Twenty years ago, on 9 November 1989, the Berlin Wall came down.
I remember the day, but the TV coverage doesn’t belong to my most intense childhood TV memories: It feels like this event is bracketed by stronger memories of the Challenger disaster and Chernobyl in 1986 and Desert Shield/Desert Storm in 1990/91.
The German radio station that I listen to, NDR2, is playing music that was popular during Die Wende (“the turning point”, as the end of East Germany and the beginning of a reunified Germany is often called in German), and people are calling in their memories of the day.
One story was particularly funny:
I woke up with daddy standing naked in my room, yelling ‘the wall is open, the wall is open!’ I didn’t know which wall. Was there a hole in our house?
