- Title: From "Alice in Wonderland" to dog-walking: Germans recall fall of Berlin Wall
- Date: 24th October 2019
- Summary: BERLIN, GERMANY (OCTOBER 22, 2019) (REUTERS) (SOUNDBITE) (German) WOMAN WHO LIVED IN EAST GERMANY, DAGMAR SIMDORN, SAYING: "It was almost like Alice in Wonderland. You just stood there with an open mouth and a hand in front of it... ohhh."
- Embargoed: 7th November 2019 08:47
- Keywords: Berlin Wall Fall of the Berlin Wall East Germany West Germany Berlin Wall memorial anniversary
- Location: BERLIN, GERMANY
- City: BERLIN, GERMANY
- Country: Germany
- Topics: Human Interest / Brights / Odd News,Society/Social Issues,Editors' Choice
- Reuters ID: LVA002B2GG2FB
- Aspect Ratio: 16:9
- Story Text: EDITORS PLEASE NOTE: CONTAINS VIDEO WHICH WAS ORIGINALLY 4:3
Dagmar Simdorn had just been to visit her late husband's grave when she walked out of the cemetery and looked along her street towards the austere Berlin Wall checkpoint at Bernauer Strasse. There was an opening.
Walking the short distance along her quiet street in East Berlin, she could see the Wall had not been completely torn down, but there were ways through. So she peered into the West.
"You could look up the Bernauer Strasse and had a free view of everything. It was like Alice in Wonderland," recalled Simdorn, now 81, who grew up during World War Two and then lived in East Germany on the front line of the Cold War.
The Berlin Wall, erected in 1961, ran along Bernauer Strasse, which became famous for escapes from apartment block windows and through tunnels running underneath it. Ten people are also known to have died trying to escape the area.
Just a stone's throw away in the west, Angelika Bondick's experience of the Wall and its fall was more humdrum.
Her former husband used to raise his beer to the guards in the Bernauer Strasse watchtower above the 'death strip', and she occasionally waved at them from their flat on the same street.
Bondick, now aged 63, still lives in the same apartment building, the old watchtower still visible from her balcony.
When the Wall fell, she was asleep or busy with her children - she can't quite remember - and missed it to start with. In any case, she had often visited East Berlin to see family. The Wall had simply been a given.
In the days after it fell, easterners formed long queues to buy fruit in the supermarket where she worked, a job she still does. More tourists flocked to the new museum outside her flat.
Once the Wall area was cleared away, there was one major advantage: "It (the border strip area) was free for our dogs and we could let them run around. That was really nice for the dog owners. So in that instance the border strip was positive in the end."
(Production: Oliver Ellrodt, Tanja Daube, Paul Carrell, Barbara Woolsey) - Copyright Holder: REUTERS
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