It is not only spies, spooks and Bohemians who look back on life before the fall of the Wall with nostalgia. For 40 years Berlin was the front line between East and West; the place where systems clashed, danger loomed and the ghosts of the past haunted the divided city.

Until 1989 Berlin, East and West, was frozen in time: a city where allied, four-power rule still held theoretical sway, where the bombed-out remnants of the Third Reich were still visible and where people lived on the edge, ready at any moment for a new East-West crisis to explode in their midst. There was a frisson to life that, since reunification, has evaporated.

Reminders of the past were everywhere. Even the flight to the city was governed by four-power agreement set up amid the ruins of the Reich.

Only the airlines of the three Western Allies — Britain, France and America — could fly there from West German cities. They had to fly along strictly demarcated corridors, never more than 10,000ft (3,048m) high in East German airspace (the maximum height for most aircraft in 1945) — which meant a bumpy ride in the clouds. Landing in West Berlin, the planes made a hair-raising steep turn to avoid overflying the wall before landing.

The night the Wall came down

The photographer Robert Wallis was in Berlin by chance on November 9, 1989. Here he shares his pictures and memories

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BACKGROUND

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On one of the underground lines a sinister recording would warn passengers as they reached Kochstrasse: “Last station in West Berlin”. The doors would close and the train set off underneath the Wall, passing rapidly through twilit, deserted stations in East Berlin, their entrances sealed and their platforms patrolled by armed guards. The train stopped once, at Friedrichstasse, where wary Western visitors could disembark, pass through checkpoints and emerge into the heart of East Berlin. And then the train kept going, back under the Wall, until it re-emerged in West Berlin.

Offices, embassies and monuments that were caught up in Berlin’s division stood empty, stark reminders of a turbulent past. The Italians and Japanese, Hitler’s allies, built grandiose embassies during the Nazi years. Badly bombed and abandoned after the war, Mussolini’s huge marble palace was largely in ruins, home to stray goats, while a single light burnt in the small section inhabited by a security guard.

The old city centre was a no man’s land, the deadly strip between East and West. Kreuzberg and other districts by the Wall had sunk into poverty, a bohemian quarter of Turkish immigrants, students and hippies who flocked there to avoid conscription in the Bundeswehr (it did not apply in West Berlin).

Indeed, the city’s population was disproportionately old and young: prim, pre-war ladies in flower pot hats who had lived through the bombing, the occupation and the ruins, as well as immigrants, students, artists and all those attracted by the hothouse atmosphere of a city shut in by the Wall.

West Berlin’s encirclement encouraged a frenetic, hedonistic atmosphere. The clubs, the shopping and the partying on the Kurfürstendamm, the glitzy main street of the West, went on all night, every night. The department store KDW — Kaufhaus des Westens — paraded more glitter, more luxury, more wealth and exotic fruits than anywhere else in the West just to remind the visitors what they could not find across the Wall.

The British, Americans and French owned all the big houses in their respective quarters, gave the best parties, and maintained a discreet though powerful presence. The British Army occasionally showed the flag by going on helicopter Wall patrol.

It was an eerie experience, flying just inside the deadly boundary, gazing down at the guards, the minefields and the impenetrable barrier. A little village, Steinstucken, a West Berlin exclave, could be reached only by a road with the Wall on either side. The helicopter had to dip down and fly only feet above the road to remain in Western airspace.

Spies were swapped across Glienecke bridge that led to Potsdam in the East. The Reichstag remained empty and abandoned on the front line in the West, cut off by the nearby Brandenburg Gate by the ugly wall, its historic symbolism forever out of reach.

Surrounded by ghosts and guards, life was lived at twice the pace in the old West Berlin. It was grim. But it was fun.

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