Where Were You When the Berlin Wall Fell?
Where were you when the Berlin Wall fell on this fine day in November of 1989? I remember it vividly. That was the year they were playing "Nothing Compares 2 U" all the time. I lived in a one bedroom apartment two blocks off Hollywood Boulevard, in the city of golden dreams, with a nice young former waitress named Dawn, who right around that time received a free roundtrip ticket to Hawaii from the apartment building manager/hooker who lived with his wife and child and sometimes his male lover across the courtyard.
I knew Dawn because we'd been waitrons in Chicago together, before we'd driven out west. I was working at Euro Coffee on Melrose Boulevard, where Nic Cage would send his dames in to have me make him a latte while he sat in a convertible outside. Dawn is kind of a whorey name, which, well, that worked. Eventually Dawn called from Hawaii; she had promptly lost the return ticket and couldn't ever get back and therefore I lost the lease.
This building was just like Melrose Place, except no one ever swam in the courtyard pool and cars had a tendency to be lit on fire outside and apparently all our neighbors were trannie hookers, except that one girl downstairs who claimed she'd gone to middle school with me, but who remembered middle school? So yeah, I guess it was exactly like Melrose Place.
Anyway, we didn't have a TV (or, like, beds or anything, though Dawn had a mattress on the floor and I had a nice foam chair that I'd found in the street) and it wasn't like the newspapers got delivered to the neighborhood—to get groceries, you had to go down to look for the roaming van that sold milk and fruit and stuff to all the old Mexican women—so it was probably a few months before I heard about the whole Berlin Wall thing, and by then, I was like, big deal. If we'd had Twitter back then, or even AOL chatrooms, I bet I would have 1. known about it and 2. had something to say about it for sure!
I guess at the time I was so happy that Ronald Reagan was out of office—well, with hindsight, out of the frying pan and into the presidential fire, am I right?—that I kind of missed the other politics of that year altogether. I wonder whatever happened to Dawn? No one names their baby Dawn any more, for all the obvious reasons.
this is a little too real.
no, actually, just real enough.
HOW DO YOU KNOW I'M NOT DAWN YOU ASSHOLE
Did you ever get back from Hawaii?
You worked at Café Express, didn't you? That's my guess. Please don't let it be The Heartland.
Wolverines!
All that hate is gonna burn you up, kid.
keeps me warm at night
I thought I had figured out your age, but this has completely thrown me off.
seconded!
I believe the New York Times reported it as 29, which should settle the matter once and for all.
Correct. I am 29.
I *did* graduate high school in 1989 however.
We graduated the same year!!
Child geniuses!
I'm 29 too! Oh, shit, it was '86, not '89. I'm 32!
Choire's age is not a mystery. He is two years older than Balk, which makes him 7.
Daren Star was your landlord?
Dawn was one of my favorite V.C.Andrews books.
This reminds me I need to get more Eve Babitz in my reading diet.
I was in kindergarten ……
I was a junior in H.S., wearing rugby shirts, and tight-rolling the jeans. I have about 7 little chunks of the wall (certified with a special stamp!). Let's start the bidding at one quadruple-shot cappuccino.
Am an Old. I was on my way to Berlin. Have a box in storage with pieces of the wall I chipped off myself, an east german's army hat I paid the guy $1 for and a picture of me scaling it.
Wouldn't be where I am today if not for this day. Been sorta downhill from there.
You win for "awesome story of the day".
actually, today, I am sort of all "fuck the berlin wall."
I didn't know until the following day in my junior high school history class. Our teacher, an elegant Southern woman built like a armoire with an immaculate head of silvery helmet hair announced dramatically: "Children, at the Christmas break you can keep your textbooks. Take them home, throw them out the window, whatever. We will be buying new ones for the new year because the world has changed." I was duly impressed. And spent the break decoupaging European kings and dictators onto postcards.
I was in elementary school but had a similar experience. My teacher was a Korean war vet and he cried and tried to help us understand what a monumental event it was. We didn't understand.
This gave me goosebumps. But I cried last night during Antiques Roadshow, so you could say I am somewhat easily affected.
Again. I had a similar experience. My sat us down and said the biggest event in 20th century history has just happened. We didn't get it.
10 years later, I moved to East Germany and spent a year living among the dispossessed. It was right about that time Ostalgie was starting and we spent our time in a cafe decorated exclusively with DDR memorabilia. My then girlfriend at the time waxed somewhat nostalgic about the life before, as we retired to her huge stalinist apartment block in the NeuStadt
The fall of the Berlin Wall and subsequent Wiedervereinigung wasn't really an event for me, so much as it was a period of time recalled through the ecstatic, incredulous reactions of my 1st-generation German immigrant family and hoarding of soon-to-be-collectible DDR merch. The first bit of Ostpolitik I really remember as a discrete event was watching the midnight dissolution of Yugoslavia on Swiss TV in 1991. Lots of demonstrations and protests &c.; who knew it would turn into a nearly decade-long bloodbath?
I wrote a college paper in 1991 predicting that there would be a war in Kosovo after the war in Bosnia. Not because I was smart, but because our textbook explained Yugoslavia in such a way that it seemed inevitable.
I remember Prague in 1995 and masses of what looked like original soviet memorabilia on sale. However a passing dutchman informed me that it was actually manufactured in china for sale to western tourists. All the real soviet stuff was gone by 1991.
If the Webbies have a Best Use of BabyNameWizard in a Blog Post EVER Award this year, you will definitely win.
I was in college, taking a Soviet politics class (hey, it was Berkeley).
Our professor came in and basically said, "OK, we're going to be off the syllabus for a while here. Let's just talk about what's happening right now."
Pretty wild throwing the Brezhnev books out the window and watching a superpower unravel in front of your eyes.
Holy cow, I was taking Russian/Soviet history that semester (not at Berkeley). It was crazy to be studying 1917 and 1956 and 1968 knowing we were living the endpoint.
My best friend was a Soviet Studies major at Wellesley at the time. Me and my 5th-century Greeks stayed cool and unchanged.
Wow, you are all so old!
I wasn't even born back then…
Stop hyperventilating, you little scamp! You're using all my oxygen, and I was here first.
That means you have all the fuck-ups of the Bush years and the Balloon Boy as Communal Memory so far, nicht wahr? Too bad for you, kiddo.
File under: Things you probably did not need to point out.
I feel sorry for you. You missed all the good parts.
Dear Girl Who Knew Choire In Middle School,
I feel sad that he didn't remember you four years later. But did you know? Cheer up! He is a homo!
I was in middle school and my family was a disaster so I don't think I paid attention to much outside my angst-ridden adolescent world. The only major events I remember happening that year were very Boston-centric:
The Carol Stuart murder case (mostly because they interrupted whatever show I was watching to show Charles Stuart's body being pulled out of the mystic river.)
…and the Gardner Museum art heist (I remember this vividly because my mom and I had just been there the week before.)
Oh, but I do remember everyone claiming they had a piece of the Berlin Wall. Where are all those pieces now?
Oh my God thats right! The Carol Stuart murder case dominated the news!! Just last week I went to the Gardner Museum and the frames still sit there empty.
Also, they rehash the theft case on the local news about every other week, with those terrible police drawings. I like the empty frames–they add a bit of vigor, which helps wake one out of the lull of spending a couple of hours in dim lighting, just in time for the etchings and lithographs.
That baby boy is 20 now! What ever happened to him?
Now that Robert Stack is dead, we may never know!
There is an exact ratio of pieces of the wall to real wall as toothpicks from the cross to true cross.
The thought that there could be a Vermeer deteriorating in a warehouse somewhere continues to fill me with sadness. But I forgot that there is also a walking human reminder of the Stuart case! Please excuse me while I shut my office door and spend the rest of the day sobbing at my desk.
I think the baby died about two weeks after he was born.
Thank you, that makes me feel both better and worse. Damn you Choire, and these walks down memory lane!
OMG you're totally right. Sorry.
I was a sleep deprived, new parent working as a paralegal in Boston. I remember hating Regan and David Hasslehoff singing some song there to celebrate the occasion.
Yeah, Judith sucks.
I was thinking Donald, myself. Stupid Treasury.
My grandfather, who was stationed in Germany in the 1960s, had a chunk of the wall that he gave to my brother. As my grandfather had left my grandmother for a German woman and my mother never spoke to him again, it is one of my only memories about him.
I was twelve years old and ignorant, one of those weird children who had probably read more musical notes than words at that point. I didn't understand fully what was happening, yet when I saw the video on the news, I cried. As the line goes, "Something there is that doesn't love a wall."
I was working in TV…frantically campaigning to be the field producer on the Berlin Wall story. Instead, they sent a guy who was sleeping with the news director…which at the time, I would have happily done, too. But the boss liked boys, not girls, which I did know so all my flirting to go on my first overseas news trip was for nothing.
Later, I had a news director who did like girls and short skirts…and I got to go to South Africa for the elections, see Nelson Mandela up close, interview Desmond Tutu and have a witch doctor put a voodoo curse on me. So suck on that, closeted gays who prevented me from going to Berlin.
So it was not the dawning of a new age of freedom but rather the end of Dawn.
ha!
Choire, there are times that I read something of yours and just want to take an informative walking tour through your brain, complete with blazer-wearing tour guide ("And we're walking, we're walking."). This is one of those times.
My neighbor's name growing up was Dawn, and she was convinced her black lab was in love with her sexually.
She also thought she was being followed by sex-perverts who wanted her goodies.
She also spent the majority of the day running around her yard in a bikini.
I didn't know you were from Hawaii.
Vermont – bikini was out April through September, or looking at an Indian Summer, mid-October.
We also had a hot-tub, so she would unexpectedly jump over the fence and hop right in with us.
They moved.
Is anyone really FROM Hawaii? I mean besides Comrade Obama.
Be careful–you may touch off another Waco
"Delta Dawn, what's that flower you got on? Could it be a faded rose from times gone by?"
apologies for putting this song into your brain.
Days! Days gone by! (I think?)
With her all projecting on to a black lab I was more worried she was a serial killer.
Dawn is my cousin's middle name. I don't think she's too worried about it sounding strippery, though. Her first name is Brandi.
In Seoul this past September, we ran across a three-sections-wide chunk of the wall on an otherwise undistinguished street corner.
It seemed pretty random to me at the time, though there are obvious reunification parallels.
Come to think of it, I'm almost positive there's a section somewhere in Midtown, too. It's in the faux-public-space of some office building…Germany must have been gifting them at some point.
There is – right off Madison and across from a giant bank. Which is pretty fitting. Personally, I would have installed it across 14th street.
Undistinguised my ass! It is across the street from an Outback Steakhouse!
I was in my last year of high school, at Central Collegiate.
The principal, Doug Fairburn, called an assembly on this day to underscore just how important this all was.
Choire, honey, "Nothing Compares 2U" was all over the place the following year.
Yes, it would have been, say, "Bust A Move" or "Love Shack".
"Never Gonna Give You Up"…?
I was a little bit older than I was when the Challenger exploded.
Wow Choire, that was my first year in LA too, working at a big law firm. I sure hope you weren't one of those Shakey's Pizza Boys, because then it would just get too creepy.
I was working for Jackie Onassis at Doubleday. Someone sent her a piece of the wall.
My family was hosting a foreign exchange student from Duisburg named Kai, whom I need to email. We had been following the news of defections through neighboring states. It certainly seemed only a matter of time for days if not weeks.
In my vague recollection of the night the wall fell, we were sitting around the living room of our house on Beacon Hill in Seattle glued to the television. I'm fairly center Kai was on the phone for a good long time with his family speaking in excited German. I asked if he had relatives in the East, but I'm not sure what the answer was — though it was probably likely.
Kai's father was an accountant, and if I'm not mistaken his firm actually got the contract to audit East Germany's books. Kai's sister, Vera, who also stayed with us later, is currently living in a beautiful old farm house in what used to be East Germany.
I had just come to live in Madrid that autumn. Remember how different life was before cell phones, email, 24/7 news hysteria? Even more so in Spain, where a lot of people still didn't have phones and there were only 2 TV channels. I was house-sittng for a couple of friends of mine who had gone to Portugal for the weekend (and since they didn't speak Portugese didn't even glance at papers or TV there). When they came back, they said, "Anything new?"
"Yeah, the Berlin Wall has come down and the city and Germany are united". Raucous laughter. "Yeah, ok, what REALLY happened?" It went on like that for about 5 minutes until I showed them the International Herald Tribune. Their faces….
In 1989, I was just starting my military service, studying Korean at the language institute in Monterey, California. Soon to ship out for South Korea and military intelligence. I recall pieces of the wall were for sale in the malls and I assumed that they were all fake.
Oh, and in November of 1989, I MARRIED A GIRL NAMED DAWN. True story.
Was she from Hawaii?