STORY
In one night the Cold War ended. With the wall that fell in Berlin on November 9, 1989, it was the entire iron curtain that tore up. This event has profoundly redefined the geopolitics of the old continent, paving the way for the reunification of Germany and the enlargement of the European Union. And everything was played in a few hours, almost by chance, on a Berlin bridge. At the microphone of Europe 1, the witnesses of the time remember:
"An event like this, it stays forever in your head!" That night, like many East Berliners, Ursula first went to the wall to check the rumor that runs through the city: there is no need for special permission to leave the GDR, according to a statement from the regime's spokesman, made a few hours earlier on television. In fact, this man was mistaken in reading his notes, and besides at the border posts, like the Bornholmer Bridge, the soldiers received no orders. They do not know what to do. Normally they should shoot.
"A huge feeling of liberation"
"The police arrived, she wanted to push us back but we stayed there, without moving," Michael tells Europe 1. Finally, hesitantly, a soldier takes the initiative to lift the barriers. "Just crossing that bridge was a huge feeling of liberation," Ursula recalls. Michael finds himself partying with strangers on West Berlin's grand avenue: "On the Ku'damm (Kurfürstendamm, ed ) it was madness!"
We laugh, we cry, we kiss, we dance. Henry is astonished: "I was just there to look in. Suddenly, in one night, it was obvious that the GDR and communism were over forever." But not everyone understood what was happening that night. As a certain Angela Merkel who lived close to the famous bridge Bornholmer but who preferred, like every Thursday night, go to the sauna with girlfriends.