The World

From the editors: Gideon is on leave to write a book, but can’t stay away from his blog…

This morning’s papers are full of memoirs by journalists who were lucky enough to be in Berlin when the wall was breached. I am jealous. I have delivered an unfortunate knack of being on the wrong side of the Atlantic, when history is made. So on 9/11, I was living in Belgium. And on 11/9 – the day the wall fell – I was living in Washington.

The fall of the Berlin Wall was definitely one of those “Kennedy assasination moments”; an event so dramatic that most people can still remember where they were, when they heard. There are strikingly few of those moments. I can think of just a few that are frozen in time for me: the moon landings, the murder of John Lennon, the explosion of the space-shuttle Challenger, Tiananmen, the fall of the Berlin wall, 9/11.

So where exactly was I  when the wall fell? Perched on the end of my bed in a shared student house on Euclid Street in Washingron, DC. I was watching events live on the NBC Nightly News, presented by Tom Brokaw from the wall. Reading the history books now, it seems that Brokaw played a rather crucial role. According to Victor Sebestyen’s highly readable, “Revolution 1989″, it was he was who,  at a press conference, asked Gunter Schabowski, “when will this new regulation come into effect?”, after the East German official had announced that East German citizens would henceforth be allowed to leave the country using GDR crossing points. It was Schabowski’s confused, unplanned, reply -”Immediately” – that provoked the crowds to descend on the Berlin Wall. And the rest is history.

So I watched the wall fall in Washington. Where were you?