TV Images and Sugar-Plum Fairies: Berlin In Sight!

Remembering November 9, 2009 When I finally pedalled my old bike into the courtyard of the all-male Bergstrasse dormitory it seemed as if the whole building was pressed around the small television set up in the basement community room. Everyone was intensely focused on the set and my questions posed in fluent but less than perfect German were met with impatient hushes.  [...]

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 [...]

The Fall of the Fall of the Wall

Remembering November 9, 1989 I had just turned 20 and was spending my junior year abroad in Heidelberg, Germany.  West Germany that is.  The wall in Berlin was still standing and the Germanies were divided by hundreds of miles of barbed-wire fence and watchtowers.  Heidelberg, nestled in the Neckar valley not far from Mannheim and [...]