By Daniel Wirtheim, Features Editor

Published in print Nov.12, 2014

When Vasyl Taras left the Soviet Union to live in Germany, it was as if he his life until then had been a lie. Sturdier metal cars replaced the plastic cars of the Soviet Union. The letter he wrote to his parents in Ukraine became more legible as the roads became smoother. His entire life he was told that things were better on his side, that he was blessed to be living in an Eastern, Soviet controlled country.

“It was like when Neo swallowed the red pill,” said Taras. “We knew that we lived in the best country in the world, but now I was beginning to look at things and think ‘something is not right.”

Before 1989, the Eastern Bloc extended almost halfway through Germany, which culminated in Der Berliner Mauer, or the Berlin Wall. The wall divided the capital city between West and East, capitalist and communist. East Berlin authorites called it the “Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart.” The westerners looked at it with disgrace.

The wall illustrated the polarized ideologies of the Cold War. Each team, the Soviets and the Allies, had to be stronger than the other.

“We use to collect pencils and erasers among other things to send to the poor little American children,” said Taras. “We had honestly felt bad for them, that they lived in such a terrible capitalist country.”

On November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall was demilitarized after a series of radical legislature passed by the East Berlin government. This came as a shock to those who had lived in a divided Berlin for nearly 28 years. Reinhard von Hennigs was enrolled at a university in Western Germany when he heard the news.

“I was preparing for a big exam the next day, and my friends came to my room shouting, ‘the wall is coming down,” said Hennigs. “I told them, ‘get out,’ I have an exam tomorrow, I don’t have the time for jokes.”

This was the evening of November 9, the night that was filmed in the most famous clips of the wall’s deconstruction.

Thousands of citizens celebrated on top the wall, where they once would have been shot. The next morning, Hennigs and a friend went to East Berlin, to see the change with their own eyes.

“We brought food and other supplies. There was a famine in the East, and very little food for the people,” said Hennigs. “It was different, you know? I knew that when the guard used the word ‘dude.’ Before that, it was unthinkable to cross the border.”

The next day, Eastern Berliners poured into the West, gaping at a world they thought they would never see. The westerers threw flowers, welcoming those eager to see a new side of Berlin.

“Before [that day] if you were to tell me that the wall could come down, I would have never believed it,” said Hennings. “East and West Berlin was like North and South Carolina … It’s as if I were to say that you and I could leave for the moon today. Would you believe that? Would you go to the moon with me today?”

Although there was no such thing as homelessness or joblessness in the Eastern Bloc, food was scarce. Citizens were paid twice a day, and would spend their morning wages before the evening to avoid daily inflation.

“There were factories that employed almost 1,500 people, but only needed 50 people,” said Hennigs. “That was because everyone had to have a job. Now the factories could let people go and there would be 1,450 looking for jobs. What do you do then?”

The economic effects of the wall are still felt in some parts of Germany today. A poll by the Daily Mail, a British media outlet, found that nearly 20 percent of East Germans today wish that the wall still stood. They claim that they feel like class-B German citizens. They’re opposed by the 71 percent who believe reunification made their lives better.

The German department at UNCG hosted the Symposium, ‘Looking Back, Moving Forward,’ in which both Taras and Hennigs told their stories.