I didn’t really know it was happening until I saw it on my girlfriend’s TV that evening. With it being 1989, I figured it was a matter of time before Soviet forces arrived to quell everything as they had done in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Poland. It was a logical conclusion since the Chinese had killed scores of students during the Summer.
The following morning, my Marx/Marxism professor Dr. Smith said the events of the previous evening weren’t a huge surprise to him, the Soviet Bloc nations had been broke since the Seventies. (As for the class, it was a philosophy class focused on Karl Marx the philosopher, his writings and the times he lived in, not what followed.)
Hard to believe a relatively peaceful re-unification could’ve happened to Germany after it was divided for almost 50 years in the aftermath of WWII. I grew up with the GDR (West) and DDR (East) all my life up till then. The two getting back together without violence was a longshot only possible in fiction. Those fears continued to be expressed even after the formal recreation of Germany two years later, the blowhard Rush Limbaugh made the ignorant joke of saying the new capital of Germany would be Paris. Now they’re one of the anchor nations of the EU.
In light of these events, I would like to recommend the movie The Lives of Others which tells the story of a secret policeman’s change of heart while Honnecker’s regime continued to maintain its facade of invincibility.