20 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall

In 1986 this writer saw among the graffiti on the west side of the Berlin Wall around the Brandenburg Gate one which said "Un jour le mur tombera", French for "One day the wall will fall". At the time this didn't seem likely for a long time, but it happened 3 years later on the night of 9 November.

The Berlin Wall and the inter-German border represented all that was ugly about the Communist world that lay on the other side of it: barbed wire, mines, automatic firing devices, watchtowers with armed guards with orders to shoot on sight - the sort of fortifications you expect around a prison and that is exactly what it was, designed to prevent "free socialist workers" escaping to the slavery of the capitalist west. With the fall of the wall also fell the repressive Communist regimes of Eastern Europe. The prison fortifications also extended along the Czechoslovak and Hungarian borders, but it was the inter-German one where the tragic nature of it was so poignant.

It also made for some daring escape attempts, some of which have been turned into films and a selection of books on the subject is available from our shop.