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For the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama, 1989 was famously the end of history, the moment when the ideological battles of the Cold War ended and western liberalism emerged triumphant. It certainly hasn't worked out that way and it's certainly not how things were seen from East Germany in the wake of that dramatic night in Berlin. In less than a year, West and East Germany were united -- and life in the east was never the same again. For good and ill. Some in the east saw reunification more as a takeover by the west. The novelist Ingo Schulze who was born in 1962 in Dresden in East Germany -- what were his memories of 1989?

(Photo: East and West German citizens celebrate as they climb the Berlin Wall at the Brandenburg Gate after the opening of the East German border was announced in Berlin on 9 November 1989. Credit: Reuters/Fabrizio Bensch)