FEBRUARY 1989: I am head-hunted by another company for the first time and feel wonderful.
FEBRUARY 1989: I travel behind the Iron Curtain – I have not been back since I left. In Prague I see people gathering at night in the silent streets. They stand in front of shop windows with televisions. The next day I meet my father for the first time in twenty years. We spend four days together.
MAY 1989: I fall in love and tell my husband that I am going to leave him. We sit beside each other in the garden next to the compost heap and cry both.. I love my husband more than anything and yet I am leaving him.
MAY 1989: My band wins the newcomers' contest at our local youth club.
AUGUST 1989: My wife gives birth to our first daughter of four. The nursing personel leaves the room and the newborn baby watches us silently for one hour.
AUGUST 1989: My mother, my brother and I escape to the West through Hungary after waiting for some time in the embassy. We lose our passports and most of our clothes in the fast river that marks the border. The Western breakfast provided by the Austrian police is wonderful.
AUGUST 1989: My aunt phones during lunch, Mum cries and tells Dad he should take it, then she runs into the bedroom and Dad follows. My sister and I stay sitting at the table, unsure what to do. When Mum comes back we learn that our twenty-one year old uncle has just died in an accident.
SEPTEMBER 1989: In psychotherapy I being to encounter myself.
SEPTEMBER 1989: My suicide attempt fails and I discover my creativity.
NOVEMBER 1989: The wall comes down. My brother listens to the radio a lot around this time and is the first to find out. The next day I'm sitting next to him on a train to Berlin.
NOVEMBER 1989: I visit Sophie in hospital after her operation. Her face is quite green. The night before, the Berlin Wall fell.
NOVEMBER 1989: By chance I learn from the evening news that something is happening in the GDR. That night the wall comes down. I sit in front of the television all night following what is happening. I think of Stefan Zweig’s "magic moments of humanity" and am certain that I am experiencing the greatest shift in the world that will happen in my lifetime.
DECEMBER 1989: The wall has fallen and I visit my friends in Berlin. It's chaos there and everything seems possible. On New Year's Eve we dance on top of stolen cars until a police van arrives.
DECEMBER 1989: I am in Prague for the second time and take part in every demonstration. Václav Havel and Peter Uhl are in prison. With my boyfriend I ring the bell at Peter Uhl's apartment, his wife opens the door to us strangers and asks us in immediately after he has introduced himself as Matthias F. from the Fourth International. After working on a translation for an hour we two women chat in Czech.
DECEMBER 1989: I get my first computer as a Christmas present: an Olivetti M 20. I do somersaults on the carpet for joy.