30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall the two teams have let go of the ghosts of the past

Andreas applied for papers to leave East Germany in 1986. After a three-year wait his request was granted in July 1989. “As a 24-year-old I was ready for the west,” he says. Like everyone else he had little idea what would happen in just four months time. I ask him where in the west he wanted to go. “To West Berlin,” he replies.

On the eve of the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Andreas’s team Berliner FC Dynamo is in west Berlin, playing away in a Regionalliga Nordost fixture in the German fourth division. Home to FC Viktoria 1889 Berlin, the Lichterfelde stadium is just 10 miles from the Friedrich-Ludwig-Jahn-Sportpark in the north-east, where Berliner FC Dynamo plays. It’s easy to draw a line through the city from one ground to the other, but this is a Berlin derby that couldn’t have happened 30 years ago.

Hans Martin Fleischer bought the sections on impulse in 1990. His luck trying to sell them ran out, so he held on.

“The Berlin Wall was lifted – it did not fall,” insists Hans Martin Fleischer. The bureaucrat produces photographs and film footage shot on hand-held camera on 12 November 1989 – three days after the East German border was first breached. They show the first segments of the concrete barrier that had encircled West Berlin for 28 years being removed at night, amid a sea of camera flashes and applause.

Sparks fly as a worker in a hard hat uses an angle grinder to slice a huge slab emblazoned with a red swastika from one bearing an interlocking hammer and sickle – graffiti painted on the western side in protest at the 1939 non-aggression pact between the Stalinist and Nazi regimes, which paved the way for the second world war and the consequent division of Europe that led to the construction of the Berlin Wall.

Three decades on, the country’s unification is still a source of sadness and trauma – which the far right know how to exploit

I was 15 when the Berlin Wall came down. Everything changed: the east adopted not just the West German currency, but all its laws and rules and values. Thousands of companies were privatised within four years of the wall falling – millions lost their jobs, and millions more migrated to the west in search of better paid work. In 1994, only 18% of East German employees still worked at the same place as they had in 1991, according to the historian Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk.

There were new and often completely disorientating experiences for many: unemployment had not existed in the GDR. No one even knew the meaning of betriebsbedingte kündigung – compulsory redundancy – or where unemployment benefits came from. In the GDR, work had been so much more than a source of income; life revolved around the workplace. Companies often had their own singing or sports clubs, and their own childcare and health services. My dad, a metal worker, lost his job after the unification. It was a shock – he felt guilty and ashamed. But it took him years to find the words to express his feelings. “I didn’t realise the gravity of the situation,” he said to me 20 years later.