A friend in London has posted YouTube videos to his Facebook page, documents of the riots in Tehran that took place on Saturday, June 13, 2009. In this one, amid choral shouts and the sounds of traffic, a troupe of police threads its way under and past the camera in the middle of the street; it’s impossible to tell who the videographer is. The camera turns: men run and launch stones off screen, a bus and a car creep forward through the crowd, a young man wearing a green kerchief over his mouth kneels down to pick up a stone. Shouts. The clamor of traffic. Then the sound goes out. A fist raised in the air, literally tens of thousands of people in the street.

June 13, 1987 was also a Saturday.

I remember, because I took the subway that day from Alt-Mariendorf to Kurfürstendamm and found myself in the middle of a protest against the visit of Ronald Reagan to West Berlin (Reagan had delivered his famous ultimatum to Gorbachev the day before). Who knows how many thousands of people marched down that boutique-lined, capitalist thoroughfare that day? It was larger than the demonstrations following Chernobyl that I had attended the previous year, when I was an exchange student. Most of the protesters were young, though still older than I was (I had just graduated from high school the week before).

Security was tight: the protesters were escorted by a cordon of police. Later, the police reorganized and began corraling us. Here’s something I regret: I was inside a corral. But I was supposed to meet Andrea and Jörg at 5 for something, dinner? And it was 3, and I needed, wanted, to get out, to get to the subway… And maybe because this was happening in front of KaDeWe, I felt as committed to this demonstration as I would have to a shopping excursion? But Reagan was certainly cause enough for me to protest, too, to stay there in solidarity with those others…. Nevertheless, when the cop refused to let me through the cordon, I showed him my Illinois driver’s license, and he let me pass.

East Berlin, September 23, 1989. A record shop near the Leninallee (now Landsberger Allee) S-Bahn station. A woman in a white dress waits patiently and legitimately for the green walk sign. Nothing could possibly change here.

West Berlin, September 25, 1989. Kurfürstendamm. What could possibly change here? But: Wasn’t it this very same day that Andrea and I, sitting in her apartment in Moabit, watched an interview on West German TV with Bärbel Bohley, a representative of the East German opposition? An East German opposition! Who had ever heard of such a thing? “It’s not going to change anything,” Andrea said matter-of-factly, “the Party controls everything there.” Of course, nothing would change. This was a world of perfect stasis, without history, no future either. The Cold War dynamic was, for my 20-year-old self, for all of us maybe, an incontrovertible reality, as well-guarded and impervious to idealism as the Wall itself.

The following day, I took the night train from East Berlin’s Lichtenrade Station to Krakow. Two bubbly sisters from Greifswald and a Dutch musicologist were my traveling companions—the three of them headed to a music festival, I to a year-long Polish language-immersion program. At some point late in the night and well beyond the Polish border, we began to talk about the political situation in East Germany. I expressed my doubts, adopted on the authority of my West-German friend, about the future of any possible East-German opposition. But the two sisters smiled secretively and looked at each other and said, “Who knows, who knows. . .?” And that was the truth: Who knew?

Brandenburger Tor, September 1989. A tourist destination.

Brandenburger Tor, September 1989. Tyrone and Jodi were here.

Potsdamer Platz, September 1989. An unreconstructable perspective.

Das rote Rathaus (Berlin City Hall), 29 October 1989. A group of us took the night train from Krakow, then the S-Bahn from Lichtenberg Station to Alexanderplatz. We decided to walk from Alexanderplatz to the checkpoint at Friedrichstrasse and happened upon this: Tens of thousands of people congregated in front of City Hall, listening to statements being made by a group of individuals seated or standing on a platform in front of the building. It sounded… I listened carefully to the megaphones, trying to translate for my American and Polish friends . . . like . . . Government officials and members of the opposition? Talking to one another? An unlikely scenario, but true—or rather: Municipal and Party officials on the one hand, and on the other, not so much an organized opposition as ordinary citizens simply airing their grievances. Really airing them, in a way that had never happened before in the GDR and that required unprecedented courage.

This was one of the so-called “Sunday Conversations” (Sonntagsgespräche) that took place that day, a last-ditch attempt by the Party to respond to the wave of protests that had been taking place all October in Leipzig. (The following Saturday, November 4, the largest demonstration Germany has ever known took place: 1 million people at least, 1/16th of the country’s population, converged on Alexanderplatz.) The West German Trotskyite newspaper Neue Arbeiterpresse carried a detailed report on this Sunday Conversation in its November 3, 1989 issue, describing the numerous criticisms made by East-German citizens of the privileges enjoyed by Party bureaucrats and of harassment by the Stasi, and one worker’s call for the Wall to be opened (Bund Sozialistischer Arbeiter, Das Ende der DDR: eine politische Autopsie [1992], pp. 109–114). Evidently the 5-hour-long “conversation” became increasingly heated toward the end. But by that point, we—Americans and Poles, tourists, ostensibly uninvolved—had already long crossed over into West Berlin.

Two weeks later, the Wall had opened, spectacularly.