A bit early, was I?

The 9th of November will always be the day the wall came down in Berlin for me.

I remember coming home from school and being dumbfounded and almost driven to tears by the sheer enormity of the fall. In subsequent days and weeks the suddenness of the transformation which was sweeping through a significant part of the world.

Today thousands of people gathered to celebrate the destruction of the symbol of the division between east and west. Ceremonies were witnessed by German P.M. Angela Merkel, who was one of the East German people who fled across the gap when the wall came down in 1989. Also on hand to witness the 20th year of celebration of the beginning of the end for the Wall and Communism were world leaders such as Mikhail Gorbachev.

And although in one fell stroke it killed the booming cold war novel industry, this monumental milestone on the way to German reunification fared little other casualties except for perhaps the dampening of Germany’s economy due to debts incurred by the failed East German state. It also helped overshadow the start of the terror of Nazism in Germany; Die Kristallnacht.

Wikipedia reports for this day:

• 1938 – Kristallnacht began in Nazi Germany as a part of Adolf Hitler‘s anti-Semitic policy, leading to the murder of over 90 Jews, and the arrest and deportation of over 25,000 others to concentration camps.

With Germany, which is still sometimes looking for a new post-war identity, people gladly forget the past horrors and go with the more recent past of reunification and the establishment of Germany as we know it today. Hookers and Porn and all.

Here’s a video for you to enjoy showing the collapse of the wall and what led up to it.