BINARY DOMAIN
Rain is falling on the morning of November 14 as the 8.15 to Rathaus Spandau pulls away from Falkensee Bahnhof. A vertical blade pulls across the sheer windscreen, neatly dividing the glass into wet and not-wet. Cobbles beneath the wheels rattle the frame of the bus until it reaches the main road, where the percussion becomes irregular, kicking in at intervals as the wheels dip in and out of potholes. These pockmarked streets are shared with the Trabants, the boxy sedans which had seemed so modern in the 1950s; now, in 1989, their missing turn signals make them an antiquated hazard. Nobody gets off at the last stop before the border checkpoint, a fresh breach in the Wall that opened up for traffic just yesterday. For decades, passing through could have meant imprisonment or death. But at a press conference four days ago, the GDR’s governing party announced an end to travel restrictions between East and West Germany. “As far as I know, it takes effect immediately,” East Berlin boss Günter Schabowski had said. “Without delay.”
“YOU CROSS THE STREET AND, SUDDENLY, THE ARCHITECTURE IS QUITE RADICALLY DIFFERENT”
He was wrong – the party had intended the border to open up the following day – but it didn’t matter. Hours after his comments were broadcast, 10,000 people were at the Bornholmer Bridge checkpoint in Berlin. In the absence of orders, the border guards relented, but stamped the passports of those at the front of the queue in such a way as to deny them re-entry. It was a final, impotent act by a state still working to keep tabs on its people, even after the point it had lost the capacity to wield that coveted information against them. Cardboard signs sit in the windows of the Rathaus Spandau bus, hurried and temporary. Public transport routes were one of the first things to change when construction of the
