On 11 November 1989, two days after the Berlin Wall opened, a queue formed at the Friedrichstrasse crossing known as Checkpoint Charlie. Jürgen Nagel's photograph records cars, people, border guards and television crews at a scene catalogued explicitly as a queue at the border checkpoint.
During the Wall era, this was one of seven road crossings between East and West Berlin and the required passage for foreigners, Allied personnel and diplomats. Immediately after travel restrictions collapsed, infrastructure once used to select who might cross became a place for processing the sudden demand to move.
The historical sentence “the Wall opened” did not itself complete a journey. People still had to use a real road and pass through the checkpoint. The line at Checkpoint Charlie preserved the interval between political freedom being announced and citizens physically exercising it.