"When the border opened, I came up with something special: our first new town sign. A member of our SPD group in Hohen Neuendorf arranged to have the standard metal sheet cut; a master painter from Hennigsdorf took care of the lettering; craftsmen from the municipal housing combine manufactured the metal stake, and then the sign was mounted onto it. With all the work finished, and after a friendly talk with an officer of the East German border troops, I set off on the evening before the Wall was to open in the Frohnau region to erect our new town sign. When I was done, I covered it with a blanket. The following morning, after the district mayor Detlef Dzembritzki from Reinickendorf and the French military governor had arrived, I unveiled the sign. It read 'Frohnau/Land Berlin' on the East side; and 'Hohen Neuendorf/Land Brandenburg', on the West.
Only a few weeks later, this very first town sign was removed and disposed of by a high-ranking officer with military authority within the Hennigsdorf Border Troops. It is a shame to have lost this testimony to the times, for there would have been a place for it today in our Hohen Neuendorf History Workshop. For me, it was the birth certificate of Land Brandenburg, which was not officially constituted until 1990; I had known it as a state from when I attended Hohen Neuendorf Primary School between 1933 and 1939. In any case, my sign was the most photographed one around: people cheerfully posed in front of it to commemorate the fall of the Wall. At times there were as many as ten different people taking photos or filming simultaneously. And a resident of Frohnau had filmed me, too, one day earlier, while I was erecting our new town sign."
Text: Günter Siebert (Hohen Neuendorf), Video: Dirk Liborius
