The birthday card arrived by airmail (not e-mail). On the front was a photograph of a 20-foot section of the Berlin Wall, taken just hours before the bulldozers arrived to knock it down.

I opened the card, read the nice note from the friends who had sent it to me, and turned back to the cover. A chaotic jumble of graffiti decorated the gray concrete surface. As I tried to decipher the various fragments of political and personal messages left over the years, the English words "Happy Birthday Grant!" suddenly jumped out at me. One of my friends' children had stood on the other's shoulders to reach a clear spot and spray-paint a birthday greeting.

For part of the year or so I lived in West Berlin, in the mid-1980s, I had stayed with this family from the southern part of the city, near the wall. In their residential neighborhood, a strip of cleared land hugged the barrier on the western side, and over the years the space had become a narrow park, filled in with trees, bushes, and paths. Most days, we walked the dog along it, and East German soldiers watched us from their guard towers as we passed. We often talked about politics, the Cold War, and what the future might hold for Germany and the rest of the world.

Through a couple of checkpoints, one could cross into East Berlin. Most travelers were issued day visas only: Be back at the border by midnight, or else. I never knew exactly what the "or else" would be, and I didn't want to find out.

Grayer and poorer than the western part of the city, intimidating and sometimes depressing, East Berlin still had much to offer. Stalin had made sure the great museums and theaters, the opera house, and other architectural monuments stood on that side. So did the rare opportunity to visit a communist country.

The opening of the wall, and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union, represented an astounding victory of freedom over oppression, of capitalism over communism. Yet, for all its profound limitations, life arguably had its advantages for those forced to live on the eastern side of the city.

A few times, rounding a corner in East Berlin as I hurried back to the checkpoint late at night, I practically tripped over little old ladies. Not one of them jumped in fear or clutched her handbag. The streets of East Berlin could be traversed safely at any hour of the day or night.

Muggings and carjackings were unknown. Schoolyards may have been dirt lots with hardly a swing in sight, but, on the other hand, no one would approach the children playing soccer or tag and try to sell them drugs. Ever.

Virtually anyone who wanted a job could have one; there was no unemployment. Salaries varied little across the professions: Teachers, waiters, doctors, factory workers, managers, and mechanics all earned similar pay. And most of them had savings, even though their pensions were guaranteed by the government.

People learned to be patient, to wait. Delayed gratification was the norm. Ten years - truly, a decade - might elapse between an order for a new car and its arrival. Not a plus, you might say, but neither is drowning in credit card debt.

Although the government took credit for these aspects of East German society, the local bureaucrats often had nothing to do with it.

The streets were safe partly because almost half a million Russian troops occupied a country the size of Colorado. And stealing money made no sense when there was little to buy beyond the essentials.

East Germany had no drug problem not because it was a Marxist utopia in which no one felt the need to get high. There was simply no way to pay for drugs. East German currency was worthless in the West, and drug traffickers want money they can spend.

Of course, the domestically produced and readily available drug, alcohol, was widely abused, and its ill effects were studiously ignored by the government, as far as I could tell.

Friends from East Berlin celebrated joyously when the wall fell, but they also worried about how their children would fare as citizens of the freewheeling West. In fact, the reunification has brought extraordinary opportunities and benefits to the East, but also, in places, more dangerous streets, drug problems, and unemployment.

Several years after the wall came down, one of my friends made a comment that stuck with me in a letter about the reunification. "Now we have other chains," she wrote. Millions of Americans, struggling to make mortgage payments on houses that are no longer worth what they paid for them, might agree.

Grant Calder teaches history at Friends Central School.

His blog is at blogs.friendscentral.org/gcalder.