Heinz Bielka remembers November 9, 1989
Heinz Bielka (85) spontaneously laughs when asked about the day the wall came down. At the time he was head of a department at the Central Institute for Molecular Biology („Zentralinstitut für Molekularbiologie“, ZIM) of the Academy of Sciences of the German Democratic Republic, or GDR, the former East Germany. The Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine was later established on the site of the ZIM. Bielka, who specialized in cancer research, remembers: „I went to bed just like any evening after having read some scientific papers, and when I came into the lab the next morning, I noticed that hardly any members of my department were there. At first, I had no clue as to what was going on.“ Of course he very quickly learned what had happened: during the night, the Berlin wall had come down! „In the course of the day, most of my co-workers came back to the institute and talked about the events; they were elated, and hardly any work got done. There was a completely different spirit, a sense of something new. And I celebrated with them even though I had slept through the falling of the wall.“
He recalls these events during an interview he gave for our Witnesses to Living History project in which we ask former generations of scientists to collect their accounts of how they lived and worked in Berlin-Buch, thus making the history of the Max Delbrück Center come alive.
Here’s a short video that shows how he recalls the events (in German):
