Cycho Librarian

With the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall, I've been thinking a lot about the event. Looking back on it, it's hard to describe just how shocking it was for this to happen, and so suddenly. I might have been more aware of the wall and the cold war generally, since I read a lot of spy novels and Tom Clancy books at the time, but I think it's safe to say that at the time no one thought the wall would ever come down, or at least not in our lifetimes. I had been dimly aware at the time of how relaxed travel restrictions from Hungary and Czechoslovakia had led to large numbers of East Germans leaving the country and trying to get to the west through those countries, but I didn't think too much of it. Anytime there had been protest like this, inevitably the government would crack down, become more restrictive, and do everything they could to prevent things from getting out of hand. I just heard on a documentary about the fall that Erich Honecker had plans to...