Disco and the Fall of the Wall

Remembering November 9th, 1989.

“The most memorable night of my life began in a German disco” I know, this sounds like the beginning of a cheap romance novel, but this is the story of how I heard about the fall of the Berlin wall on November 9th, 1989. At the beginning of that night I was looking for some distraction in the Dionysian atmosphere of an improvised Disco sponsored by a women’s dormitory (remember, I was living in an all-guys dorm) at the end of the Hauptstraße in Heidelberg. Actually, I had just rolled in on my WWII vintage bicycle from the “Teestube zum ewigen Leben” – a weekly bible study held in defunct tea room. Maybe it was the tea, but I was pretty mellow – a rarity for me during the fall of 1989. Nursing a beer and scanning the room for familiar or friendly faces, slowly losing myself in the music, maybe I was even dancing a little, a woman suddenly came up to me and pulled my ear to her lips. I don’t know what I was expecting next, but what followed was beyond my most exaggerated fantasies…. “Die Mauer ist offen, die Mauer in Berlin ist offen” she yelled into my ear. My brain did not comprehend and this had nothing to do with the German. The wall in Berlin was open? The wall has fallen? What? I honestly thought that she was drunk beyond good sense.

But as the “drunk” girl (“We’ll always have Heidelberg!”) joyfully passed on to the next guy with a beer, my mind raced and my mellowness expired. I got on my surplus bike and pedaled away from the smokey disco with images in my head that made no sense to me. As I crossed the old bridge over the Neckar, the famous castle of Heidelberg at my back and rode along the banks of that river to the Kennedy bridge, I was a little angry, a little worried, a lot excited: Uncertain. This was before cell phones and the internet. What in the world was happening?

I found out when I got back to the all-male dormitory in the Bergstraße. A silent group watched the images on TV with an intensity I had never seen before. This night was different than any other. This was a night on which history was being made.

NEXT BLOG: TV Images and Sugar Plum Fairies: Berlin In Sight!