"When the Wall came down and we suddenly found new spaces to create our own way of life," says Dr. Motte of the lawless borderland between two long cut-off worlds. "It was the best thing that ever happened to us. You cannot imagine."...
ORIGINS stuart braun
"When the Wall came down and we suddenly found new spaces to create our own way of life," says Dr. Motte of the lawless borderland between two long cut-off worlds. "It was the best thing that ever happened to us. You cannot imagine."
As World War II came to an end in 1945, a pair of Allied peace conferences determined the fate of Germany’s territories. They split the defeated nation into four “allied occupation zones”: The eastern part of the country went to the Soviet Union, while the western part went to the United States, Great Britain and France.The construction of the Berlin Wall began.
On November 9, 1989, as the Cold War began to thaw across Eastern Europe, the spokesman for East Berlin’s Communist Party announced a change in his city’s relations with the West.
Starting at midnight that day, citizens of the GDR were free to cross the country’s borders. East and West Berliners flocked to the wall, drinking beer and champagne and chanting “Tor auf!” (“Open the gate!”). At midnight, they flooded through the checkpoints.
On Thursday November 9, the night the Wall fell, East German devotees of club music that they could only hear on West Berlin radio crossed the border and packed into the Ufo, a renowned Kreuzberg club. As both sides of the city danced together that night, an inclusive club movement would continue to break down barriers.
More than 2 million people from East Berlin visited West Berlin that weekend to participate in a celebration that was, one journalist wrote, “the greatest street party in the history of the world.” Berlin was united for the first time since 1945. “Only today,” one Berliner spray-painted on a piece of the wall, “is the war really over.”
