Category Archives: Berlin Wall
Remembering Romania and Ceausescu
Why did I switch from journalism to psychotherapy? As chronicled (cautiously) elsewhere on this site (see my long-in-the-tooth Masters thesis from 2000), Romania and covering the revolution there 20 years ago this month were, looking back, the decisive turning point.
As this year of revolutionary anniversaries draws to a close (wall-to-wall coverage of the fall of the Wall with a capital W), I’ve been asked by the occasional student and colleague what it was like to be in Bucharest for BBC Radio at that extraordinary Christmas time in 1989.
I haven’t yet quite got the hang of this blogging software well enough to allow me to position the photos beautifully around this page, but I do at least now know how to scan old negatives into my system, so here, after months of feeding images from 40 years of travel onto my hard drive, is having a go.
Starting on the left at the very top of this post with a view of the burned-out National Library on the edge of Revolution Square square before the old Central Committee building, where the crowds gathered to shout down the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu on that fateful Thursday and chase him away in a helicopter. He and his wife Elena were executed by firing squad on Christmas Day.
I arrived in Bucharest (by taxi from Belgrade – a fare of $1600) on the Saturday morning, December 23, just before nine o’clock London time – important, because BBC Radio 4′s Today Programme was still on air – and just squeaked into a small hotel, the Modern (which wasn’t very), where manageress Veronika Munteanu got me a telephone line to London. Read the rest of this entry
Tandeming through the Berlin Wall, anno 1978
As Europe remembers the opening of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago this week, I can’t resist posting a picture of what it used to be like in the old days – as Jutta and I cycled through Checkpoint Charlie on a tandem.
I was working for Reuters at the time, and we lived in East Berlin, crossing the Wall pretty much daily between West and East, me on my reporting assignments and Jutta attending her teacher training at the Free University.
As we pedalled up, the East German border guards (who we actually knew quite well) were friendly but flummoxed.
“Herr Gott nochmal,” they said, “Good grief! If we let you through on a tandem today, we’ll have to let people through on horses tomorrow.”
I never did see a horse go through Checkpoint Charlie. Read the rest of this entry
