Ich war dabei. I was there. That's what it said on the tacky t-shirt I bought in West Berlin in November 1989. However unlike other Westerners - reporters, news crews and tourists - I had walked through the wall from the East side to the West. I only arrived in East Germany a few days before, to undertake a report on theatre for the British Council. Within three days of my arrival in a country where many of my interviews were conducted in whispers, the wall was broken open. When it happened, I was in Dresden, visiting a theatre. Obviously I wanted to find out what was going on, but with only an East German interpreter to talk with, it was hard to know how safe I would be going through the wall. The East Germans themselves still felt very unsure about the situation so would not tell me much.
I understood basic German and spoke it fairly badly, so watched the TV news in my hotel room to try and understand what was going on.I had with me an old-fashioned tape dictaphone on which I recorded my interviews, and now my own personal reactions to what was happening around me. I still have the tapes. So here follows the first of my podcasts from twenty years ago. It begins as I just come out of a theatre from a play that I found fairly deadly. It includes extracts from German and BBC broadcasts that I picked up. Despite these, it was with a feeling of trepidation that I set off to cross through the wall. Click the link below to hear the 5-minute podcast.
EastGermany-Part1
