A trip to Berlin with John Smith before the wall came down

Last Sunday night 8,000 illuminated balloons, tethered along eight miles of Berlin’s former inner-city border between East and West Germany, were released into the sky to commemorate the dismantling of the Berlin Wall 25 years ago. The wall, built to stem a growing flood of East Berliners to the western part of the city, had stood from 1961 until 1989, when it was breached as the consequence of a muddled East German response to a wave of protest by people demanding democracy and freedom of movement against a background of liberalisation in the Soviet Union. East Germany’s communist government suddenly announced that its citizens would be allowed to travel, and tens of thousands of them turned up at a checkpoint where border guards, lacking any clear instructions, let them through.

The wall stood for 28 years, but I missed it altogether. I have only visited Berlin twice — the first time in 1960, a year before the wall went up, and again in 1996, seven years after it came down.