In 1989, I had just graduated from the Gymansium, the high school, in Kitzingen, Germany. After toiling for all of those years just to maintain an acceptable GPA in possibly the toughest school system in the world, I wished to do one thing and one thing only: work and make money. It's no fun being broke, as I learned early on as a young adult.

Luckily, the number one employer in town, Fehrer, a manufacturer of interior automotive components, according to their own website, took a chance on me. Now Fehrer wasn't a mom-and-pop store or an amusement park. Fehrer was and is still a factory with people working on assembly lines. These were unionized workers who were accustomed to hard work. Some of my buddies told me to get ready to sweat.

I was assigned to help manufacture foam components of seats, headrests, and the like. Being the new guy on the line, I got the least desirable work, which was opening those hot kettles carrying piping hot foam parts coming out of the oven. Once the kettles reached my position, I removed the hardened foam parts with my bare hands. Frequently, I would burn my hands. At first, I was not quick enough in removing the foam parts so that the line needed to be stopped, and the foreman would cuss at me from the top of his lungs. I learned. I worked hard. I survived. And yes, I made good money. And one year on the line was enough for me to decide that I did not want to work there for the rest of my life.

In the summer of 1989, an extraordinary event happened. Some of you Boomers or Xers might remember it. Hungary opened its border with Austria, albeit for just a few hours. Hungary's border was part of the Iron Curtain, which stretched all the way past Czechoslovakia and East Germany. According to plan, the opening was supposed to be a symbolic gesture or a sign of peace. Hundreds of citizens from East Germany didn't care about peace or symbols, but seized the opportunity and escaped to the west without so much as an Auf Wiedersehen to the old country. 

In Germany, we were stunned. What on earth had just happened? Were there cracks in the Iron Curtain? Nah, couldn't be.

Fast forward a few months: by now, autumn had set in Germany. I was driving my dad's car to work on a cold November morning when the news reached me that thousands of East Germans were flooding into West Berlin. I stopped the car and listened. Was this the Germans' idea of a practical joke? 

At work, the employees were all smiles. For years and years, our generation, plus the generations before us when the Berlin Wall was built in 1961, never believed there would be an end to the Cold War, let alone a unified Germany. Events happened so lightning quick that there were no parliaments or committees to debate this, and yet people were now treating the Berlin Wall with the treatment it deserved...with sledgehammers. 

Only a few months later, we greeted the first East Germans at Fehrer, who were eager to prove their value to the oldtimers. Employees from other former Soviet Union satellite states were also hired, including Yugoslavians, Bulgarians, Poles, and Romanians.

In 1990, Germany won the tropy at the FIFA World Cup in Italy. On October 3, 1990 the German Democratic Republic (DDR here in Germany) officially ceased to exist. German reunification now was no longer a dream. A fitting end to an incredible decade.