On November 9, 1989, Jurgen Morhard was serving in the foreign ministry in Bonn, the then capital of West Germany. "I remember this day as if it were just yesterday; my wife and I were hosting a farewell reception for friends and colleagues prior to our imminent departure to Tokyo. The harbinger of the good news of the opening of the Berlin Wall was a cheery colleague from the German Parliament," Morhard, now the Consul General of Germany in Mumbai, tells us. The East Germans, he adds, had begun to cross over into West Germany. "Our party got busted, but of course, for a very special and joyful moment. Hastily, we all tried to find a radio or a television set on the premises, in order to verify the historic moment."

Unlike Morhard, Suzanne Bernert experienced the immediate effect of the collapse first-hand. "I was a teenager then, and we were driving on the highway to visit my grandmother on her birthday. As my grandfather, a customs officer, was posted at the border of the wall, we were headed in that direction. This was when we saw a sea of Trabant—the iconic East German car—entering our side of the country," the West German-born actress recalls. "We turned on the radio and learned that the wall had come down. Before we knew it, all of us were crying out of happiness. Finally, families and lovers that were ripped apart 40 years ago were going to reunite," Bernert, who played Sonia Gandhi in The Accidental Prime Minister, adds.