Abingdon News No. 57

What was life like in Berlin before the wall came down? I lived on the west side of the Berlin Wall. I was 13 when the wall was destroyed and up until then I hadn’t really noticed any of the restrictions. I lived just within Berlin and we had a holiday house by the Baltic Sea in the north. We would go there three or four times a year so every time we wanted to leave Berlin, we had to go through a number of checkpoints in East and West Germany. If you were in any way suspicious to the East German border guards, they would take you aside and would search your car thoroughly, leaving everything strewn all over the place. Did you do anything special on the evening of 9th November 1989? Not in the evening because I was at school on the day that the wall came down, so I heard the news half way through the school day. The next day was a Saturday so we went to East Berlin and it was so weird, so different even though it was just a few kilometres on the other side. I remember the smells were different, the sounds were different even the colours of the buildings were different, people’s clothes, people’s haircuts. Everything was different. What was the atmosphere like when the wall had come down? Because so many friends and families had been separated, initially people were elated on both sides. East Germans wanted to visit West Berlin; many just to have a look. They just wanted to see what the supposed golden West was like and lots of West Germans would hit the cars on the top as a celebration at the borders. There was champagne and lots of partying. Did your life change due to reunification? My family life did not change because I had quite a small family, but my school life changed a lot. My school was only 2 km from the border meaning that when the new school year started, we had a completely new form of students who all came from East Germany, whose first foreign language was Russian. They had a Russian teacher and they were two years ahead in Maths and Science; they were absolutely unbelievably amazing. Was there a big difference in lifestyle between East and West Berlin and was it difficult for the two sectors to integrate? Once the wall had fallen the differences were not as big anymore. With time, many argued that the West had usurped the East which had an impact on the self-confidence of the people who had lived in the East. I think if you went to Berlin today you would not see the differences anymore. However, if you speak to people of my parents’ generation or even my sister’s generation, they will often still talk about East Germans and West Germans. They still have strong biases and prejudices against the East German people. 6 April 2021 An Interview with Frau Von Widdern By Arlo Hyman and Jacob Eaton in the Third Year. The full article was first printed in The Polyglot, the MFL department’s school magazine. Frau Von Widdern teaches German at Abingdon. She was born and brought up in Berlin, living there for 23 years before moving to the UK in 1999. The Brandenburg Gate is shrouded in fog as a man looks from a watchtower over the Wall to the Eastern part of the divided city on November 25, 1961. The tower was erected by the West German police to observe the Inner-German border. rarehistoricalpictures.com Frau Widdern as a child with her sister and parents