In recognition of the 25th anniversary of the incredibly historic Fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, Google Doodle has created a commemorative video that features images of the wall when it was whole and where pieces of that same wall can be found around the world now. Nils Frahm, the video’s composer, remembers exactly where he was at the time.
I was seven years old when thousands of East German signature cars arrived in my hometown of Hamburg and filled the air with odd-smelling blue smoke. I saw strangers hugging each other, tears in their eyes, their voices tired from singing. I was too young to understand it all, but I had a very strong sense that life was different now–and that different was better. A quarter-century later, it is our obligation to tell this story to all those who couldn’t be there, who could not feel the spark of the peaceful revolution and, more importantly, who are fortunate enough not to know the feeling of an incarcerated, divided existence, trapped behind concrete walls. It is a story that demands to be told today, and for generations to come.
In June 1989, President Ronald Reagan made a speech at Brandenburg Gate appealing to General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev to “open this gate. …[and] tear down this wall.”
On November 10, 1989, the late ABC News correspondent Peter Jennings reported from the site of the Berlin Wall right after it came down.
