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- - What were you doing on the night when the Berlin Wall fell? (http://historum.com/european-history/38348-what-were-you-doing-night-when-berlin-wall-fell.html)

Probably being nursed by my mother, it's what 2 year olds do.

Probably watching cartoons.

Not sure if I remember that year, wasn't E.T. the extraterrestrial out in movie theaters? Someone I don't remember who, took me to see it that year, so maybe I was watching E.T. in the movie theatre.

I just do not remember.

Quote:

Originally Posted by srb7677 (Post 940020)

I remember how fantastic it felt to see it happening. I grew up in an age when the Cold War seemed set in stone as a permanent feature of world geopolitics. I never imagined that I would see the wall come down and the iron curtain disappear in my lifetime. Few people did. As a young lad in the 70s I used to read science fiction comics, and they assumed that the Soviet system would still exist centuries into the future, with Soviet colonies on the moon and suchlike. And this just demonstrates that it was easier to imagine Soviet colonies on the moon, than it was to imagine the collapse of the Soviet system.

The fall of the Berlin wall was a momentous and wondrous event at the time, and recognised as such my most people witnessing it.

This sums up my feelings exactly. And yes, I read sci-fi novels which made the same assumption! :)

Quote:

Originally Posted by MrKap (Post 940042)

E.T. was early 80s.

I watched it on the TV and wished I was there.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sankari (Post 940049)

E.T. was early 80s.

Yes, I thought the same thing but it was released in theaters in the mid-late 80s. I would have only been like 2 or three years old if I saw it in the theaters on the first release.

I was probably watching cartoons.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sankari (Post 939930)

I was watching it live on TV. I could not believe what I was seeing. For those of us who grew up during the Cold War, it was an event of unprecedented significance.

Margaret Thatcher was deeply opposed, and frantically begged Gorbachev to preserve the Wall in the interests of maintaining a permanently divided Germany. She was motivated by her paranoia about the potential influence of a unified German state.

Fortunately Thatcher's pro-Soviet whining and pleading was to no avail: Gorbachev simply ignored her.

My father was born in Kiel, West Germany. He predicted that the Berlin Wall would not come down within his lifetime. Sadly, he was right: he died less than a month before it fell.

What were you doing on the 9th of November, 1989?

Home works. I was still in the High School, for accuracy I was 17. Italian teens were quite lined up as political stance and politics was a very rude argument among us.

I remember in my classrooms there were girls members of the FGC [the federation of the young communists], while I stayed on the other side.

The following day it was a "hot" morning. I remember tough discussions, but honestly I don't remember the details.

Quote:

Originally Posted by MrKap (Post 940055)

Yes, I thought the same thing but it was released in theaters in the mid-late 80s.

That must have been a re-release, because it originally came out in 1982, which is when I saw it.

Geezer ;)

I might have been playing video games too...

http://www.emuparadise.me/fup/up/912...(CX2674)-1.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.T._th...al_(video_game)

Quote:

E.T. is frequently cited as a contributing factor to Atari's massive financial losses during 1983 and 1984. As a result of overproduction and returns, millions of unsold cartridges were buried in an Alamogordo, New Mexico landfill. The game's commercial failure and resulting effects on Atari are frequently cited as a contributing factor to the video game industry crash of 1983.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sankari (Post 939930)

Wasn't just Thatcher, a close of aide of President Francois Mitterand declared he would rather go to Mars than see German unification.

^^ True, but there's a big difference between Thatcher saying it and some anonymous French flunky saying it.

I was hoping to get some responses from our resident East Europeans. The fall of the Wall was their gateway to democracy, and in many cases, modernity.