1989: Witnessing history

It was a world without mobile phones, rolling news or social media. BBC journalists reflect on how they told the story, once they found it…

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Brian Hanrahan,Diplomatic Correspondent (pictured in ’89) reported from Poland, Berlin and Romania.

“I don’t think I ever quite imagined what was going to happen. It was obvious that this was a regime that was breaking down, but we had a moment, like many, where when the announcement was made, we sat in a room arguing if it meant anything. In the end we just decided that it had to. So we bashed off a piece to the newsroom saying that this was the big moment on which the century
turns and hoped that we got it right,and then went out to look for it. And the extraordinary thing was that it was very hard to find. You’d think that something like that wouldn’t be difficult but when you’re living in a locked down society where nobody tells you anything, we couldn’t find the
break in the Berlin Wall.”

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BBC World News presenter Nik Gowing witnessed a tense moment while reporting for Channel 4 News.

“I walked up under the Brandenburg gate, technically in the East, and found myself with the camera and a sound man standing alongside a platoon of East German border guards. Wessies (West Germans) were sitting up on the wall. [The guard] was on the phone demanding orders: ‘What should I do? What should I do? Shall I shoot them? Shall I shoot them?’ We were filming all of this and after about 15 minutes he started laughing as nobody replied.”

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Bridget Kendall, Diplomatic Correspondent, was in Moscow as events unfolded in Berlin.

“Moscow did feel like it was on the other side of the divide. A very long way from Europe. In those days we didn’t have pictures. It was before rolling news and we couldn’t watch BBC news in Moscow so we just had the words. It felt muted. When we began to hear about these dramatic events, it started to compute that these were all the things that the Soviet leadership had been doing, and it made us realise that this was connected to what was happening in Moscow.”

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BBC Monitoring’s Magda Ralphs was posted to West Berlin in the summer of 1989 to monitor Polish news.

“In an era when there wasn’t satellite or internet, we had to be as close to the sources as we could get. I was based in a small office in West Berlin. It was a summer of discontent in Eastern Europe... Western television news reports would show people jumping over fences to Western embassies, but not much about that appeared in heavily censored Eastern European media. The differences in reporting were enormous. The East German television channel Deutscher Fernsehfunk (DFF) tried to play it down. Polish television was more free than East German, but it was still not quite obvious that we were witnessing the beginning of the end."

Related links

click Take a tour of the 1989 photowall

click 1989: Europe's revolution