The Berlin Wall: a victim of bananas (Feature)

Hamburg - On Thursday evening, November 9, 1989, West German public TV stations signed off the air at about midnight, as usual. Residents of Hamburg, a mere 50 kilometres from the East German border, went to bed, dreaming of little than the next workday and the following weekend. Little did they know it would be a Friday like no other. The next day, people in Hamburg and other West German cities along the East German border awoke to find convoys of drably dressed people driving dilapidated East German cars through their streets in search of - of all things - bananas! Suddenly, roads blocked off for nearly 30 years were open to traffic. Homes which had fronted on idyllic isolation on a dead-end street suddenly fronted major east-west thoroughfares clogged with cross-border traffic and exhaust fumes. And all because of bananas. Over the years, the 'Banana Revolution' theory has faded from memory. But on the weekend after the Berlin Wall checkpoints opened, people in West Germany were dumbfounded by the veritable convoys of East Germans - traveling together because they had no maps - on shopping expeditions in search of the tropical fruit. West German food retailers displayed their capitalist cunning by setting up produce stands on major roads. They quickly learned, however, that the hordes of East German shoppers were not interested in kiwi fruit or mangoes. All they really wanted was bananas. Within days, hastily set-up vendors were competing for customers on every street corner in West German cities. The wide-eyed East German visitors obediently formed long queues. It was a memorable sight. On an upscale street in Hamburg lined with couture boutiques, nattily dressed West Germans would be laden with parcels from high-end shops as they passed a sidewalk banana vendor where a long, long line of grey-clad East Germans waited patiently for a bunch of bananas. In those heady, early days of November, more than a few West Germans would raid a pricey nearby supermarket, purchase armloads of bananas - and then distribute them free of charge to the 'Ossis' - the German term for people from the East, or 'Ost Deutschland' - who were shivering in the queue at the fruit stand. Thus, the first contact between Ossis and Wessis (people from 'West Deutschland') was when a couple of bananas were exchanged with a smile and a handshake. It all happened so quickly, and so unexpectedly. In hindsight, and after 20 years of historical research, Germans now know that the fall of the Berlin Wall resulted from behind-the-scenes diplomacy dating back months or even years. But, that November, Germans everywhere - including journalists - were clueless about what was coming. Indeed, back then, there was no 24-hour, all-news broadcaster in Germany. Indeed, CNN had not yet expanded beyond the shores of the US. At about 11:30 pm that Thursday evening, NDR television in West Germany aired a final newscast in which it was reported that the East German government had announced an easing of visa restrictions. Night editors at Deutsche Presse-Agentur (dpa) were brewing coffee when an urgent bulletin arrived from a Berlin correspondent saying people were flooding through one checkpoint along the Berlin Wall. There were no cell phones. No Twitter. Berlin news staffers had to find public phones (a rarity in East Berlin) to call in their sketchy reports to the editorial offices. There was no live TV coverage because the German postal service was in charge of satellite uplinks. Those had to be booked well in advance - not at midnight on a Thursday night. Two fledgling commercial channels, RTL Plus and Sat.1, managed to get on the air at 5 am with live reports. But the mighty public broadcasters did not get on the air until midday Friday. Thus, West German newspapers that Friday said nothing about the Berlin Wall and TV viewers could see no footage, unless they had access to the upstart commercial channels. Radio was the only up-to- date source of news. Indeed, most West Germans only realized something was afoot when they looked out their windows and saw convoys of two-cylinder East German Trabant cars putt-putting through their streets. And a lot of those first ventures westward were due to a scarcity of bananas in Communist East Germany. Coffee and chocolate were also in short supply, but bananas were unobtainable. In March 1990, the East German assembly would take a first historic vote on steps toward German unification, which would be realized October 3, 1990. After the vote, when it became clear that German unification was a certainty, journalists asked a prominent West German leftist politician named Otto Schily if he could explain the speed with events were occurring. Schily, who would later become a cabinet minister in unified Germany, said nothing. Instead, he pulled a banana from his briefcase and held it high for the cameras to see. He smiled and nodded knowingly. The banana had brought down the Berlin Wall.