By Kyi Carino
Over three decades ago on Jan. 20, 1989, University of Puget Sound German Professor, Kirsten Christensen, arrived at the United States Embassy in East Germany as a U.S. Diplomat. “There was no way that I could have known then what I was going to experience over the course of that year,” Christensen said. From the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, to experiencing East Berlin’s first free elections, Christensen was there for it all.
Christensen described her living conditions in Berlin at the “Fall of the Wall” campus event on Nov. 13, 2024. Sometimes, she could hear a third party breathing in during her phone calls. She’d also come home to find evidence that her place was searched — including rearranged items and cigarette butts on the terrace. Twenty-two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Christensen found a 435 page file by the Stasi (the East German secret police) about herself. The file included personal information such as summaries of phone calls, descriptions of items in her apartment and surveillance reports and logs of her border crossings. Christensen also found surveillance photographs of herself, the ambassador secretary, Margie and other close friends.
“It felt ominous to have my phone tapped. It felt ominous to have my apartment broken into. It felt ominous to find out all these years later that I’d been followed by the Stasi,” Christensen expressed.
Christensen described Berlin as an island within East Germany. The Soviets controlled the territory in all directions and the wall was constructed to isolate West Berlin, which was divided among western powers.
“If somebody had tried to get through and just walk through to the West, they would have been shot,” Christensen said. Christensen was able to move freely between the West and East because she was a diplomat.
Christensen was in the East when the wall fell on Nov. 9, 1989. She was occupied with work when a coworker entered her office saying, “I can’t get home. The wall is open.”
That evening, the West German News Program televised a press conference hosted by a member of the East German Central Committee, Günter Schabowski. At the end, Schabowski stated that the East German departments of passport and registration control ought to issue visas for those desiring leave: “that comes into effect, according to my information, immediately, without delay.”
Christensen shared the confusion that swamped East Germany after that fateful press conference. If you were not watching TV that evening, Christensen wondered, “where were they supposed to go to find that out?” She continued. “No offices were open. There was no one they could call to find out if this was true.” So what did the East Germans do?
“They went to the wall,” Christensen said.
Christensen and the ambassador’s secretary of her embassy, Margie, would join the people at the wall that cold November night. The pair locked their classified documents, gathered their videotapes and walked towards Checkpoint Charlie, the famous crossing point between East and West Berlin. “The closer we got to Checkpoint Charlie, the louder it became,” Christensen said. “We walked around the corner and saw all the people lined up.”
Border guards were not told beforehand of upcoming updates to travel regulations. Just like how people felt when the Wall was built on Aug. 13, 1961, Christensen said, “no one was prepared.” These guards were left to decide themselves whether or not to let people pass. “They were about to get overrun,” Christensen described.
The gates opened. “They just flooded through,” Christensen stated. As they walked past, Christensen said, “people were putting flowers in the guns of the border guards.”
In West Germany, some also saw the televised press conference that evening. They began walking to the wall to unite with fleeing East Germans. “It was just this amazing unification of everyone,” Christensen said. “There were lots of tears.”
“Some of them were seeing family and friends for the first time in 28 years,” Christensen expressed. Five months later in March 1990, Christensen would experience the first free elections in East Germany. “I was an election observer,” Christensen said. She described a packed room. “There were so many people in there who were so interested in this,” she said. Voter turnout would total 93.4 percent in that election, reported by the German Bundestag, Germany’s national parliament.
Many people of color also had difficulty finding work. Many were contracted under the East German government. When the government dissolved, there was no longer a contract, “no longer a support system,” Christensen said. She continued, “it didn’t take long before some people were already starting to say that they missed things in the East.”
Throughout her experiences, Christensen acknowledges her privileges: “They couldn’t keep me from exercising my profession, they couldn’t keep my kids from university, they couldn’t imprison me because I made a joke about not liking communism.”
While Christensen and other diplomats could walk up to the Wall and use it as a marker to navigate through Berlin, East Germans risked their lives doing the same.
Today, the fall of the Wall stays with Christensen. Every Nov. 9, it’s now tradition for Christensen to call Margie. “I saw both Berlins. By that, I don’t mean East Berlin and West Berlin. I mean a Berlin with a wall and a Berlin without a wall,” Christensen said.