In the second part of our series, Jenny Laue, who was born and grew up in East Berlin, speaks to her family about how they felt when their world was changed for ever.

ON THE Western side of the Berlin Wall on the day they came to smash it down on November 9, 1989, there was jubilation. It was the end of division and it meant freedom for all those poor souls who had had to endure life on the other side. It was a great day. Wasn’t it?

Well, not necessarily. On the Eastern side of the Wall there were those who were happy to have been “liberated”, but just as many of us feared terribly for our futures.

I was born in East Berlin in 1976 and I had just turned 14 when the events that shaped the rest of my life unfolded.

Since I moved to the UK 12 years ago, people are always asking me what it was like growing up behind the Iron Curtain. “Did you really have to queue for food?” they ask. “Did you have sweets in the GDR?” “Were you made to take steroids?”

Although I can say a categorical no to all those questions, I wish I’d paid more attention to the political climate that existed then. Like any other 14-year-old, I wasn’t remotely interested in politics.

But then came November 9, the day the Berlin Wall finally crumbled. Here was something that immediately and directly affected me, my family and all my friends.

My mother, Ute, and her mother, my grandma, Elfriede, both lived on the other side in the German Democratic Republic for most of their adult lives. When the three of us talk about the fall of the Wall, it becomes clear that none of us felt the euphoria so many of our countrymen and women did. Forget all the press pictures being sent around the world of jubilant East Berliners dancing on the Wall, or news reports that we all were being swept away by a surging spirit of optimism. What we had was an overwhelming feeling of dread, especially my mother, then 35, who had two children to bring up and had never known anything else but communism.

“To this day I have mixed feelings about the Wall coming down,” she says. “I was really scared because I just didn’t know what would become of us. When everything that I had known before disappeared, I was so scared I just cried. It wasn’t that we were hard-core communists, it was more the uncertainty over our future. I just couldn’t understand that everything we had worked for, that we believed in, could be taken away from us just like that.

It couldn’t have been a bigger impact if you’d dropped a bomb on our house.”

MY grandmother, Elfriede, then 59, was about to go into retirement when she watched events unfold on a portable TV as she started the night shift at a factory in the north-east of Germany, near the Polish border.

She reacted with the stoicism. Being of a generation who grew up during the Second World War – another time of great social change – her first thought was ‘we’ve seen it all before’.

“I remember telling my younger colleagues there and then that there was going to be widespread unemployment in the East and that it wasn’t going to be the mythical land of plenty they’d hoped for. I knew what was coming for us and that the euphoria was going to leave a bitter taste in people’s mouths. And I was right.

People lost everything and it was like 1945 all over again when the Russians rolled into East Germany and plundered shops, houses and churches,” she says.

Until that November day, my own childhood and teenage years had been fairly uneventful.

It might have been communist propaganda, but I was aware of how secure my life was, and I considered myself lucky to be growing up protected by the Wall.

We had everything we needed, food, clothes, luxury goods, a great healthcare and school system and we never needed to worry about money, drugs or losing our jobs. Granted, we couldn’t holiday in the Bahamas – not being able to travel was quoted as the number one reason that brought about the change – but who cared when we had our own beautiful country to explore, as well as others such as Russia, Mongolia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, Poland, Czechoslovakia and even Angola?

All of a sudden, my parents’ jobs were under threat. They feared losing their life savings, and they feared a greedy capitalist landlord was going to take over our block of flats and either charge exorbitant rent or kick us out on the street. From the point of view of a 14-yearold girl everything was better in the GDR, so much so that my classmates and I referred to the past as “peace times”.

OF course, Germans have this wonderful skill, developed from two world wars, of rising from the ruins. My family isn’t any different. We quickly picked up the pieces and moved on. Otherwise, I would not be sitting here, doing a job I love, in a country I’ve adopted as my home.

As I write this, I’m expecting the fourth generation of my family. My daughter, who will be born in January, will know nothing about living in a divided country. She will grow up free to choose where she goes and what she does.

Naturally, I will endeavour to explain what November 9, 1989, meant for us, but will she really understand the far-reaching consequences the fall of the Berlin Wall had? I think, most probably, not.