Wall Came Tumbling Down

Matt Charlton reflects on the fall of the Berlin Wall 35 years ago, why the city is a magnet for misfits, and the role of the music scene and dancefloor in reunification

Three and a half decades ago, a fault line in the world — which had existed in one form or another since 1945 — started to heal, very suddenly, and then, very slowly. On the night of 9 November, 1989, the Berlin Wall checkpoints were unexpectedly opened in both directions, allowing — for the first time since 1961 — the free flow of East Germans through the Iron Curtain. Citizens from both sides climbed and pounded at the hated partition, chiselling at the graffitied concrete, standing atop of it letting off flares and singing with joy. It was a red letter day in history, and the start of the end of the Cold War. 

The German capital of Berlin is a city which bears the physical scars of European history like no other, and there are a million stories to tell about lives behind, around, before, and after the Wall, but maybe the question to ask, a third of a century after its collapse, is whether it still defines Berlin. 

From the air, in the night sky, the voltages of the old East and West are still different; a line of bricks embedded in the ground still runs through the city, the East Side Gallery is one of the city’s biggest tourist attractions, and a Disneyfied Checkpoint Charlie, once the definitive gateway into the communist Eastern Bloc, is now next to a McDonald’s. 

The united country has definitely had growing pains, too. There is still a financial — and more recently a re-emerging political — disparity between East and West, all Germany’s financial centres are still based in the cities of the old Federal Republic (FRG). But then, maybe this is why Berlin is Berlin. After all, City Bros always ruin the party.

Paul Hanford is a writer and DJ — originally from the UK and now living in Neukölln — and the author of ‘Coming To Berlin’. The book reflects, through the lives and music of migrants, settlers and newcomers, how a constantly in flux city with a tumultuous history has evolved into the de facto cultural capital of Europe. “Berlin has in various times in history been a magnet for people that just don’t fit into mainstream society. In the West Berlin of the 60s, 70s, and 80s, where it was very cheap and easy to live there, there was no industry, and if you were a German man, it got you out of conscription. The universities were also very Marxist leaning, and it was cheap. The continuum of where we are now was set by the people who just didn’t fit in, but I do think it runs deeper than that.”

A person who seems to encapsulate this is Mark Reeder. Reeder is originally from Manchester — another city not unfamiliar with electronic music rising up amongst the ruins — and first came to West Berlin on a whim in the late ​1970s. Forty-five years later, he is still here. Paul has just made a BBC documentary about him. “I think the reason his story needs to be told is that he’s one of the real music insiders of all time. He’s such an un-cynical person, and an enthusiast, and I think that enthusiasm — at various points — has really driven him to do things like put on a secret punk concert in East Berlin — the first time a western punk band played in the GDR — something that was totally illegal at the time. He proves that being passionate about music in a non-gatekeeper way can be a catalyst for change.”

But what of the wall? When I met Mark a few years ago, he told me, “Without the fall of The Wall, it would have just been about 50 people in Metropol [one of the first big clubs, modelled on New York’s Studio 54] dancing to a genre no one else listened to. Radio DJ’s such as Monika Dietl on Radio Free Berlin made the East Germans — who were listening illegally — believe that there was some huge scene going on with hundreds, or even thousands of people… but it was a just a few tiny places with the same group of faces every night,” he recalled. “It was a lucky coincidence that The Wall came down, because it was getting boring,” says Reeder. ​“The scene went East when The Wall fell; the opening up of the GDR reinvigorated everything. It was on the dancefloor that reunification started.”

This must mean then that the city we know and love now could only exist because of the Wall, but it isn’t that simple. Berlin has always been a place for misfits. ‘You are crazy my child, you must go to Berlin,’ was, after all, coined by composer Franz Von Suppe in the 1800s, and there was of course the literally decadent Weimar Republic in the roaring 20s, as the city danced into the darkness of the 1930s. “There are questions that still remain about why Berlin does have this unusualness about it,” agrees Paul. “The Weimar era was wilder and more hedonistic than anything happening now. [Berlin] almost feels like a strange mystical realm sometimes, and I feel it goes a lot deeper and is a lot more inexplicable than simply what happened in the 20th century. I feel as if it was just down to that, it could have all been eroded by now, but it’s still an unusual place to live.”

It can’t be denied that the presence and then fall of the Wall was the catalyst for most of what the city has become — the removal of a membrane which caused a cultural reaction.  But it has always been a draw for the weirdos, misfits, kooks, and opt-outs, and that was nothing to do with ‘die Mauer’. Should the city use this anniversary to attempt to redefine itself? “[The fall of the wall] was a period of such huge optimism, and now everything feels so dark, with the threat of the far-right across Europe in Germany with the AFD gaining more power”, Paul continues. “I feel like the fall of the Wall is something really important to reflect on. It wouldn’t have been there if it wasn’t initially for the rise of fascism in 20th century Germany, so it’s good to mark that, and mark things that we simply can’t allow to happen again.”

It deserves to remain commemorated — as a cause for celebration, a pivotal moment in history, a memento mori, and a warning.  There is no doubt that Berliners — whether native or immigrant — should be looking away from that line of bricks that mark the once dreaded partition. However, as they’re standing there, looking up, and imagining the future, they should feel those bricks beneath their feet, and realise that, somehow, it’s probably why they’re standing there in the first place.

“I feel like through writing my book, everyone who moves here because they love the culture and energy of the city finds their own [way into] that”, says Paul. “There’s always something that makes us go ‘I’m glad I’m here’.”

‘Coming to Berlin’ by Paul Hanford is available now, published by Velocity Press

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