Twenty years ago today, the Berlin Wall came down.

Ten years ago today, I wrote a piece for WordRidden entitled The Making of History in which I tried to express what this historic event personally meant to me, a true “Cold War kid” and one who happened to be living in Germany on November 9, 1989.

And just two years ago, I was in Berlin for the first time since 1988. That trip made a tremendous impression on me, not just because I completely fell in love with the city, but because it was the first chance I had to revise the mental image of Berlin that I had formed as a 15-year-old. The Cold War intrigue has been swept away, but the strands of memory connecting past to present still remain, and they’re brought to life as you traverse the ley lines of the city, trace the remains of the Wall, follow the Straße des 17. Juni straight through the Brandenburg Gate and down Unter den Linden to the east. Like London, Berlin will never cease to fascinate me. There’s just something about the city as a nexus of so much history, both good and bad. There’s no other place in the world quite like it.

The New York Times has a nifty little feature on Berlin “then and now” where you can drag a slider across photographs to slip from the Berlin of 20 years ago to the Berlin of today. I can’t reproduce the groovy slider effect, but I can do a few side-by-side comparisons of pictures I took in Berlin in 2007 and my mom’s incredible photographs of Berlin from 1969 and from just before and after the Wall came down. So here you go…

The Reichstag in 1969:

The Bundestag today:

The Brandenburg Gate in 1969:

Me at the Brandenburg Gate in 1988:

The Brandenburg Gate today:

The Berlin Wall in 1969:

Me at the Berlin Wall in 1988:

What’s left of the Wall today:

Me with an East German guard in 1988:

Me with an “East German guard” today:

And finally, just because I love the picture so much, my little brother in Berlin 20 years ago: