Here are two views of former East Berlin from the TV tower. In the first notice the kind of large concrete buildings that seem to be everywhere. That was typical Communist style, uninspiring at best, ugly at worst. On the right you can see the old Reichstag, the dome is behind the building that looks like a computer screen, with a large black area in the middle. Two the right of the old Reichstag you can barely make out some construction. They are building a new main train station right near the center of the city. The current Berlin Zoo station is on the edge of Tiergarten, the big park visible in the last set of photos. Below you can see Alexanderplatz, the central piazza of old East Berlin. 500,000 met there in a protest on November 5, 1989, putting pressure on a tottering government that four days later let the Berlin wall fall. Ironically, that was an accident. Gunter Schobowski, press spokesperson for the old GDR, made a mistake at a press conference. At 6:55 PM, November 9, 1989, just five minutes before the conference was to end, he answered a question from an Italian journalist about travel between East and West. He had been given a plan that would go in effect the next day to allow limited travel, but falsely said it allowed travel "immediately" across all borders between East and West Germany, including Berlin. At first people didn't know what to make of that, no one dreamed it meant that people could cross over. The East German Politburo, who ran the government, were in a meeting until 11:00 PM and didn't know what was happening. West Berlin mayor Walter Momper got on TV (and East Berliners could get West TV) and told the city about Schowbowski's announcement and said it was an historic day for Berlin. East Berliners then decided to try it out and headed for the borders (by now it was about 9:00 PM). The border guards didn't know what was going on, they had received no special orders. After a lot of confusion they let the growing crowd go to the otherside and soon the East German state was past the point of no return. The result was that within a month almost the entire East bloc would fall. A mistake by a government official at a press conference and a people willing to protest and demand change brought about the downfall of communism. Power to the people!