpoint Charlie about 15 minutes later and at first there was hardly anyone around. Then people began to arrive in numbers until there was a huge crowd on the Western side. I decided to head for the East German checkpoint and in no-man's land I photographed two middle-aged women coming towards me.  Their hands were clasped to their faces and they were crying tears of joy and disbelief. They were possibly the first from the East to cross to the West at Checkpoint Charlie that night, the first to experience freedom.  ​

I pictured two young men who fell to their knees and punched the air when they crossed the border. All around me people were hugging and celebrating. Someone held up the late edition of a newspaper. The headline read: 'The Wall is gone. Berlin is again Berlin'. ​

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After a couple hours, I made my way round to the Brandenburg Gate where people had climbed onto the Wall and some were chipping away at it with hammers and chisels. But then the border guards cleared the Wall and were preventing others from climbing on.  In one corner, I saw soldiers using a fire hose to try and repel those beneath them on the western side. Over the next hours, though, a group of determined and mainly young men acquired more sophisticated tools and took it turns to hammer at a particular section of the Wall. They even tried to haul it down with a tractor and chain at one point but the chain snapped.  The young people were cheered on by the crowd as they worked, ignoring the drenching they received and kept going by adrenalin and the knowledge that they were making history. 

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