These pictures from 1974 show the border between East and West Germany – to the right, you can see an East German watch tower. Few things can be more evocative of the world that my generation inherited than this split into East and West, freedom and tyranny, democracy and communism.
For us, this was how things were – how they had always been. When these pictures were taken, it was unthinkable that the Iron Curtain would vanish within our lifetime. But it did. Improbable as it seemed, we would live to see it, quite literally, disappear before our eyes.
