His World Collapsed the Night the Berlin Wall Fell. Then Came the Hard Part.
Ruth Bender
3 hrs ago 
Falk Fleischer (third from left) and fellow East German soldiers at Checkpoint Charlie, moments after the fall of the Berlin Wall on Nov. 9, 1989. © Mark Power/Magnum PhotosFalk
The smells were foreign to Falk Fleischer. Even the cigarette smoke felt different. He heard Champagne corks popping. A hand flipped his cap off his head. Another pinned a flower to his lapel.
The 20-year-old East German border guard in training disentangled himself from the other soldiers. There was no point trying to block the crowd from entering the forbidden zone. At first, people trickled through the border one by one; then the trickle became a stream. The guards were no longer checking passports. In the ruckus, he recalled, a woman walked by with a circus bear on a leash.
It was Nov. 9, 1989, at the Checkpoint Charlie crossing between divided East and West Berlin. For most Germans, it was a night of joy. The infamous Berlin Wall had become history. The East German people, having defeated one of the Soviet bloc’s most repressive dictatorships, was bursting through the barrier. But for Mr. Fleischer, it was the night his own world collapsed.
One of the pictures taken that night by the British photographer Mark Power captured a group of young, gangly East German soldiers who barely filled their uniforms. In the middle is Mr. Fleischer, staring into a void. Three decades later, The Wall Street Journal went searching for the young soldiers. It found the story of a man’s struggle to reconstruct his life in a strange new Germany.
At the time, Western politicians, academics and journalists—like most Germans on both sides of the wall—grossly underestimated the complexities of merging two countries separated for 40 years. Mr. Power’s photograph, with its ambivalence and sense of the unknown, was a more prescient portrait of what was about to unfold than the images of celebration that flooded the world in the days after Nov. 9.
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http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/his-world-collapsed-the-night-the-berlin-wall-fell-then-came-the-hard-part/ar-BBWpx3v?ocid=ientp
