Growing up as a German-Canadian, I always knew it just as The Wall—die Mauer. The “Berlin” was implicit, a crude scar down the middle of my heritage. It was built the year I became a teenager, shortly after I got my citizenship papers, and it was torn down just after I turned 41. And I was lucky enough to be there when it was first breached.

Standing there in Potsdamer Platz, on a cool, overcast November night, wearing a Cold War trench-coat, holding a CBC microphone, I remember thinking that this was a defining moment in my professional life. As such, I had to be careful.  I needed to approach this story with professional detachment, without any emotion whatsoever, even though (or perhaps, because) this was such a pivotal moment in 20th Century history. I had to wear a mask of dispassionate impartiality. At the time, we called this “getting out of the way of the story.” Watching the tapes 20 years later, however, I’m embarrassed by the lack of passion in my voice. If ever there was a moment for a tear, a tremor in the voice, or a trill of joy, that was it.

The collapse of the Wall, of course, was the climax of a bigger geo-political story that I and other members of CBC’s London bureau had been following for weeks in the fall of 1989. Seismic events in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and other Warsaw Pact countries were keeping us busy; we sensed that we were witnessing the important end of  something significant. The P and G words were on everyone’s tongue: perestroika and glasnost, reform and openness. Gorbachev was stirring the tectonic plates of Europe. So our eyes were on the entire Soviet Bloc, but our attention was fixed mostly on Germany.

I vividly remember Leipzig. We’d heard that unusual things were happening in this historic East German city. It had begun with a peaceful candle-lit march by 40 people, demanding that East Germans be free to travel. Over successive weeks, the march grew to 80 people, then several hundred, then more than a thousand, walking in defiance of local authorities. My cameraman Philippe Billard and I decided that this was something we needed to witness.

So we packed a small portable video camera, and passed through Checkpoint Charlie on October 10, posing as tourists. In the camera was a cassette with tape of my son Patrick’s eighth birthday party. We arrived in Leipzig in early evening, and a huge candle-lit demonstration was already under way. Philippe filmed the march surreptitiously, on the last half of the birthday cassette. Then, on the drive back to Berlin, we rewound the tape. It was an inspired precaution: Sure enough, at Checkpoint Charlie, East German border guards demanded to see our tape. We handed it over, and they watched portions of the tape of Patrick blowing out the candles of his birthday cake. “A handsome boy,” they said, and sent us on our way. The next day, the first videotape images of the Leipzig marches were shown around the world.

There are few things more thrilling than to touch history on the run. The early evening of November 9, 1989, was overcast and wet in East Berlin. Reporters gathered at a routine press conference by a Politburo member, Gunther Schabowski. It was boring, and I was looking forward to a dinner of sausage, red cabbage and beer. Shortly before 7pm, as he was wrapping up, Schabowski made a curious comment in reply to a question from an Italian journalist. It was delivered sotto voce, almost like a throw-away line; the instantaneous translation made it sound as if the government were lifting the rules that prevented East Germans from traveling abroad. The Wall, he seemed to be saying, would be open immediately for travel to the West. Without elaboration, Schabowski gathered his papers and walked out. I bolted out of my seat, told my camera crew to follow me, and we chased him to his waiting limousine. “Mr. Minister,” I said, with forced calmness, “aren’t you afraid there will be a huge exodus as a result of this?”  Stepping into his car, choosing his words carefully, Schabowski replied: “Nobody can say what will be the result of this step, you see. But we are trying to do our best for the people.”

History sometimes swings on such banal words. Within an hour or two of Schabowski’s announcement, tens of thousands of East Berliners began gathering at exit points on the Wall. They demanded travel visas.  They wanted them now, “sofort!”. The guards were nonplussed. They said the Wall would not be open until the next morning, but the crowds were so large, and so insistent, that the border guards threw up their hands and let them through. I was in my West Berlin hotel suite shortly before midnight, editing my story about Schabowski’s curious statement, when Philippe Billard came running in, waving a video cassette, and shouting: “People are going through the Wall by the thousands!!”  The Ossies (as the East Germans were called) were already beginning to flood West Berlin’s high-end shopping district, the Kurfurstendamm, with fistfuls of useless currency.

Within a day or two, the sledgehammers began knocking down the wall. In March there were free elections. By the following October, there was only one Germany. Twenty years later, the emotion that I suppressed so “professionally” in my reporting of these and subsequent events, is still with me.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/berlinwall/memories/f-vp-adams-claude.html