My passport

February 1990 - The wall had just been open for three months and the eight previous border crossings (Friedrichstrasse, Heinrich-Heine-Allee, etc.) were no longer sufficient for all the people who switched back and forth between the two parts of the city. So additional, provisional border stations were set up, which existed until the official reunification. The first of these were: Invalidenstrasse, Brandenburg Gate, Rosenthaler Platz, Potsdamer Platz, Jannowitzbrücke, etc.

From February to April I passed the Iron Curtain every day when I was doing an internship in West Berlin and living in East Berlin. Shared accommodation in West Berlin was excessive for my young financial situation at the time and that gave me the idea of ​​looking for an apartment in East Berlin. I found them on Ackerstrasse in the Mitte district.

West Germans needed a passport to enter the East. Since stamps were stamped on this document at the border between East and West, it filled up more and more with these documents from the temporary border crossings and thus became a special document.

The three months have been impressive. I lived in a house belonging to the East Berlin squatter scene. Yes, there was actually such a thing. Young people from the east German province came to Berlin, occupied houses, were punished for it, paid a small fine and then received a lease from the municipal housing administration.

The house in which I lived was full of young people who had come to Berlin from Stralsund, Greifswald or other cities. These city names were like from another world for me: Stralsund, Potsdam, Leipzig ... what did I know about them? It was foreign and far away and yet of course one had heard all these names - a foreign country and yet Germany. The young roommates in the house worked as a set designer at the Maxim-Gorki-Theater, as a bookseller at Unter den Linden, one was a landscape architect and had a hairstyle like Rainer Langhans from Kommune 1.

My apartment was heated with a tiled stove, and I still had to learn to fry with briquettes. In the kitchen it was warm from a radiator that had been removed from an S-Bahn. The toilet was halfway up the stairs and really cold in winter. The smell of briquettes was the smell of Berlin. It has now disappeared and very rarely, really only very rarely do I notice it in winter and wonder where it suddenly comes from and then all the memories are there again.

In the evening it was quiet in the apartment, Ackerstrasse was a cul-de-sac that led directly to the wall, no one went there who didn't belong there. Opposite the house was the Sophiengemeinde cemetery. The GDR street lights threw their orange light on the cobblestones and a seemingly lost Trabant of the People's Police drove its last patrol with a crackling two-stroke engine.

In the morning I listened to the GDR radio at breakfast. Peaceful music, calming. A nice start to the day. Later at the Pappelplatz tram stop I recognized the same people who, like me, were standing there every morning and waiting for the train - a young father with his small child, a few working people. Everyday life in a socialist country, as one could not even imagine after years of portrayals of the East in western media. I liked this morning waiting, when the street lamp, moving in the wind, threw its light on the bricks of the fire wall on the opposite side of the house, when the tram came with its screeching sound, when people went to work in this strange country.

I also liked walking home in the afternoon from the Friedrichstrasse train station through the city, either along Friedrichstrasse or past the Bode Museum, the Monbijoupark towards the Sophienkirche in Große Hamburger Strasse. Mountains of briquettes lay on the street in front of the houses. I remember a picture of a pick-up truck from the GDR brand Robur standing at a traffic light on Friedrichstrasse. On the back of the truck, lying on a pile of briquettes, was a rather dirty, muscular, young man who looked self-confident and demanding with a slightly mocking grin, while the rain-gray sky dripped lightly on him.

If you wanted to meet in East Berlin, you didn't do it by phone, instead a small pad with a pencil on a ribbon hung on each door of the apartment. A kind of GDR-style answering machine. The news was short and sweet: "Tonight there is a party in Friedrichshain, I'll come by at six, if you feel like you can come with me." We celebrated Women's Day, to which men were also invited, or went to a rally of the New Forum in the Gethsemane Church, where Wolf Biermann appeared. The nights in East Berlin were lively, the trams ran all night, we used them often, we were pretty tipsy every time we went home from the beer, which was incredibly cheap, some young people on the train played their guitars and sang . We explored the East Berlin theater world and saw "The Transitional Society" in the Maxim Gorki Theater and "Gorbatschow / Fragment" in the Volksbühne.

We came home one evening and suddenly heard the thunder of fireworks. For a brief moment, for fun, we suspected that it wasn't fireworks at all, but that the Russians had started to suppress the peaceful revolution with arms because the collapse of the East was going too far for them. In those days anything would have been possible.

We spontaneously decided to go to the roof of the house, where a worn, rickety iron rung ladder led through a skylight at the top of the stairwell. Then we finally stood over the roofs of Berlin and looked across the city at the fireworks in the west. We were silent and while a light, mild wind was blowing in our faces, I felt the whole expanse of the Mark Brandenburg, the plain on which this city lies, the entire attitude towards life of this city flowing through me.

It was a time that now runs in my memory like a film - a memory of a Berlin that has completely disappeared.