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.