there. I lived in Prenzlauer Berg during that time ... and you had to go ... So if you have here West Berlin and here East Berlin, maybe we can make it that the face is East Berlin and the hair is West Berlin and the eye is Prenzlauer Berg. It’s not really perfect, but okay ... And then you had to go south and around this corner, and where these little hanging things are, that’s Potsdam. It took you about two and half hours if you went fast.
So I went with my parents to this event. A lot of intellectuals came, a lot of people from the film scene in East Germany. And I remember I had never experienced something like that ... I was surprised about this energy in this space. The main criticism of Markus Wolf was, that he finished the book of his brother, so everybody was telling him that he had a lot of conflicts with his brother, and also that he was jealous of him and that his brother is a better intellectual than he himself. Most of the people spoke very clearly and brought a lot of input. I had the feeling they really knew what they were saying. But in between somebody came and asked the audience if they knew what was happening at that moment in Berlin, in Bornholmer Straße in Prenzlauer Berg. People didn‘t really know ... I didn’t know. I asked my mother and she said, ‘Ja, I did hear something on the radio news.’ I was shocked.
After the event was over I wanted to leave, I wanted to go to the house of my parents and see on the TV what was happening. But instead we were waiting at the entrance of the building – it was on the Heiliger See in Potsdam. Maybe somebody knows it? Now it is a restaurant. But before it was a cultural place called Bernhard Kellermann*. My mother met another woman, and they talked. Then Markus Wolf came. He was standing next to this woman. Later on I realised that this woman was ... the Fußpflegerin ... the pedicurist of my mother in the DEFA film studios. She was the new wife of Markus Wolf. We said hello to Markus Wolf. Even so he was a figure we really hated, which I think you can understand. Then finally we went home and saw on the news what
happened. I decided to go directly to Berlin to ... to ... ja ... to this place in Prenzlauer Berg, in Bornholmer Straße.
It took me a long time to get to Berlin. On the way I realised that I had forgotten my passport in the publishing house I was working at during that time. The publishing house was – and this was the image I wanted to bring – the last building on Leipziger Straße, so not so far from the Tresor and ...
Potsdamer Platz ... first Leipziger Straße later Potsdamer Platz. It was the very last building. Now it’s the Federal Council, Bundesrat. I worked in this building as a producer for magazines. The special thing was ... when I went to colleagues
... other people in the house, I could always see the west. First you saw a huge field of nothing, then the wall, and nothing, then the west.
I was on the train when I realised that I didnt have my passport. And I thought I cannot go to the border, because I don’t have my passport. So I went home. Maybe I can stop here ... since that was the day.
And then on the next day I was waiting quite long. Just in the afternoon I went with my uncle to the west. We went to the checkpoint at Invalidenstraße. It was a very special situation. Later I saw a scene in a movie or on TV ... of The Beatles walking through a corridor of people, ja, where people stand left and right at the airport in New York ... and to walk like this, people crying and screaming next to you, hands on shoulders ...
It was a really strange story and maybe only in fragments. But this was really a strange day, and changed my life completely.
* Bernhard Kellermann, author and poet, wrote the novel Der 9. November (The Ninth of November) in 1920.