20 years after the fall

Today is my little brother's birthday - he turns 20 years old.

Which might be the only reason I remember the 9th November 1989. I was only 4 years old when it happened. But because I became a big sister that day, I remember so much. To my parents, those days might be among the most overwhelming of their lives. We lived just 30km from the border to the GDR, my father's parents fled with my father, just a baby back then, to Western Germany in 1955 - half of our extended family was still living in the GDR in 1989. On that special special day everything changed for us.

Well, enough personal melodramtic info, I nearly shed tears just writing that (and I assure you, I am not the weepy type).

What are you memories of this day? Discuss the significance and importance!

Here are some great articles / opinion pieces from today
NYT - opinion piece
El País - Communism today in Eastern Europe
Various stuff in The Guardian

Video of the Tagesschau of the 10th November 1989 (Tagesschau is the main news broadcast of the West-German National TV)
Bundestag (German parliament) sings the National Anthem on 9/11/89

Being an American my memories are quite different than yours. I'd been visiting my daughter in western Germany (she was in the USAF) & left for home just 2 weeks before the wall came down. I can remember thinking to myself that I should have remained in Germany for an additional 2 or 3 weeks because the excitement within the country must have been electrifying. A great moment in history for all the free world.

Well, this is a little late - sorry, I wasn't looking at the Cafe.

I don't remember what I was doing exactly when the wall came down, but I remember being absolutely thrilled about the "velvet revolution" - the way the Soviet empire collapsed without a war. It seemed truly miraculous to me.

I had been reading Vaclav Havel's dissident plays and prison reflections (Letters to Olga) for years, and was keenly aware of dissident literature and films - Solzhenitsyn, Wajda, etc. I was in Poland when Solidarity first made it onto the TV screens - people there were absolutely shocked because it was a spontaneous popular movement (hence forbidden) not one of the hated Communist organizations. This was in 1980 or so and was a precursor to the great events of 1989. A few years later I visited Czechoslovakia. A friend of a friend who was a Czech citizen looked after me in Prague. I'll never forget sitting in a cafe with her and asking her how she felt about Havel -- she looked around her furtively as if we would get arrested just for mentioning his name. (This was long before he was president!)

There's so much that could be said... In retrospect, I have vast admiration for Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II - their courageous, determined, almost quixotic but ultimately realistic battle against the Communist status quo. The liberations of 1989 might not have happened without them.

It was one of the watershed years in modern history and yet if you say "1989" to many people today they won't know what you're talking about.

Congratulations, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, East Germany, Bulgaria....! arty: :birthday: