Brett Neely

November 9th is a complicated day in German history. In addition to marking the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, it was also the day in 1938 when Nazi-led mobs attacked synagogues, Jewish businesses and Jews on the streets of Germany. In 1918, it was the day the Weimar Republic was founded and in 1848, it was the day the last of the German revolutionaries of the 1848 revolutions was executed, marking an end to Germans’ first attempts at creating a constitutional government. That’s German history for you, the highs are stratospheric, the lows hellish.

While there is plenty of coverage of the day, including some of my own, I’d like to share one story, told to me by a neighbor.

She and her husband have lived on my street for 42 years, when the neighborhood, Prenzlauer Berg, was in such disrepair that balconies often collapsed without warning. Many buildings were still heated by coal and bathrooms were often shared between several apartments.

In the fall of 1989 one of their two daughters fled to the West via Hungary, like so many East Germans did that autumn, precipitating the regime’s collapse. The second daughter had remained and was barely out of school, just 19 or 20. It was early November and suddenly, perhaps like any teenager, she wanted an apartment of her own.

She went with her mother to the nearby office that doled out apartments to see if one was available but none were even though there were dozens of empty apartments nearby because so many people had left the country in the past few weeks. They leave the office and the daughter turns to her mother and said, “Mother, this is the last straw, I’m going to the West, too. I just can’t be here.”

The mother looked at me while telling this story and said, “I had just lost one daughter a few weeks before and didn’t know if I would ever see her again. And then my other daughter says she wants to go to the West too. Because she couldn’t get an apartment. It was the worst day of my life.”

The mother walked back into the housing office. One of the women working there was an acquaintance and sees that the mother is near tears and pulls her aside to ask what’s wrong. The mother explains and the housing woman says, “I can take care of this.”

She goes into a back office and returns a few minutes later with a key, saying, “This one will work.” The mother goes outside and gives the key to her daughter, who’s overjoyed about the apartment and stops talking about going West. It was November 7, 1989.

Two days later, it’s all irrelevant, the mother tells me, the Wall is gone and the fear that families could be separated, never to reunite again, is gone. And she says that day, November 9, 1989, was one of the happiest days of her life, not just because they could travel freely, but because her newly shattered family was made whole once again.