An American in Berlin - Marc Fisher remembers the ...

Federica Bonacini – euronews: “The events of November the 9th, 1989 marked the end of the cold war and had a big impact on the society as well. Marc Fisher was a young reporter for the Washington Post at that time and had just started his posting in West Germany. You were a young witness to the events. What did you feel that night and what was your perception of what was happening?” Marc Fisher – Washington Post columnist: “I was actually just beginning my time as the bureau chief for the Washington Post, that fall, and was still enrolled in a language course in a small village in Western Germany, the day before the Wall came down. I was out to dinner with my wife. We were staying in the home of an elderly couple. When we arrived back at their house, the old man was waiting for us and in the simpliest German he could muster he said, “The wall has fallen, Washington has called, you must work”. And so I made my way from that small village to Berlin to see the immediate impact of the Fall of the Wall. It was one extraordinary emotional reunion after another and a time where each individual hour remains absolutely riveted in my mind even twenty years later.” Federica Bonacini – euronews: “Can you tell us what were the reactions in the US not just in the Washington Post but in general in American society?” Marc Fisher – Washington Post columnist: “I think this was a tremendously stirring moment for many Americans, of all ages but particurilary for those generations who had grown up during the Cold War, in the aftermath of WWII and through the whole period of great tension, nuclear tension through the 1960’s and 70’s. For that generation, to wake up one morning and see that the people they have always been told were enslaved, imprisoned, behind the Iron Curtain, had the gumption and really the people power to step forward on their own and take action against an oppressive state. This was a tremendous fulfilment of the hopes an...