A merry chaos after the wall fell continues to this day

IT was the revolution that ended the Cold War. But there was not a shot fired.

Instead on that autumn day 20 years ago, there was a feeling of spring in the air, there was something electric and smiling – no German said, “Where is your tram ticket?” or “you can’t park there”.

That was the day the wall came down – the day people streamed through the breaches in the wall and wandered around the streets of West Berlin, the first time they were free to do so in almost 30 years.

By night time as people returned to their homes on the other side of the divide, there was not a single banana left in the city, Pádhraic O Dochartaigh remembers and laughs at the memory of the little things.

The Leitrim man has lived in Germany for more than 40 years and in Berlin for most of that as a film and TV producer, helping mould the culture of his adopted country.

From his apartment high above Joaquin Fredrich strassa he watched the invasion of the city by the other Berliners. He was aware he was watching history. “There was a feeling, like the book title – an incredible lightness of being – like being in love. You could feel the emotions, it permeated everything,” he said.

It was a peaceful revolution: “They were ordinary people protesting – the families and friends of the security services. One of the catch cries of the time was ‘We are not rowdies, we are the people’,” he recalls.

In a way the wall coming down was not a surprise in the end. “It crept up on you,” he said. Some months before, he got a permit to go fishing in the east, for instance. Rather it was the end of a long process and determination by people like Willy Brandt.

“The wall was crumbling,” he says.

The man who prefers to speak either Irish or German remembers buying hammers and chisels to claim his piece of the wall. But it had been built to last more than its 28 years and he could chip away only tiny fragments. In the end he bought a slab of the painted surface from a young Turk for the equivalent of €30 – it has pride of place in his hallway.

The buzz lasted for years. The newly vacant factories in the east provided the perfect venues for techno parties and a massive clubbing scene developed. “They started around 11pm and you came out for breakfast. We had deck chairs on the roofs. This was a whole new chilling-out, modern thing, a result of the kick-start of the wall coming down – a lets rethink this – nothing is as it was,” he recalls

This merry chaos, as Pádraic calls it, continues to this day.

The city got new citizens too – Jews that had been moved to Russia at various stages from the time of Catherine the Great, and the Volga Germans that had been sent by Stalin to the borders of Kazakhstan.

The feeling that it was good to be alive and that this reunification was a good thing has survived. The proof is that people still do not grumble about paying the Solidarity Tax introduced all those years ago and which will continue for another ten years to build up the infrastructure in the east, he says.