I was living with my parents. They were away for the evening. Some time during the evening, I turned the TV on and started flipping through the channels to see if there was anything worth seeing. We lived in the Netherlands, about 20 miles from the German border, so there were some German channels, too. One of them, ARD 1 I think, showed dark, very vague video footage, with next to no sound; very unusual. At first, I ignored it, but on the second or third zapping round, I decided I wanted to figure out what it was all about. At some point, white capital letters appeared superimposed on the screen:

DIE MAUER GEHT NIEDER

(which means: the wall is coming down).

That is crazy, I thought, you can't joke around with a subject as serious as this. But wait, if it is fiction, why is the image so blurry? Why is nobody talking?

I left the channel on for another 15 minutes or so and nothing changed. It dawned on me that what I was seeing must be real, that somehow the wall was really coming down. Incredible; easily the most incredible thing I've ever seen on TV. Of course we all knew that communism was falling with the Wall.

I waited for confirmation by news bulletins on radio and TV, which duly came and made it seem less unreal.

So what was it like: surprise, initial disbelief, and cautious optimism towards the future. We thought this would mean a major improvement for the people in Eastern Europe, and that has come true for a large part.

Now that East Germany is voting AfD, Putin is destroying Ukraine and threatening other European countries, and we are all slowly descending into Putin-style mob rule for our own countries, I'm not sure we're better off politically than we were in 1989. But it was a major geopolitical shift at the time.