On the evening of November 9th, 1989, Gunter Leo was on duty as usual, commanding the East German border guards on the stretch of wall running through the centre of the city. Watching television with two colleagues, he saw Gunter Schabowski, a member of the Politburo, announcing that, with immediate effect, easterners would be permitted to cross into the west.
"We had no choice and had to let everyone go through. Our officers were totally confused. They felt betrayed, as if the wool had been pulled over their eyes. There was nothing you could say to them," he recalls.
When the Brandenburg Gate was opened a few weeks later, an old lady tapped Leo on the shoulder and asked if he, too, was happy that the Wall was gone. He said yes, but he was not pleased at all. A loyal servant of East Germany's communist regime, all he could hear was the relentless chime of hammers and picks eating into the border it had been his task to defend.
"These sounds have haunted me, right into my dreams," he says.
Leo lost his job on September 30th, 1990, and after 31 years in service he was presented with a radio. Because his service was deemed too short to justify the full price of this retirement gift, he was asked to pay DM30 (£12) out of his own pocket.
After 18 months on the dole, he got a job in a supermarket but was sacked when his employers heard that he faced charges connected with shooting would-be escapers at the Wall.
After a trial lasting six years, Leo was convicted and sentenced to three months in prison, although the court acknowledged there was no evidence he actually shot anyone. He now works as a salesman, selling doors, windows and greenhouses.
Anne Hahn was in Hohen lauben women's prison, serving a 20-month sentence for attempting to escape to the west, when she heard the news that the border was open. She had chosen an unusual route to freedom, hoping to go through the Soviet Union to Turkey and from there to West Germany. But she was arrested in Azerbaijan and deported, via Moscow, to East Berlin. She was 22 years old.
"We were allowed to watch the East German television news every evening, but I hadn't seen it that day. But I noticed the following morning that the warders were unusually nervous. They had told the criminals what happened but not us politicals," she says.
A week later, Ms Hahn was released and, as soon as she had collected a few important documents from her parents, she headed west to Freiburg, where she lodged with a friend from the East.
"We always had these daydreams in prison: what's the first thing I'll do when I get out of here? It ranged from having sex to shopping sprees to real plans for the future. I always imagined that I'd be sitting with my friends in a communal flat in the west and I'd study at last. The reality was less lovely," she says.
Life in the west was disappointing, as Ms Hahn realised that few of her new friends were interested in hearing about her past and that she could not fit easily into the glittering world of consumer capitalism. After less than a year, she moved back to Berlin to study art history at the Humboldt University, in the east of the city. She now works as an art historian in Berlin and is a single mother with a baby son.
Ten years after the Berlin Wall was breached, two out of every three easterners say their lives have improved and an overwhelming majority relish the freedom to travel and speak their minds. Most have seen their living standards improve and 95 per cent are happy with the expanded choice of goods and services.
But 80 per cent of those who lived under communism complain that the streets are no longer safe and two-thirds believe the prospects for the next generation are worse than before.
"There is a fear of the future which, as citizens of the German Democratic Republic, we did not know," comments Jens Essbach, a 34-year-old social worker from Leipzig. Mr Essbach counts as one of the success stories of German unification. When he lost his job in a state housing agency, he studied sociology and was reemployed by the same agency as a social worker.
For many easterners, the biggest trauma that followed unification was the dawn of mass unemployment and, despite massive government investment in job creation schemes, unemployment in the east still stands at 17.2 per cent, more than twice the western level. The population of the east has fallen to 15.2 million, compared to 16 million 10 years ago and the Berlin government estimates that a further 250,000 people will leave the east by 2010.
Frustration and fear of the future have driven some easterners towards racist violence, but most express their disappointment with the system by voting for the formerly communist Party of Democratic Socialism, which has supplanted Chancellor Gerhard Schroder's Social Democrats as the second-largest party in the region.
Just as western voters have shown themselves unwilling to lower their living standards out of solidarity with their eastern brethren, western politicians have been reluctant to loosen their grip on power. There are only a handful of easterners in top positions in the main parties and most are fobbed off with responsibility for "soft" policy areas such as family affairs.
A new wave of talented easterners now dominates German theatre and film, and many of the most talented young writers are easterners who remember life under communism. In films such as Sonnenallee, currently the biggest hit in Berlin cinemas, they portray life under a communist system that few believed in but under which even fewer suffered too greatly.
Westerners who are horrified at the nostalgia many easterners feel for life before the Wall came down might do well to remember that, for most people, life is not primarily about politics, ideology or systems of government.
As the narrator of Sonnenallee puts it at the end of the film: "Once upon a time there was a country. And when people ask me what it was like to live there, I tell them they were the happiest days of my life. Because I was young, and in love."