On November 9 1989 I was at home in my flat in East Berlin.

I had taken the day off work to nurse my sick seven-year-old son.

In the late afternoon the old German film showing on television was interrupted for a news announcement.

This was very unusual, but the message that the government had decided to lift travel restrictions for GDR citizens was not all that surprising.

Freedom to travel had been the number one demand of the demonstrators who had grown in confidence especially in Leipzig over the previous weeks.

Official reaction to the thousands leaving the GDR to get to West Germany via Czechoslovakia and Hungary was to deny it was really happening.

GDR society was experiencing traumatic events that I was finding difficult to keep up with.

Less than a month earlier Eric Honecker had been replaced by Egon Krenz as the general secretary of the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED), the East German communist Party.

Just a few days earlier a massive demonstration in East Berlin had been followed by the resignation of the government and then the politburo.

I remember thinking that our demonstrations in the West didn’t have that impact. Of course it wasn’t just the demonstrations that were behind the changes in the GDR.

I had been working in the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF) headquarters on Unter den Linden for two years and was trying to reconcile my belief in the socialist state and the day-to-day realities — the excessive and detailed control of our work by the communist party.

The November 9 television announcement said something about people having to get police permission before they travelled and it was not clear when this all would happen.

On the BBC World Service that evening a British East German expert was sceptical and did not believe travel restrictions had really been lifted.

I remember him saying it would be months before the authorities introduced the necessary legislation.

I went to bed thinking roughly the same thing.

Changes were on the cards but I believed the system was so rigid that it would take some time to put into practice. But that night hundreds flocked to the border crossings as millions of people watching TV around the world found out.

The next day on the tram to work I was surprised to see hundreds queuing patiently outside police stations.

The law-abiding East Berliners were getting the required freedom to travel stamp on their identity papers.

The East Germans were on the move in a way I had thought them incapable of.

On the tram two young men were poring over a map of Berlin — West Berlin. That was the first time it dawned on me that things were changing forever. I felt that the solid ground beneath my feet had shifted.

When I got into work on November 10 some of the German colleagues were decrying the confusion and mayhem caused by spokesman for the central committee Gunter Shabowski’s announcement the day before.

At that time the atmosphere in the WIDF offices was surreal.

It was all business as usual. The organisation was not able to react to the political situation unfolding in the streets outside the building.
Our German bosses stayed tight-lipped about the situation — at least in front of us foreigners.

Only one German colleague did openly react. She was a loyal SED member and expressed total bewilderment that this all “was being allowed to happen.”

In a one-woman protest she started putting up posters along the corridor wall trying to rally people to defend the GDR.

Her superiors shrugged their shoulders, although this sort of initiative would never have been dared previously.

That night after work I took my son down to the Friedrichstrasse train station border crossing point.

Instead of going down the fast-track passage for foreigners with multiple-entry visas as I usually did, I stood in the crowd heading for West Berlin for the first time in their lives.

My son spotted one of his friends from school with his parents, a quiet couple.

I joined them and we all went through together.

The atmosphere was electric but calm — with everyone aware they were living through a very important historic event.

People stood patiently for hours as the trains filled up to capacity. In the West it was hard to move along the streets at times.

Stalls had been set up serving free beer and the streets were wet with spilled drinks.

We headed for the Europa centre — then a showpiece for all that free market enterprise had to offer.

I would not say I witnessed great joy and celebration in the streets, at least not that day.

The family I was with seemed to be in a state of shock and bewilderment. The father said why on Earth were they never allowed to do this before — such a short journey.

“Why have we been treated like children?”

There was sadness as well as anger in his words. They were of the generation born just before the wall went up in 1961.

“We don’t want to live here in the West — we just want the right to travel” was a refrain echoed so many times by any GDR citizen who was happy to talk to me, a foreigner.

Travel and democracy. By democracy they meant just the right to speak their mind in public.

The few neighbours in my block who were brave enough to speak to me explained the problem.

“We have all these organisations — trade unions, local groups — but they are all controlled by the party. You can’t go there to a meeting and raise anything you like. You just have to say ‘Ja ja ja’ to everything.”

These were the ordinary working people of Berlin speaking — not the more middle-class dissidents with connections to the West via the church organisations.

Over the next few days thousands of East Germans visited West Berlin — and went home again.

The Western media reports about thousands fleeing Berlin did not touch the real story, although in the months following November 9 people did leave East Berlin bit by bit.

In every district flats were abandoned. In my area, sad little piles of furniture and books appeared out on the street as people dumped their GDR lives in the hope of something better in the West.

But the majority stayed. And the majority voted for unification by the time elections came in 1990.

A few weeks later my next-door neighbour, who had never spoken to me before, started chatting to me in the lift — in English.

He had been a diplomat and had lived in various places in the West. He had never spoken to me before because he was “not allowed to,” he said.

Around this time I felt the solid ground beneath my feet shifting again in the local supermarket.

A lot of the usual GDR produce had been replaced by Western brands — biscuits, washing powder, tinned goods.

Rumours were that distributors were bribed to dump GDR stuff and deliver Western groceries.

There was nothing official about it. It was a sign the GDR was crumbling and would soon be gone.

For a believer in socialism who had jumped at the chance to live in “actually existing socialism” in 1987, it was a shock to see it all slipping away.

In the months that followed, the WIDF tried to reform itself. We foreign workers found out that our German colleagues had all had to swear to report to their superiors any private conversation with the foreign workers.

The German women’s organisation affiliated to the WIDF seemed to evaporate and hundreds of small “independent” women’s groups sprouted up around all kinds of issues.

I went along to one campaigning for better conditions for foreign workers. We had not been allowed to vote, join a trade union or political party in the GDR.

Another group I met started to formulate demands for “not so German-looking people” — mostly for mixed-race people.
Racism lay deep in the culture of many East Germans and the problem had hardly been addressed by the SED.

There was also a group fighting discrimination against red-haired people, which I soon found out was not a joke.

At a big meeting in Berlin bringing together scores of new women’s groups with organisations of the political parties I wondered where all these people had been hiding in the past two years.

This burgeoning of citizens’ activist groups was reflected in round table discussions that started before the end of the year.

Their aim seemed to be to reform the GDR, but in the May 1990 elections and the all-German elections in December the majority voted for reunification and this flowering of small people’s democracy gave way to a rapid and ruthless takeover by the West.

In the end the SED-funded WIDF ran out of money. Eight months later in June 1990 we headed back to Dublin.

Ireland had reached the second round in the World Cup and the streets were full of joyous people with green, white and orange painted faces.

I could not join in the celebrations. It was a world apart from the historic trauma I had just experienced.