[Closed] 9/11/1989 Der Mauerfall

I remember getting in from the pub and flicking round the few tv channels we had then , at first I thought I was watching a film then realised it was live news .... truly amazing events .....

Also the anniversary of Reichsprogromnacht, and also the Munich Bier hall Putsch and something to do with the Kaiser. Early November in Germany has legally sanctioned action dates (or so it seems).

References were made to those events in the speeches earlier, Sandwich, along with parallels with what's happening in Germany and the need to fight agaist similar trends, i.e. the AfD.

I was probably on acid and went home to watch the hitman and her.

I was 8 so alas not on acid. I think we played Trivial Pursuit

“History doesn't repeat itself but it often rhymes,”

They put it on the tele in our primary school. I was just about to turn 8.

That Christmas Leonard Bernstein conducted a memorable performance of Beethoven's 9th Symphony in celebration. Funny thing is I sang in a performance of it the same Christmas. That had particular meaning for me and later I was able to visit my mum's home town and walk more than 2km east for the first time.

I can remember writing to my Grandfather (based in Graz) at the time and mentioning it was a great time. He appreciated it all the more as he had been part of the British Forces administering Vienna at the war end.

I was staying in the Gellert Hotel in Hungary... the TV was on in the restaurant because the staff were all excited and the Italian mob sitting next to us were in raptures.
It was a very strange evening indeed... My then partner and I sat up watching a mix of BBC and some German TV intermittent with crappy TV signal and lots of red wine.

The following day most of the police we’d seen the previous day (don’t forget this is still communist Hungary at this point, soldiers and stazi were all over the place) had disappeared... and there was an eery calmness.

A week later we left through the no-mans land exit into Austria and all we saw were ‘000’s of soldiers walking along the roads with their weapons slung over their shoulders... it was a very unsettling journey home..

I'm unconvinced by this Danny Dyer tribute on BBC 1

I had just started at uni at the time. 3 years where "quite a lot happened" in eastern europe, what with the fall of the wall, reunification, yugoslavia war, czech/slovak separation, etc.

My grandfather used to work in the embassy in Berlin, so checkpoint charlie for him would have been called a daily commute. afaik the house was in West Berlin, and the embassy in the East.

Now I work in Germany. I wish I'd visited Berlin much earlier than I did. I do wonder what my Grandfather would make of today's current affairs though.

They put it on the tele in our primary school. I was just about to turn 8.

Mrs Nimmo? You got the TV that day did you?

I was 20 when the wall came down and can vaguely remember it on TV but I was a student at the time and had other things on my mind. Ten years later I end up living in the former GDR. The whole peaceful revolution started here in Leipzig and talking to people who were at the demonstrations it really was on a knife edge whether the authorities would open fire on them or not. I went to the first Lichtfest in 2009 to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the October demonstrations and there was a walk around the city ring (the same route as in 89) which ended in a tour of the Stasi museum (the old Stasi headquarters). And there were all kinds of files you could look through on the citizens of the city. For me it was like looking at WW2 stuff...interesting in a historical sense, but for the people around me they all lived through it and all these detailed files were about them.

Thirty years later, superficially it can be seen as a complete success story. When you travel from west to East in Germany you can’t see any discernible difference but if you scratch under the surface there is a lot of inequality between the old West Germany and East. People earn on average twice as much for the same job in the west and there is a complete forgotten generation of East Germans (like my father-in-law) who lost his good job in the GDR never to work again unable to come to terms with capitalism.

And now politically the backlash has started with the gains the AfD have made in the old East German states and the rise of the new nazis in the rural areas. So it’s all a bit bittersweet these celebrations.

Die Ärzte song Hurra Hurra is a delightfully humourous treatment of the fact die Wende (the change) wasn't quite as fantastic for everybody as it was portrayed to be.