So its 30 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall in Germany. Do you Remember it?

No cos I wasn’t born

I was 18 at the time so understood well the significance of what was happening. It was unbelievable. I'd grown up in a world with an iron curtain. To me, the Berlin Wall was as intractable as the Alps. It was just the way things were. To see it just being torn down like that was incredible. I remember the whole family actually standing up and getting as close to the telly as we could, we simply couldn't believe our eyes.

I remember my teacher telling me the Berlin Wall would still be there when I had grandchildren. We had been discussing Tiananmen Square and he asserted with some confidence that communism in China was on its last legs. He claimed communism was never “a good fit” with Chinese culture...I don’t remember the specifics of his reasoning. So I asked if the Berlin Wall would come down and he responded as above. He had been to West Berlin just two years earlier and had shown us video and snaps he had taken. He seemed to know quite a bit about Berlin and East Germany. So a few days after the wall was opened I spoke with him and he seemed to be in denial and trying hard to hide his bewilderment at the situation. I later spoke with him again, it was probably about a month later, and he admitted he was stunned but delighted about the whole spectacle. Admitted he was completely caught by surprise. Even with the protests in the GDR and refugee chaos in Hungary nobody really thought the wall was about to fall, least of all him.

So the most amazing thing about it for me was seeing how gobsmacked an articulate well travelled adult educator could be. Just his reactions to it all left a huge impression on me. It helped me to better grasp the weight of what we were witnessing at the time.

Raconteuse wrote: »

I love the joy in the footage - and so many other heightened emotions... and mullets, and bomber jackets, and shellsuits, and stone washed denim... and the Hoff!

And the stunned looking East German soldiers who made a few half hearted attempts at pulling people off and then just sorta shrugged.

It is a bit amazing to realize that the wall was only in existence for 28 years.

Wow. Thirty years. In ways, it seems like yesterday. Until you realise that for much of my childhood, 'Europe' stopped at the border with East Germany. Everything beyond it 'belonged' to 'Russia' and was pretty much out of bounds, or v difficult to reach, as far as we were concerned. No cheap flights to Tallinn or Krakow. We'd never heard of Croatia, say, because Yugoslavia was pretty much terra incognito. We were reared on stories of Berlin being pitted with mine fields. Every couple of years, somebody would make their escape from East Berlin by way of some daring stunt and it would make the News At Ten. Nuclear annihilation felt like a very real threat.
Mad aul times. No wonder 'we all partied' when we got into our 30s after the Millennium!

I do yes , I was in 1st class at the time and one my classmates father went over to the knocking of the wall, I went over myself in 05

Yes. I was there that night, at Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin. Most emotional moment in my life.

I remember it well. I was in uni and we did not have a tv in our flat.
So went to the social club to watch home and away and the news was on instead.