It was a sight I never thought I would see. Scores of jubilant West Berliners were sitting astride the Wall, or standing on a platform facing the barricaded Brandenburg Gate. Laughing, cheering, singing, they were waving at the bemused East German guards, revolvers locked in their holsters, standing impassively in the morning sun only a few feet away. A month ago they would have risked being shot.

I tried scrambling up to join them. The wall was higher than it seemed — a good 10ft (3m) of smooth, graffiticovered concrete, topped with a rounded coping that afforded no grip. Someone reached down to haul me up. Somewhere in the struggle I lost my house keys. Such are the banal details of an event that was to shake the world.

The wooden street barrier between East and West Berlin had been raised only hours earlier. In the heady atmosphere of protest and change, East Berliners had been watching the evening press conference of the party spokesman, outlining hastily improved arrangements giving access to West Berlin for the first time in 28 years. He stumbled through the hail of questions from Western reporters. When would this come into force? He fumbled through his notes. “Now. Immediately.”

Thousands made for the Wall. The Stasi guards were wholly unprepared: no notice, no orders, no precedent. Frantic calls were made to ask the Politburo whether force should be used. Could shots be fired into the crowd? No one picked up the phone. Finally, after hours of jostling, wrangling and cheering, the barrier was lifted. The gateway to the West was open.

Times Archive, 1961: Communists seal the Berlin border

Tanks and troops employed to hold refugees back, but hundreds still filter through the barricades

• Topic: Berlin Wall

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I got the call from the Times foreign desk late on Thursday evening on November 9, 1989: “The Berlin Wall is open. How soon can you get there?” I was on the plane from Brussels at 7am the next morning. “To the Wall!” I cried to the excited taxi driver. And then I saw it all. There was Potsdamer Platz, that bleak no man’s land where I had so often gazed from the West Berlin viewing platform across the minefields into the East. There was the Brandenburg Gate, the long sweep of Unter den Linden blocked by the ugly wall that cut off streets overgrown with weeds.

But this morning there was an incredible carnival atmosphere. People were excitedly chipping bits of concrete off the wall — the first holes in the once blood-soaked and impenetrable barrier.

Huge traffic jams built up as people abandoned work to witness the amazing scenes. West Berlin threw all rules to the wind. Cars were allowed to park anywhere and people rode free on public transport. The underground, which was already stopping at a newly opened station in the East, was dangerously overcrowded. On Saturday evening spontaneous street parties thronged the famous Kurfurstendamm. Bands played, people embraced one another, hotels handed out hot soup, dozens of firms distributed chocolate, fruit and souvenirs, and the big stores were overwhelmed with excited East Berliners gazing at the cornucopia of unimaginable prosperity and wildly scrambling to find something to take home.

No one knew where they were going, as West Berlin was marked only as a big white space on East German maps. Firms and newspapers had printed thousands of street plans that were handed out to visitors as they arrived. Those who exhausted their precious cash were given money by passers-by, while long queues built up outside the savings banks. Some even joined in the West Berlin lotto draws, hoping to win enough to make their dream trip come true.

At Checkpoint Charlie, the main crossing point for non-Germans, a huge crowd gathered to toast with “champagne” every East German car as it came across. Thousands applauded and thumped on the roof of each comical Trabant, shaking hands with the bemused families inside. They threw rice and confetti, and even the Stasi guards, uncharacteristically nonchalant, managed wintery smiles.

Never had so many East German cars, belching acrid blue fumes, been seen in West Berlin. Not since the last desperate days before the Wall went up in 1961 had so many “Ossis” streamed in. On Sunday morning there was to be an official ceremony to mark the opening of a new crossing point at Potsdamer Platz. Thousands of journalists waited on the Western side, perched in trees or on roofs to get a view of the crane about to lift a section of the Wall where a new Tarmac path had been laid across no man’s land to the Western checkpoint.

In the chill, foggy morning the ceremony began. The section of Wall was swung away and the mayors of East and West Berlin met. They shook hands and some solemn words were said. Few could hear or care what they said. Then a stream of East Germans came running down the path, barely pausing to have their passes stamped in the reception tent. They had arrived in the West. Indeed, they had arrived in the British Sector, and the British Army had set up a tent where squaddies were earnestly handing out mugs of tea. Few East Germans stopped to drink it. Long Bavarian horns sounded like trumpets to welcome the visitors.

People cheered. I blinked in amazement. Here was history happening. Like thousands of others, I could scarcely believe it.

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