There’s nothing like the anniversary of a major historical event to make one feel old – not that I’m complaining mind you. Still, it’s hard for me to imagine that it’s been 20 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall. It’s even harder for me to listen to today’s news reports and realize there’s an entire generation of Germans who don’t even remember a divided Germany, or all that the Berlin Wall really meant to people on both sides.
The night the Wall fell my family was eating dinner at the Officers and Enlisted Combined Club at Garlstadt. The 8 o’clock news came over the Armed Forces Radio Network and announced the borders between East and West Germany were open. Not one of us said a word. I think each of us probably thought we’d heard the news wrong.
The truth is the Wall had been on its way down for months, but to us at the time, it was such an icon of the age, it was hard to imagine it would come tumbling down just like that. Only a few weeks before we’d been in East Berlin shopping. That weekend there was some sort of communist youth day in the capital and the city was swarming with young East Germans, all dressed in their school uniforms with the red ties. How could the Wall suddenly be breached?
The next morning, however, I awoke to the yelling of my mother calling me out of bed. The sun wasn’t yet up, but my mom, always an annoying early riser, was up and had turned on the German news. (We didn’t get American television where we lived.) While my German was never good, at the time it was better than my mother’s or Ryan’s, and thus my mom wanted desperately to know what was being said.
When I looked at the television screen, I saw thousands standing on the Wall in front of the Brandenburg Gate cheering and shouting and sometimes taunting the East German border guards. Some of the guards, by this time, had flowers hanging out of the barrels of their guns.
We were glued to the television for hours. We called friends and family back in the United States – not giving a care to the time difference – after all, this was history.
A week later an East German traubbie (East German car) was parked down the street. Our neighbors were reuniting with family they hadn’t seen since the 1950s. It truly felt like the world had been turned on its ear for the better.
The night the Wall fell my family was eating dinner at the Officers and Enlisted Combined Club at Garlstadt. The 8 o’clock news came over the Armed Forces Radio Network and announced the borders between East and West Germany were open. Not one of us said a word. I think each of us probably thought we’d heard the news wrong.
The truth is the Wall had been on its way down for months, but to us at the time, it was such an icon of the age, it was hard to imagine it would come tumbling down just like that. Only a few weeks before we’d been in East Berlin shopping. That weekend there was some sort of communist youth day in the capital and the city was swarming with young East Germans, all dressed in their school uniforms with the red ties. How could the Wall suddenly be breached?
The next morning, however, I awoke to the yelling of my mother calling me out of bed. The sun wasn’t yet up, but my mom, always an annoying early riser, was up and had turned on the German news. (We didn’t get American television where we lived.) While my German was never good, at the time it was better than my mother’s or Ryan’s, and thus my mom wanted desperately to know what was being said.
When I looked at the television screen, I saw thousands standing on the Wall in front of the Brandenburg Gate cheering and shouting and sometimes taunting the East German border guards. Some of the guards, by this time, had flowers hanging out of the barrels of their guns.
We were glued to the television for hours. We called friends and family back in the United States – not giving a care to the time difference – after all, this was history.
A week later an East German traubbie (East German car) was parked down the street. Our neighbors were reuniting with family they hadn’t seen since the 1950s. It truly felt like the world had been turned on its ear for the better.
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