B.

B.C. World Service, I'm Chris Bolby.

Ever wondered what really brought down the Berlin Wall?

Politics, yes, but how about the power of music?

Sounds a bit far-fetched, but this is one of those fascinating Cold War stories that's still emerging now.

How music and the sense of freedom that went with it changed history.

I'm off to find out more because I've had a feeling that music really mattered

ever since I lived in Berlin back in the 1980s and commuted daily by tube from one part of the west to another underneath East Berlin.

Yeah, this is the place, Parada Strass, I recognise the name now. This is where I used to begin my journey to work. In

1980, Cold War Berlin, divided between the capitalist west and the communist east, and I would start my journey to work from here 5 a.m. every morning on the underground

but it was a really unusual journey. Well the communists might have done a deal to keep the trains running but they were

determined to keep their bit of Berlin tightly sealed off. I'm on the train now and it's bringing back memories of how we'd

go through so-called ghost stations, disused stations under East Berlin. The lights would

be dim and there'd be scowling border guards on the platforms aren't with some machine guns

determined to stop anyone getting on or off. Quite a spooky experience.

Try to take your mind off it. I used to like to listen to a lot of music at that time,

pull on the headphones, try to think of something else. But I found myself wondering sometimes,

what was life really like for those above me in the east.

Could they listen to my music for example? This. These days I can get off in Berlin wherever I like, the Berlin walls long gone.

But the story is still emerging of what life was like in East Germany and music,

the kind of music I used to listen to in the train really mattered.

The communists and their Stasi secret police tried to control it,

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