After the Berlin Wall - Christopher Hilton

THE BERLIN WALL, one of the most powerful and enduring symbols of the Cold War, fell on 9 November1989. It would be another year before East and West Germany were officially reunified, but on this momentous day Germans from both sides flocked to the wall in celebration. Once the euphoria had died down, the unimaginable task of putting East and West back together began. For almost three decades the country and its capital had been divided between France, the UK and the USA in the west and the USSR in the east. How did one go about marrying a totalitarian, atheist, communist system with a democratic, Christian one? And how did this marriage affect the everyday life of ordinary Germans? There had been no warning of this marriage and no preparation for it - and no country had ever tried putting two completely opposite systems together before. This is the story of what happened, in the words of the people it happened to: the story of an incredible unification.

CHRISTOPHER HILTON was a journalist on the Daily Express and Sunday Express for many years before becoming a full-time author in 1990. He first visited Berlin in 1970 and became fascinated with it; his account of the divided city was published as The Wall: The People's Story in 2001.