MORE than 1m Germans from East and West held the world’s biggest nonstop party in Berlin yesterday as their sober leaders tried in vain to dampen the euphoria by warning that a united Germany was not yet on the political agenda.

East Berliners poured into West Berlin to celebrate their liberty on free beer and wine, and late last night one 24-year-old visitor from the East gave birth to a baby girl on one of the city’s bustling streets, to the delight of the partying crowds.

The new life seemed symbolic. Berlin was itself a city reborn. The party clogged the streets as the barriers that divided Germany melted like the ice of the cold war. Officials said well over 1m people had passed the frontiers from East Germany into West Berlin and West Germany in a matter of hours.

Running through a cheering gauntlet of beery West Berliners dancing on the wall and throwing flowers at bewildered Checkpoint Charlie border guards, Christiane Schulz, Janna Meyer and Andrea Fleischer came whooping into the West, spraying Rotkäppchen, the fizzy party plonk of the East, at grinning policemen.

Until 8pm they had had a normal dull evening serving pigs’ knuckles and mushy peas to Russian tourists at the Hotel Stadt Berlin (East). Then came the news that the wall was open.

They bit their lips and looked at each other. With Teutonic thoroughness they worked until the end of their shift at 2.30am before Andrea turned to the others and, with a nervous giggle, said: “Anyone for the Kurfürstendamm?” For the first time in their lives, three girls from the East could go to the West End for the evening.

For one delirious night most of East Berlin took a walk on the wild side: two-stroke “Trabbies”, the East’s glass fibre midget cars, raced Mercedeses along the glitzy avenues, littered with broken bottles beneath a sky ablaze with fireworks; it was as if a long-awaited marriage had occurred: Berlin embraced Berlin.

Policemen (West) kissed bus conductresses (East). “Berlin is again Berlin. Germany weeps with joy,” screamed the headlines on special-edition tabloids handed out free on the streets of the West.

From a telephone box Andrea woke her parents in the East: “Mutti, I’m on the Ku’damm. It’s mad. It’s marvellous. Oh don’t be cross – I’m coming back.”

Then “Yahoo!” and into the mêlée.

Others had their hearts in their mouths. Petra Lorenz, a dumpy, middle-aged mother-of-two, had travelled from her flat in Marzahn, the high-rise suburb of East Berlin, leaving her husband to look after their children. “Don’t be daft; it’s a lie,” he had said.

She wandered in a trance on the Western side of Checkpoint Charlie and went back with a newspaper as a souvenir from a dream.

The burning question in everyone’s mind was answered by a bus driver from the East, smiling with a crisp certainty. “Can they take back their decision, close the wall again? Never. We’ll see them sink in ashes first.”

At 9am, when KaDeWe, the Harrods of West Berlin, opened its doors, the East Berliners flooded in to stare. Top of the gawps was the mountainous meat and fruit display on the “Gourmet Floor”.

But most only window-shopped. The border might be open but their pockets were empty. The counter assistants had been told to accept East German marks – but at a ratio of 10 to one.

The stream of honking Eastern cars continued to flow down the Ku’damm over the border and along Unter den Linden. The wall before the Brandenburg Gate looked more redundant than ever.

Only the British, French and American allies seemed mildly uncomfortable, their position in Berlin suddenly as doubtful as anyone else’s.

By dawn yesterday, queues of Trabbies more than 20 miles long stretched back from East German frontiers as families from Leipzig or Dresden took a day trip to Bavaria and Mecklenburgers went shopping in Hamburg. But no one denied that it was Berlin’s party.

The religious knelt in the streets as the church bells of West Berlin sounded to welcome the visitors.

Was it fate that decreed that the wall should start to crumble on November 9, exactly 51 years after Kristallnacht, the Jewish pogrom engraved in shame on Germany’s soul? Had God relented after half a century of purgatory?

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