Axel Martens, "The Fall of the Berlin Wall"

25 years ago the Berlin Wall fell - suddenly. A most hideous and much hated vice designed to prevent the East Germans to leave their country, that had stood for 28 years, and that had cost the lives of at least 136 people trying to overcome its imprisonment was unexpectedly opened - by accident. I was almost 18 at that time. Haven grown up quite sheltered in a tiny town in the rural North of East Germany, I was watching the late night (West German) news as I saw footage of Berliners - first hundreds then thousands - crossing the "Death Strip" into West Berlin. An event that had seemed as likely as a UFO landing on the White House lawn had just happened - and it changed my life and the world as we knew it forever. Let me tell you my story, about the Wall, the daily life in East Germany in the 80th, the events leading up to November 9th, and the rare happy end of a revolution in 1989.
Bio:
Axel Martens was born 1972 in a small East German town 120 miles North of Berlin. Going through the typical East German school system including mandatory communist youth organizations, Axel was in his final year at high-school when the Berlin Wall fell. After finishing school, Axel moved to Berlin where he studied computer science and worked for SAP AG. In 2004, after finishing his Ph.D., Axel moved to the USA and started working for IBM Reseach in New York. Axel joined Google in October 2012 and works in New York as Tech Lead in CorpEng.