In October 1989, Stern, a German weekly news magazine, published a special issue reflecting on the major events of the 1980s. That was a big mistake. By trying to hit the newsstands early, the magazine missed the decade’s biggest surprise: the fall of the Berlin Wall on Nov. 9, 1989 — 25 years ago on Sunday.

“You! Get on a plane!” my editor, John Kominicki, babbled at me excitedly as the news broke that Thursday evening. We were in the newsroom of Stars and Stripes, the daily newspaper of the U.S. forces overseas, in Griesheim, West Germany, about 20 miles south of Frankfurt.

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The East German government unexpectedly had allowed its citizens immediate, unrestricted travel into West Berlin, an enclave of democracy and capitalism that had been surrounded for 28 years by a concrete wall, mine fields and watchtowers. Kominicki wanted me in Berlin because I was a reporter who spoke German.

I arrived in Berlin about 10:30 a.m. in the midst of ecstatic pandemonium. By chance, I had traveled there for the first time only a month earlier, so I had a good grasp of the street layout. Eventually, some Stars and Stripes colleagues joined me there. We stayed about a week.

When the Bornholmerstrasse crossing opened Nov. 9, so many people were waiting to get through that the crossing point couldn’t handle them all. So with each passing day, more sections of wall were breached. Wine bottles lined the top of the wall in many places, and people were sitting on it, too, singing, laughing and drinking. Strangers hugged each other. It was like the world’s biggest wedding.

One morning, workers chopped a hole in the wall in East Berlin’s Pankow district. I began interviewing the new arrivals. Most were exuberant, but some were melancholy. One old woman broke off our conversation suddenly and wandered away weeping. “Please forgive us,” said a friend who had accompanied her. “This is very emotional. Her parents died in the west, and the authorities refused to let her attend the funerals.”

After talking with several visitors, I retreated to a nearby park to write a story on a Tandy 200, a device that looked like a modern laptop computer but bore about the same relationship to one as an oxcart does to a space shuttle. As I typed, East Germans started wandering into the park and asking questions about the Tandy 200, which amazed them. It became obvious that I wasn’t going to get any work done there, so I rang a doorbell at a nearby apartment building and convinced a man who answered to let me finish my story in his living room, undisturbed.

The Berlin landmark that attracted the most revelers from the west was the Brandenburg Gate, the city’s iconic 18th-century landmark. The gate was in East Berlin, and the wall swept in a wide arc around its western side. I arrived there one evening and found hundreds of people atop the concrete crescent. I climbed up onto the arc’s southern side to take a photo of the crowd, still marveling that no East German guards were interfering with a celebration that, had it occurred only a week earlier, might have resulted in somebody getting shot.

As I backed up to get the best possible angle, I bumped into Dan Rather, the anchor of the “CBS Evening News” in those days. His cameraman was behind him. “Is that thing on?” I said, pointing to the TV camera. “No,” Rather said. “Great,” I said, and continued taking pictures.

Then I climbed down into the crowd that was pressed up against the western side of the wall, where I ran into the spokesman for the U.S. Embassy, which in those days was in Bonn.

“You know, the old man is here tonight,” he said, gesturing toward U.S. Ambassador Vernon Walters. “You want a word with him?”

“Sure,” I said, then proved myself woefully incapable of rising to the occasion. Amid all the hubbub, the only thing I could think of asking Walters — a longtime diplomat and former four-star Army general — was whether he ever had seen such chaos in the streets.

“Oh, yes,” he said, “Paris in 1968” — a reference to student riots that wracked the continent that year.

The next morning, before I left my hotel, I turned on the TV and found Rather interviewing Walters. “So,” Rather said, noting the collapse of communism in Hungary and East Germany, “what’s next?”

“Czechoslovakia,” Walters replied.

Why couldn’t I have thought of that question?

(Walters was right. The Czechoslovaks’ peaceful Velvet Revolution began the following week.)

During those euphoric days after the wall opened, Berlin was the setting of scenes that were unique in the city’s history. Western supermarkets dispatched trucks to crossing points to hand out chocolate, coffee, fruit and other items to East German visitors. One of my colleagues photographed famed Soviet dissident Mstislav Rostropovich playing his cello beside the wall. Hundreds of Trabants, tiny smoke-belching cars from the east, clogged West Berlin boulevards, turning the air to a blue haze.

After a week, I went home, carrying pieces of concrete that once had been part of the Berlin Wall.

The wall went up when I was 8 years old, and when Berlin was a tinderbox of political tension that threatened to propel the United States into a world war with the Soviet Union. Now I have an 8-year-old German grandson who has never known a divided Germany, who thinks of Berlin as the place where he goes to visit his Aunt Tina, and who possibly never has heard of the Soviet Union, which ceased to exist long before he was born.

Today Berlin is a different city facing different problems, but it is the capital of Europe’s biggest economy, wielding power in ways that help to temper the attitudes of foreigners who still remember when it was the wellspring of Nazi terror, and when it was a hub of Cold War tension in the decades after World War II.

We baby boomers who spent part of our childhoods taking part in air raid drills in preparation for a possible nuclear attack should consider ourselves lucky that things turned out as well as they did.

Joseph Owen is the copy desk chief of the Kennebec Journal and the Morning Sentinel. He worked as a reporter for the European edition of Stars and Stripes from 1985 to 1994, covering the U.S. military and European political events.