Paul: That memorable night, when The Wall came crashing down, that entire chain of events may have had something to do with reading glasses. One of the official spokesmen for East Germany, not having the reading glasses at the press conference? Remember the press conference, and this individual was asked a question--

Volker: Oh.

Paul: And he didn't have his glasses. I mean, that changed the course of history.

Volker: This was Schabowski

Paul: Schabowski?

Volker: Schabowski - who was Editor in Chief of Neues Deutschland, which was the communist - official communist newspaper of the DDR. That was Günter Schabowski, who-- He came out of a public bureau meeting. There was Honecker, all the biggies. And of course, the pressure had been building, okay?

Schabowski was not in the meeting. Or somebody gave him a little slip, handwritten. Because he had to face a news conference for the western correspondents. Tom Brokaw was one of them, asking tough questions. And it was a mixture of English and German. NBC's top technician in Germany translated for Brokaw.

I don't know if he asked the deciding question. But Brokaw kept asking little by little what happened in the public bureau. Remember, things were at the boiling point, okay? At one point, Schabowski was -- he was not up to reporters asking questions. Not Western style. He was just thrown off by German and English-speaking reporters.

And here was Schabowski. Supposedly he couldn't read his notes, and he didn't have his reading glasses. So he winged it. And there was talk about when to open the border and under what conditions. And I forget who - they were leading him on. And I think the question was, "So would you say that the border is already open today or will be open today?" And Schabowski said something in German, "Yes, I think you could say that," and--

Paul: Oops.

Volker: The public bureau people had gone home. Schabowski was there on his own, amazingly. None of the bigwigs spoke English, okay? So, everything they said went back and forth: German and English. The English-speaking reporters had to be translated. This was hilarious. Some of the border guards who listened on the radio - more or less threw up their hands and opened the border. They weren't supposed to.

One of the officers in charge of the border guards tried to call Honecker, who was in his car. He couldn't reach him, Honecker didn't have a phone in his car.

Paul: Saving money, or they just didn't have car phones?

Volker: They didn't have the technology. Here's the head of a country who could not be reached, because he had no phone. Yet every bakery and every dry cleaner had a phone in his car. Honecker didn't, so he never got word. But yes Schabowski… By the way, he died a few years ago. He turned out to be a fairly decent guy. They stuck him with a job and they went home, and the rest is history. Günter Schabowski. By the way, an educated man.