A random walk more or less by the Berlin Wall (June-July 1989) 

Well did he??

@@dimas5826 my guy asking the real questions here

@@dimas5826 No, but he should've.

@@bigredracingdog466 why are you trying to take credit for what your brother did?

@@jhonviel7381 I did?

That's crazy when we say something isn't gonna last it usually last forever take the Eifel tower for example or covid And when we say it's gonna last it's actually not hahha Guess god love trolling us

Absolutely incredible.

Well, as long as you didn't have money in Long Term Capital Management, no big deal.

One of those times where you feel good missing the mark, cheers to hopefully more peace.

@@mastr-sf1jv I was thinking much the same... never so happy to be so wrong.

Yes, "slice-of-life" has its own honesty that I love too.

My plan was to shoot much more "next time" (spring 1990, say). This was just a test. Had I known the wall would be gone soon after, I'd force myself to film more places (I knew exactly where I wanted to go, including spots very rarely shown, like the Am Sandkrug "wedge") instead of goofing off. But carrying the largish camera bag and a tripod was a bit of a hassle. Who knew.

Yes to see just normal the day life is priceless

Any concern in that moment that somebody from the other side's army would try something in your unit? I fear we won't ever get another Glasnost-era.

American from which country? America is a continent. From Brazil? From Peru?

@@aylinguluzade5962 There's only ONE America. The rest is South America.

@@aylinguluzade5962 That is not the typical usage. Its common speech to say American to refer to a US citizen. The geographic continent is something talked about in a geographic class in school but not in any way in common day language. You are simply referring to a word in a manner that it is never taught in the US.

@@lijohnyoutube101 Which is wrong. Being 'typical' doesn't mean being right. It's as if Russia was claiming "we are Europe, the rest is Western Europe". The US should finally start looking for a name, 'America' is more closely related to other countries on the continent.

Most of those places are almost unrecognisable today.

Yes..I was there 1986, both sides. I remember photographing the East Berlin guards while they watched me with binoculars. I waved. They didn't. We took the train back at night from the east. I was by the window, and could look down to see two soldiers with weapons and dogs, searching under each carriage for escapees from that place, the world's biggest prison. I will never forget it.

@@danstrayer111 самая большая тюрьма в мире это СССР!!

@@JanPBtest Haha, even for the ones born here it gets difficult. Cheers from Neukölln ;-)

@@alielabdimarras7965 That's where I stayed at the time (Emser Straße).

was it easy to go for a walk in the east part? Was the permit/visa difficult to get?

@@ytrew9717 depends what decade you're talking about

Mehr als sechs Monaten! Im Januar 90 stand die Mauer immer noch und war nur für Ost- und Westdeutsche links und rechts vom Brandenburger Tor durchgängig !

@@ytrew9717 After 1971 the crossing was possible by showing your passport and paying a fee. There were several checkpoints, some of them only for West Berliners, others for West Germans, other for foreigners, some of them combined those categories. It was quite a system :-)

@@stephanesimon6667 I have videos of that too, need to post it soon.

Were you in the secret service or some diplomatic mission? You've seen a lot!

That's how socialism mess a brain.

@@ranjittyagi9354troll

Easy Germany stil existed for nearly another year after the wall came down.

Lol! I was wondering what they were talking about

This was Nikita Khrushchev’s opinion on modern art I can’t disagree

he aint all that wrong

I caught that too, funny

@@wfr1108 who was? not so long before? what are you talking about?

I heard somewhere they changed almost every day and the two would not have known one another beforehand. If this is true, then from their perspective a one day sit-down at the border was probably somewhat interesting and different than the routine? I don't know what it was about the binoculars, they seemed surgically attached to them all day.

@@JanPBtest every Border Guard post was given a Sector. most of the Sectors were overlapping as well. inbetween you had control Stations and Sections that monitored the Guard posts. the repercussions if someone fled in your Sector and you did not shoot at them were bad, but if you didnt even see it... lets say your loyalty was questioned and you dont want that to happen in the DDR.

Standing in line for almost everything you need DAILY tops that! The socialists wachteslange💔💔💔

@Vandole i agree with 1 exception: "in the worst case you ended up in Jail": your Dad left out some bits then. i 100% agree with everything else you said.

@@JanPBtest They were from the same unit,

You're welcome! I believe this is the first time I was called "Whoever", haha! It was a bit of luck that few months earlier (in April 1989) Canon put the first Hi8 Hi-Fi stereo-sound video camera on the market which I used here (the Canon A1). I think the sound greatly improves the "presence".

Holy shit, it's a dude with a camcorder in the 80s - relax 😅

When you moved to Berlin, did you have to change your passport? Because IIRC the West German passport was slightly different than the West Berlin one (the former stated the bearer of this passport is German, and the latter said "German national" ("Angehöriger"? I forget)). And you had to pay every time you crossed, yes? This was apparently a decent source of extra income for East Germany :-)

@@JanPBtest I am not sure about passport i think i kept my federal republic of Germany passport - because it was still valid or because i didn't need it (Berlin(West) id card was sufficient for traveling in east and west Europe)- but i remember exactly about ID card, at first i got a "temporary provisional ID card" (vorläufiger behelfsmäßiger Personalausbweis) till my "provisional ID card" (Behelfsmäßiger Personalausbweis) was ready printed. all inhabitants of Berlin(West) have a "provisional ID card" and yes you are right there was only "the bearer of this document is German" (or similar) written and nothing about "federal republic of Germany" Also yes to the forced minimum exchange of 25DM to 25M for a single day. Bought books about electrical engineering or computer science and have nice dinners-if i have left over some money, i deposit it at state bank ("Staatsbank") and use it at my next visit (it was forbidden to export M (Mark der DDR) to the West.

Can you post some of those stories? Anything unusual?

Fascinating and interesting.

"Alles klar" :-)

Hauptsache was zu meckern. Don't know what he thought he was achieving. Hope the kid kept painting.

What was he saying to him? If he was berating him, given all the graffiti there already and the injustice of the wall in the first place it makes no sense unless he was a DDR border guard or Stasi in disguise. Great footage in any case.

@@caj1119 It was ridiculous. He was saying to him that he should stop, that it was the property of the GDR. He must’ve had nothing better to do.

@@JennHolt Thanks. Yeah, he truly must have had nothing better to do, and that "property" of the GDR was so heavily painted all over already anyway, why should he really care?

no it wasnt

DDR was pure poverty, still there are people crazy enough wanting this back🤦🏽‍♂️

@@mcpartridgeboy Many people have said it was like going back 30 years

​@@molasses1257poverty?? Funny how there was no homeless people and every one had a roof over their heads and food was plenty. You're just parroting western propaganda. It wasn't a utopia, but it wasn't anywhere near as bad as the western media made it out to be.

It still is different and remnants of the DDR/GDR times are still to be found in many places (and unfortunately in some heads, too) 34 yrs later ... Yes, East and West Berlin have grown together again but the former border line is still visible. Building design was very different between East and West.

My plan was to also film oddities like the Eiskeller exclave or the "wire" (portions of the Wall on the southern (mostly) border which consisted of high fence and no concrete), or the Am Sandkrug "wedge" near Frohnau. But I was too busy partying and just resting (running around with a camera can be surprisingly tedious and a seeming "waste of time"). I had simply assumed I'd come back to do it "properly" next year. Nobody at the time, including all my German friends in Berlin, had the slightest clue the situation will change completely within months.

@Charlene Olson Did you keep contact with them?

If you like the sound, maybe this one would bring some memories :-) ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-K5GLx12rZrw.html

I would have done much more, I knew exactly what I wanted to shoot but I pushed to off to my next visit which was... late November 1989. Walking around with a (largish) camera and sometimes a tripod was a bit of work. I went to some places without the camera out of laziness (like the Prinzenstr. checkpoint or Oberbaumbrücke), who knew, right? The city was in general slightly surreal because it had a look and feel of a major capital city yet it was quiet, no signs of the usual government buildings, few tourists. I remember walking one day past an abandoned villa in an equally abandoned garden, behind an unexpectedly expensive-looking but a bit unattended iron fencing. Like signs of former glory but the current owner, living somewhere far way, simply keeps the place and does nothing with it. Turned out this was the Japanese embassy building, before the war. (All the government for the West was in Bonn.) When you took the S-Bahn from East Berlin and crossed to the West, you suddenly rode along the super-opulent Tiergarten and a couple of times you'd catch a glimpse of the Siegessäule at the end of a very long wide avenue lined with trees, just a magnificent perspective, and... the avenue is practically empty. There were no such grand perspectives in any city in West Germany. This odd dislocation between the look-and-feel of the place and its "non-function" was always there. OTOH one never felt enclosed by the wall. Seems strange but the place was so huge anyway.

@@JanPBtest You've described the feeling so well! I went through Berlin, coming from the East on a transsiberian trip from Beijing to Paris, and crossed the border at Friedrichstraße station like you seem to have done, too. That was in 1986. I wasn't supposed to stay, just change trains and more importantly cross the border, but a last minute change of mind from some of my group of fellow students had some of us stay longer in West Berlin. We stayed at a YMCA near the then center of West Berlin, the Zoo station area. We were on a high school trip, had stayed in (very) communist China for nearly 2 months at a university, and when we arrived at Zoo station and heard pop music for the first time in 8 weeks (at the Burger King in front of the station, which I believe is a Dunkin Donuts nowadays), we felt like lions out of a cage. We didn't see much of East Berlin outside of the insane line where we waited for about an hour before being let to cross the border to the West. However, since we arrived in East Berlin from Poland and traveled by S train to the checkpoint, we still got to see what East Germany looked like from the train, upon arrival in East Berlin, and from the S-bahn while traveling to the border. I was impressed by the historic buildings in Mitte and soon realized that was where most were (still) standing. The streets had a very drab and grey, desolated, sort of dusty, eerie look, as if out of some weird dream. That was also visible from the other side of the wall, from the viewing platforms. But like in Poland and contrary to China, Mongolia and the USSR, people were often clad in clothes that wouldn't have looked out of place in the West. Once we passed the bridge into West Berlin, everything looked rich and modern. Being used to lots of old buildings in my own country, the modern side of West Berlin was also quite enticing. I was impressed by the dynamic, friendly and open-minded atmosphere of West Berlin, and by the size of Berlin as well as its green spaces, specifically Tiergarten. To this date, these times spent in that incredible city are precious memories. I love to watch these videos that take me back to this fabulous trip. Thank you for sharing!

@@Bellasie1 Great memories! Do you remember what you saw when you stepped out of the Zoo train station? As soon as you started walking along Joachimstaler Strasse there was this giant shop with giant glass windows across the street: TEPPICH KIBEK. Every time I went to visit West Berlin, that sign would be the first thing to greet me there, it was like: "Oh, it's you again". This was only possible, I think, because of the relative lack of market pressure on what would in a "normal" city be considered a prime location! And that place was _huge,_ with _huge_ carpets hanging in the _huge_ display windows.

Haha, small world! I like her smile at the camera. I wonder what the wall sprayer does today, perhaps owns a modern art gallery :-)

@@JanPBtest I think he went on to study something completely different than art and either stopped doing it or does it as a hobby (I don't think he does it illigally though since they usually stop doing it at the age of 30years)

Thanks for letting us know. The Stasi will be giving you a visit

@@knerduno5942 HA HA!! It would be a PLEASURE IN 2022 because I remember you could just tell you were being watched when I was in the Old East!!

There is no girl at 14:45 or at this time.

yeah, I was living in Berlin during your tenure... I was there from 1999 to 2011... great memories and great times during that transition... even during my time, Berlin transformed and became a different city.

it was the best decision to buy an apartment in the former east... now it costs tenfold...

hab ich sich grad beim Ansehen gedacht, ein brutaler Mord

Yes, it was a total surprise.

I always suspected he was an East German (retirees were allowed to go West), probably a former bureaucrat of some kind. Of course the concept that the wall itself was awful-looking did not occur to him.

@Leonid Lemburg Most graffiti to me looks bad. But in this case it was just a weird thing to say :-)

@@JanPBtest That's possible in general. But from his dialect he sounds more Southern German.

@@JanPBtest I nearly lost it when he said the graffiti were defacing the wall. No sir, the wall itself was the defacement.

​@@heinrichalthausen7522I Thought the same first. But the way he pronunced the "R" and "verboten", I would say that it's some kind of northwestern Plattdeutsch dialect. It's definetly not a Berlin or any kind of Eastern German dialect.

I have some footage from late November/December and January, crazy times! I'll post some soon.

Brilliant ✌

The time that shaped me the most in my childhood was between 1988-1993 in East Berlin (Friedrichshain and Mitte) . So many memories about the differences between east and west Berlin on a daily base and that wasn't a good VS bad. It was just so different

You were there as a toddler? Are you responsible for all the graffitti on the wall by any chance?

That's a very interesting comment. Very interesting. Good on you.

Nice!

Thank you for the note! The images look odd today, as in "how on earth was such a thing even possible in the middle of Europe??" But I remember very well that in 1980s one could not imagine Berlin _without_ the wall, it was just a part of "normal life". A weird relativity.

In 1993 those areas were just a sea of cranes, one huge construction zone, with little improvised shacks selling Glühwein!

@@JanPBtest Yes, cranes, cranes and... more cranes! Only thing else visible from old Checkpoint Charlie was a Benetton sign.

Exact. Militaire dans l'armée française en 1980, j'y suis retourné en 1996. Tous mes repères étaient par rapport au mur et j'ai eu beaucoup de mal à m'y retrouver dans ces forêts de grues de reconstruction, j'étais perdu, ne sachant plus si j'étais dans la partie Est ou dans la partie Ouest...

First time in 1986, second and last in 2017. I was prepared for a slap in the face, and I got one. My mind was constantly looking for the wall.

Thanks, cool!

Relatively few people went there. Berlin got popular after 1989.

@@JanPBtest that’s why it was good 👍🏼 Plenty going on without the tourists. I hardly recognize Berlin these days.

@@More-than-ladyboys i agree. I consider moving to West Berlin in 1988 for job reason. Eventually did not move. Berlin was genuine (East and West). Thesedays too artificial. Too many green fascists.

@@guidostahl2139 I was lucky to have experienced 80’s West Berlin on numerous occasions. Such a thrilling city. Went for the last time in 91 but the vibe and the raw possibility that anything could happen was gone. Seems plagued by talentless graffiti now.

Go Wally go!

West Berlin itself was just fine, it was the areas near the wall that were left undeveloped, for various reasons. I should post a video showing the city at that time.

Na siehste

You should post pictures of this stuff

The border passport control guys never smiled and never reacted to any attempt at small talk, it was probably their training. I was very surprised when I got back home that day to see the guard waving to me (I hadn't noticed it while filming because of doodling with some camera controls). The camera had a very noticeable red flashing LED in front which tended to attract attention sometimes.

Its like today

I was in the GDR in summer 1988 as well - as a west German 13yo "tourist" my father and me visited our relatives in the east for 2 weeks. We had to spend a certain amount of "Ostmark" everyday. My father had to check "Volkspolizei", the local police, to tell them at which relatives we stayed. We were driving an Audi80 coloured in "flamingo metallic" and everybody knew, those guys are "westerners". I'm glad I had this experience as a teenage boy, but I'm even more glad that teenagers in present Germany don't have to make this experience.

discontentedness...make it easy...discontent

;) 9 days ? ;) ... I spend 33 years in East Germany.. and I escaped.. 3 months before the border was opened.. Greetings out of the spring

They wanted you to hide them in the trunk.

@@cowsmuggler1646 Good thing I didn’t have a car !!!!!! I didn’t need to be tortured by the East German military. In reality, this year was one of my first experiences with actual communism, the iron curtain, and armed soldiers. I was a “book-learned” but rather naive young student and the real world had some shocks for me. Thanks for your reply Cow Smuggler.

@@johnmaryn4497 I mean, yea, the DDR sucked, but that situation? The Berlin wall thing isnt that different from the Mexican American border..the only thing different is that Mexico and USA are not mortal enemys.

@@foty8679 It was different though. The Berlin Wall had a killing zone where people were shot and killed trying to escape to West Berlin. For myself, seeing the Wall and the East German border guards showed me that “freedom” with all of its benefits (a more prosperous life) was something people were willing to risk their lives, often usually losing their lives. Thankfully, those days passed. The US border with Mexico has no one shooting at each other, though people do die in the deserts and river trying to get into the US. No one wants to see people or families lose their lives.

@@foty8679 Oh it is very different, except you want to talk about the structure itself. ;)

Thank you! People don't normally pay attention to such things, and cameras in those days were much bigger and heavier. I also carried a tripod for some scenes, it can be seen e.g. at 11:24 (very fuzzy) and I still have it and it still works(!) But the effort in general would have been _much_ heavier had I known this was really the last chance to film it. My plan was to continue filming in the summer of 1990, the footage you see here was really "just a test".

Views from the eastern side are shown until 4:46. As for the look of the western side, remember that the area near the wall (several metres typically) was in fact legally in the eastern sector, that's why it was so run down (it could not be developed by the western government).

"is a quiet and poor town"? The western part looks no different. And now, Germany has turned to semi-third-world.🤣

@@JanPBtest Yes, the western part is better, by definition, but not based on the video.

@@internetcensure5849 semi-third-world? Do you even live in germany?

@@internetcensure5849 Germany is probably the most first world nation in all of Europe, far better than any neighboring countries or France or England. You sound very American

das Gefühl habe ich auch noch......

Yes, it was something else! I came back in late November 1989 and remember _walking across_ the Brandenburg Gate, it was unbelievable. An advertising poster was on the wall's eastern side already, it said (IIRC): "Saatchi & Saatchi, first over the wall".

Must have been interesting!

Commie?

So much has changed!

"And in November 1989 the dictatorship was over." If it was true, you would have been shot on the spot. Proof it wasn't a dictatorship is you are alive to tell your story.

@@internetcensure5849 Such nonsense what they say! We were chased by dogs and beaten up with rubber clubs and arrested. The fact that there were no orders to shoot was just a coincidence and great luck for the people who were on the streets. You should look into the history of the GDR before you tell such stupid crap! At the border there was an order to shoot. Anyone trying to flee East Germany could be shot. Many died trying to escape. These murdered people who only wanted to live in freedom can no longer tell their story. Others who were fasted alive went to jail.

Thank you! As I mentioned in other posts, this was meant as a "test" for making a "proper" video "next year" (1990). And then November happened 🙂

So true. Like traveling to the past in some other communist countries, too...

Great description!

Was it actual Germans guarding border or Soviets.As far as I know were half million Soviet troops stationed in East Germany?

​@@billybigballs5776Allied Statutes prevented GDR authorities from dealing with Allied soldiers in Berlin. Each checkpoint had a small detachment of Soviet MPs. No GDR Border officer or VoPo was allowed to check or ID uniformed allied troops entering the Soviet sector or on the transit roads from and to Berlin or the Allied Military Missions. Allied soldiers on duty could travel pretty much all of the GDR with the exception of some regions where access was restricted by the Soviets. There's that legendary story where British Military Intelligence obtained info on the calibre of a new tank-mounted gun by sticking an apple at the end of the barrel and then simply measuring the dent it made....

The East Germans expected a brighter, more democratic more free future. Communists have always been optimists. They built the wall against fascism to prevent the society we live in today. Unfortunately, fascism won and we are now living in a dystopian, capitalist world that's being rapidly destroyed by the US empire. Even war returned to Europe and we are sacrificing our economy at the behest of our American masters. Our media and politicians are controlled by the US, people have been brainwashed to hate socialism and defend capitalism even as it collapses. We are totally enslaved while our children are brainwashed to falsely believe to be free. And due to the inevitable and increasing failure of capitalism, things are getting worse and overt fascism - not just fascism disguised as liberalism - is returning. The same propaganda the Nazis used against the Soviets and Jews is now being used against China, the US is even trying to start a world conflict against China. We live in a far worse place than Eastern Europeans imagined... communists thought we would colonize other planets by now, instead of still serving our billionaire masters. :(

Thank you! This footage was meant as a test for the "proper" documentation to be done next year (1990). I had a list of places I wanted to film "next year". Nobody knew the situation would change. I mean, look at North Korea, it's the same as it was in 1989.

Thanks! Needless to say, I'd have filmed _much_ more had I known the Wall would disappear within months. It was actually more difficult to film the wall from the eastern side because the police or the military would likely approach you. It happened to me once (two young guys with machine guns) and... I sort of _yelled:_ "What? Is this forbidden?!" I was very surprised that they just looked and walked away. When Wim Wenders was making his film _Wings of Desire_ (highly recommended), he approached the East Berlin authorities for a permit to film the wall from the eastern side. The way Wenders tells this story is that the eastern official just looked at him and started laughing. Wenders ended up filming a very short scene in East Berlin (in Prenzlauer Berg) in secret, and then smuggling the unprocessed film through Friedrichstrasse, half-expecting it to be confiscated. So these were the conniptions partially expected while doing this. I visited Ukraine (Lviv) about a year ago and in some ways it was less intimidating 🙂(if you didn't mind air raid sirens every day that is).

Thanks! I had bigger plans with many more bizarre wall places to film but got a bit lazy, going out with friends, etc., with plans to continue the following spring or summer. Of course nobody had a clue about the November! Which I also filmed but never posted (the Vivian Maier laziness phenomenon 🙂)

If you were not military, just a foreign tourist, you did give your passport to the border guards at Checkpoint Charlie and they would stamp it. I still have those stamps (and the Friedrichstrasse, Griebnitzsee, etc.) in my old passport. You also had to declare any hard currency you had, just list it on a piece of paper. It was forbidden for some reason to carry the eastern marks across. Of course I did sometimes, because of forgetfulness or just ignoring those "stupidities". And then off you go and, like you said, always a mild shock, in either direction. There was also a western S-Bahn line under East Berlin (like those two U-Bahn lines you mentioned) but because the S-Bahn still used the old 1930s cars (long story why), its doors were not kept mechanically shut while in motion: the mechanism only _closed_ them at station departure. So one could simply open the door while the train was in motion (a standard teenage entertainment then). So this meant that while riding along those ghost stations one could theoretically open the door and let the eastern guards in, since the trains always slowed down at those platforms for some reason. Because of that the East Berlin geniuses came up with a solution: steel mesh curtains hanging from the ceiling to the platform. The mesh was quite large but good enough to prevent an escape. This was not needed on the U-Bahn lines because their door were kept shut under pressure at all times. Those mesh curtains disappeared within few weeks after 9 November. There were many more such weird bits, my plan was to tape it all properly "next year". Meanwhile...

You are not in the video, are you? (haha) One of the posters here recognised the girl on the bicycle at 15:49, she was a waitress at a bar at Europa Center, so one never knows... I have panoramic shots of the wall taken from Reichstag Ufer (180-degree) but haven't even scanned those negatives yet. I guess I'm as bad as Vivian Meier at this.

@@JanPBtest Alas, no, that would have been so cool though. I was there for the European Association of Geoscientists and Engineers convention.

Ah yes, the passport control was interesting, very deliberate and always done without any trace of smile.

but the graffiti on the wall was only in the western part or was it also done in the eastern part? because I believe that in East Berlin the wall was absolutely unapproachable ...

@@ddr7246 Yeah its on the western facing part of the wall but its not built directly on the border but like 3 m on the east German side so workers and machines didnt have to cross over to W Berlin to build it.

@@antonk.2748 ok ... but the graffiti on the eastern part were there ??

I wish I filmed more, as I had originally planned. Who knew what would happen a few months later.