25 years ago tonight: "Did you just hear what I just heard?"

[DFW]

My wife and I had parked the kids with friends of theirs for two nights, and we went up to Hamburg for the weekend, which we sometimes used to do in those days. I had to work on the weekends there twice a year, and so she liked to come up with me, as we both like the city.

It was a time of upheaval in Germany, as the East was bleeding people over the Hungarian-Austrian border, and people East Germans in Prague, which they were allowed to visit, were climbing in droves over the gates of the West German embassy in Prague, so they could technically be on West German soil. It was getting to the point where it was no longer practical to box their people in any more, even though the shoot-to-kill order was still in force at the Berlin Wall and at the border.

We saw a re-broadcast of a televised press conference in East Berlin. Erich Honecker had already fled to Chile, and Egon Krenz was nominally in charge, although his authority was crumbling. Günter Schabowski, an East German member of the Politburo was reading out a decree in such a monotone that it took a few seconds to sink in. "Freedom to travel to the West for all citizens of the German Democratic Republic," or DDR as it was called there. Asked if this meant free travel to West Berlin as well, he said yes. Asked when this decree was to go into effect, he said, "as far as I can tell, immediately."

My wife and I looked at each other dumbfounded. WHAT????? Did we just hear a top East German official announce then end of the wall? West German TV commentators were going nuts trying to figure it out, and East Germans, who watched Western TV started gathering at border crossings (where they would have been shot for this just that morning), trying to convince the border guards that they should stand aside and let them cross. The border guards, who did NOT watch western TV had gotten no such notification, and at first refused to open the borders. But when the crowds started to get massive, they called in to their bosses and said the crowds were just too big, something must be up, and they couldn't just gun down hundreds or thousands of ordinary people. one gusty border guard threw in the towel, and let the people through. The other border crossings followed, and we watched, stupified, as crowds of East Germans surged through the border. This was the night of Friday, November 9, 1989.

The next morning, Saturday, November 10, Hamburg, which was only 30 miles from the old border, was inundated with East Germans, who were getting their first look at Western opulence (or decadence, depending on what they saw). It was West German practice to give East Germans visiting for the first time "Begrüssungsgeld," or "greeting money," so they could buy food and take public transportation when they came. It was 100DM, or about $65 per person, which was a decent bit of change back then.

We knew we were in the middle of history happening around us. It was hard to grasp just what we were living through, but we knew that Germany had just changed overnight before our eyes. East Germans in Berlin were shaking hands and giving pats on the back to the border guards who, as far as they knew, still had orders to shoot to kill anyone who tried to cross to the west. But none of them did. They sensed that something had changed, too. German TV showed the live news tapes from that night again this weekend. Maybe the Eastern border guards didn't know their country was about to dissolve within a year, but they definitely knew that their jobs would never be the same after that night.

Like such momentous events as the births of our children, this event is as fresh in our memories today as it was then. Everyone knew that the euphoria would die down, that reunification politically and economically would be monstrously expensive, and come out of the pockets of resentful westerners. Everyone knew as well that reunification in the minds of everyone old enough to talk would be a much slower process. But THAT night, no one was thinking about all that. Everyone was just thinking that a page of history had turned, and that there would be no going back. In that, they were correct.