- Ronald Reagan
Ronald Wilson Reagan (February 6, 1911 - June 5, 2004) was the 40th President of the United States (1981-1989) and the 33rd Governor of California (1967-1975). Reagan was born in Illinois, but moved to Hollywood in the 1930s, where he starred in numerous "B" movies and became President of the Screen Actors Guild. He was a prominent Democrat who supported the New Deal Coalition in the 1940s, and was a leading opponent of Communism in Hollywood.
- John F. Kennedy
John Fitzgerald Kennedy , also referred to as John F. Kennedy, Kennedy, John Kennedy, Jack Kennedy, or JFK, was the thirty-fifth President of the United States. In 1960 he became the youngest person ever to be elected President of the United States, and the second youngest, after Theodore Roosevelt, to serve. Kennedy served from 1961 until his assassination in 1963.
- Egon Krenz
Egon Krenz (born 19 March, 1937) is a former German Communist politician, who briefly served as leader of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in 1989 before the end of Communist rule. Throughout his career, Krenz held a number of prominent positions in the Communist regime, but he is most remembered as the Communist leader during the fall of the Berlin Wall. After reunification he was sentenced to a six and a half year prison sentence
- Peter Fechter
Peter Fechter (14 January 1944 - 17 August 1962) was a bricklayer from East Berlin, who at the age of eighteen became one of the first victims of the Berlin Wall's border guards.
- Thierry Noir
Thierry Noir is the man who contributed to the longest concrete painting in the world, the Berlin Wall. His paintings, with their bright colors and their melancholy poetry, survived longer than all the others did after the fall of the wall in 1989. Thierry Noir was born in 1958 in Lyon, France. He came to Berlin in January of 1982 with two small suitcases, attracted by the music of David Bowie and Iggy Pop, who lived in West Berlin at this time.
- Günter Schabowski
Günter Schabowski was an official of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED), the ruling party during most of the existence of the German Democratic Republic. Schabowski gained worldwide fame in November 1989 for accidentally beginning the destruction of the inner German border, including the Berlin Wall. Schabowski was born in Anklam, Pomerania (now part of the federal state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania).
- Chris Gueffroy
Chris Gueffroy was the last person to die while trying to escape across the Berlin Wall. Together with his friend Christian Gaudian, Gueffroy attempted on the night of February 5-6, 1989 to escape from East Berlin to West Berlin, along the Britz district canal. The two believed that the "Schießbefehl", the standing order to shoot anyone who attempted to cross the wall, had been lifted.
- Frank Beyer
Frank Beyer was a German film director. He studied theatre science and worked as a director for small plays before studying film at the Prager film school. In 1957 came his debut film, "Zwei Mütter". But it was "Nackt unter Wölfen" and "Jakob der Lügner" which made him famous for their portrayals of life in the concentration camp and Ghetto. His later work came increasingly under the censorship of East Germany, …
- Conrad Schumann
Hans Conrad Schumann was one of the most famous escapees from East Germany. Born in Leutewitz near Riesa, Schumann served as a soldier in the East German Bereitschaftspolizei. After three months' training in Dresden, he was posted to a non-commissioned officers' college in Potsdam, after which he volunteered for service in Berlin. On 15 August 1961 he found himself, aged 19, guarding the Berlin Wall, then in its third day of construction, …
- Vitalic
Vitalic (born as Pascal Arbez in 1976) is an electronic music artist. According to a joke made in an interview, Arbez is Ukrainian and emigrated from Ukraine to East Germany when the Berlin Wall fell, accompanied by his dog, "Mini Robot". Pascal was actually born in France and is of Italian descent.
- Ernst Bloch
Ernst Simon Bloch (July 8, 1885 - August 4, 1977) was a German Marxist philosopher and atheist theologian. He was born in Ludwigshafen, the son of an assimilated Jewish railway-employee. After studying philosophy, he married Else von Stritzky, daughter of a Baltic brewer in 1913, who died in 1921. His second marriage with Linda Oppenheimer lasted only a few years. His third wife was Karola Bloch, a Polish architect, whom he married 1934 in Vienna.
- Roy Gutman
Roy Gutman (born March 5, 1944, New York City) is an American journalist and author. Gutman graduated from Haverford College, in 1966, majoring in History, and from London School of Economics in 1968 with a masters degree in International Relations. Roy Gutman joined Newsday in January 1982 and served for eight years as National Security Reporter in Washington. While European Bureau Chief, from late 1989 to 1994, he reported the downfall of the Polish, East German, …
- Benno Ohnesorg
Benno Ohnesorg was a German university student killed by a police officer on June 2 1967, during a demonstration in Berlin against the visit of the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, to Germany. It was the first political demonstration that the married student (of Romance and German literature and culture studies) attended as part of the German student movement. His death served as a rallying point for the radical left wing, …
- Anthony Suau
Anthony Suau, an award-winning photographer, was born in the United States in 1956. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1984 for his photographs of the famine in Ethiopia, the World Press Photo of the Year in 1987 for a photo taken during a demonstration in South Korea, and the Robert Capa Gold medal in 1995 for his photos from Chechnya. He has worked for Time magazine and has published several books, including 'Beyond the Fall', …
- Matt Frei
Matthias Frei (born 26 November, 1963 in Essen, Germany) is the BBC's Washington, D. C. correspondent. Since appointment to that position he has become one of BBC News' best-known faces. He went to Westminster School, then read History and Spanish at St Peter's College, University of Oxford, before graduating in 1986. He joined the BBC shortly after graduation. After a year in the German Section of the World Service, he moved to English Language Current Affairs, …
- Sebastian Haffner
Sebastian Haffner was a German journalist and author. He wrote mainly about recent German history. In 1938 he emigrated from Nazi Germany with his Jewish fiancée to London, where he intended to work as an author and journalist. He adopted the pseudonym Sebastian Haffner so that his family, who remained in Germany, would not be endangered by his writing.
- Ivan Kostov
Ivan Yordanov Kostov (born December 23, 1949 in Sofia) was Prime Minister of Bulgaria from May 1997 to July 2001 and leader of the Union of Democratic Forces (UDF) between December 1994 and July 2001. Ivan Kostov graduated in Economics from the University of National and World Economy in Sofia in 1974, and later earned a Ph.D. in Mathematical Modeling of Economic Processes from the Sofia University. He had worked as associate professor at Sofia Technical University, …
- Wladimir Kaminer
Wladimir Kaminer (born 19 July 1967) is a Russian-born German short story writer, columnist, and disc jockey of Jewish origin. Kaminer was born in Moscow, and after initially training as an audio engineer for theatre and radio, then studied dramaturgy at the Moscow Institute of Theater. Following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, Kaminer emigrated to Prenzlauer Berg, a district of Berlin, with his wife and children in 1990.
- Reuven Frank
Reuven Frank was an American broadcast news pioneer. Born in Montreal, Quebec, Reuven Frank earned a bachelor's degree at City College of New York and a graduate degree in journalism from Columbia University. He then worked a reporter at the "Newark Evening News" in New Jersey. Frank was a key figure in bringing television news out of the shadow of radio news by emphasizing the importance of visuals in telling stories.
- Rory MacLean
Rory MacLean is a Canadian travel writer living in the UK whose best known works are "Stalin’s Nose", a black and surreal travelogue through eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and "Magic Bus", a history of the Asia Overland hippie trail.
- Toni Fisher
Toni Fisher (born 1931 - February 12, 1999 in Los Angeles, California) was an American pop singer. Fisher is best remembered for her 1959 song, "The Big Hurt" written by her husband Wayne Shanklin. The song went to No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 music chart in the USA. "The Big Hurt" is notable because it featured phasing effects; indeed, it is claimed to be the first song to do so.
- Ingo Hasselbach
Ingo Hasselbach is a well-known dropout of the German neo-Nazi community. He is the author of the book "Führer Ex: Memoirs of a Former Neo-Nazi" (with Tom Reiss, also made into a movie directed by Winfried Bonengel), which has been translated into several languages. Furthermore he was co-founder of the German EXIT project, which helps neo-Nazis exit the community. The project is modelled on a Swedish project with the same name.
- Richard Roth
Richard Henry Roth (1949-)is an American journalist, a CNN correspondent who covers the United Nations and was the host of "Diplomatic License" (until its cancellation in January 2006), a weekly program that was devoted to United Nations affairs. Roth is a CNN "original" - one of the first employees when the network launched in 1980. He has covered a wide range of stories over the last 25 years, …
- Klaus von Dohnanyi
Dr Klaus von Dohnanyi is a German politician and a member of the Social Democratic Party (SPD). Dr. von Dohnanyi is the son of Hans and Christine Dohnanyi, and thus a nephew of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. His younger brother is Christoph von Dohnányi. After studying law at the universities of Munich, Columbia, Stanford and Yale, he started his career working at the Max-Planck-Institute for Civil Law. He then moved to Ford Motor Company, the car manufacturer, …
- Jockel Finck
Jockel Finck (1962 - c. January 28, 2006) was a photographer working for the Associated Press. His assignments included the fall of the Berlin Wall and the bloody disintegration of Yugoslavia. Jockel Finck started his career as a freelancer photojournalist in Hanover. In 1986 he joined Associated Press in Hamburg. In 1989 he changed to the Berlin office just as communism was crumbling in East Germany.
- Peter Leibing
Peter Leibing is a German photographer known for his 1961 photographs of escaping East German border guard, Conrad Schumann jumping a barbed wire fence during construction of the Berlin Wall. On 15 August 1961 Leibing, working for the Hamburg picture agency Contiepress, had been tipped by police that an East German border guard might escape the Berlin Wall, then in its third day of construction.
- Raelynn Hillhouse
Raelynn Hillhouse is an American novelist, expert on international affairs and national security and former smuggler. Hillhouse studied in Central and Eastern Europe for over six years at various institutions including Moscow State University, Moscow Finance Institute, Humboldt University of Berlin, Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen (Germany) and Babes-Bolyai University (Cluj, Romania). She earned her undergraduate degree from Washington University in St.
- André Kolingba
André-Dieudonné Kolingba was the fourth president of the Central African Republic (CAR), from 1 September 1981 until 1 October 1993. He took power from President David Dacko in a bloodless coup d'état in 1981 and lost power to Ange-Félix Patassé in a democratic election held in 1993. Kolingba retained the strong support of France until the fall of the Berlin Wall, after which both internal and external pressure forced him to hold presidential elections which he lost.
- Susanne Albrecht
Susanne Albrecht is a German former terrorist and member of the Red Army Faction. Born to a wealthy family in Hamburg, Germany, Albrecht attended the University of Hamburg studying sociology and psychology. Becoming acquainted with several members of the Red Army Faction, she was a participant in the murder of her godfather and president of the Dresdner Bank Jürgen Ponto on July 30, 1977.
- John Runnings
John Runnings (April 25 2004) was a peace protester also known as the "Wall Walker". Partly inspired by Mahatma Gandhi's work and nonviolent resistance in general, he is notable for his series of one-man protests against the Berlin Wall during the 1980s. These culminated in the construction of a largely symbolic, car-mounted battering ram. This particular action landed him with an 18-month prison sentence from the East German authorities. He was released after three months.
- Peter Millar
Peter Millar is a British journalist and author, primarily known for his reporting of the fall of the Cold War and fall of the Berlin Wall for "The Sunday Times" of London. He was named "Foreign Correspondent of the Year" 1989<sup>*1</sup> by the British "What the Papers Say" television programme. Millar was born in Northern Ireland and educated at Magdalen College, Oxford. He subsequently worked for Reuters in East Berlin, Warsaw and Moscow, …
- Wayne Shanklin
Wayne Shanklin (1916-1970) was an American music performer, composer, arranger and producer. He was also the husband of pop singer Miss Toni Fisher. Shanklin wrote several hit songs including "Primrose Lane" (1959), recorded by Jerry Wallace and "Jezebel", recorded by Frankie Laine in 1951 and covered (as an instrumental) by Australian teenage guitar prodigy Rob E.G. in 1963. Shanklin's best known composition is the song "Chanson D'Amour (Song of Love)".
- Miklós Németh
Miklós Németh served as Prime Minister of Hungary from 23 November, 1988 to 23 May, 1990. He was one of the leaders of the Socialist Workers' Party, Hungary's former Communist party, in the tumultuous years that led to the collapse of communism in Eastern and Central Europe. As Prime Minister, Németh took the controversial decision to allow East Germans, long held captive by their country's communist regime, to pass through Hungary en route to freedom in West Germany.
- Brian Hanrahan
Brian Hanrahan (born 22 March 1949, Middlesex) was the Diplomatic Editor for BBC News and a well known correspondent. Recently, he has presented The World at One on BBC Radio Four and cover shifts on the rolling news channel BBC News 24. Hanrahan was educated at the St Ignatius' College (grammar school) in Stamford Hill, Tottenham. He studied politics at the University of Essex. He joined the BBC in 1970 as a photographic stills clerk, then became a scriptwriter, …
- Leslie Woodhead
Leslie Woodhead is an award-winning British documentary filmmaker. For his National Service he served in Fife at the Joint Services School for Linguists where he was taught Russian. and posted to West Berlin to monitor the communications of Soviet pilots flying in and out of East Germany.
- Norman MacRae
Norman Macrae is a British author, born in 1923. Considered one of the world's best forecasters when it came to economics and society, Macrae joined "The Economist" in 1949 and retired as its deputy chief editor in 1988. He foresaw the reversal of nationalization of enterprises, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the spread of the internet, which were all published in the newspaper during his time there.
- Ketil Stokkan
Ketil Stokkan (born April 29, 1956, in Harstad) is a Norwegian pop artist who has performed as solo artist as well as the singer in the Norwegian band Zoo. In 1986 he won the national Eurovision Song Contest with the song "Romeo", written by himself, which came 12th on homeground in the Eurovision Song Contest final, which that year was held in Bergen, Norway. In 1990 he won the national final again with the song "Brandenburger Tor", …
- Tímea Vágvölgyi
Tímea Vágvölgyi is a pornographic actress and female wrestler. After the fall of the Berlin wall, Vágvölgyi was one of the first pornographic actresses from Eastern Europe. She studied pedagogics at the Eötvös Loránd University of Budapest. Before entering adult films, she was an elementary school teacher. She started her career as a normal model, then crossed over to pornography in 1994, primarily working for the Private Media Group, …
- Wolfdietrich Schnurre
Wolfdietrich Schnurre was a German writer. Schnurre was an important literate of post-war West Germany. Apart from numberous short stories he also wrote novels, tales, diaries, poems, radio plays and (beginning in the 1960s) children's books which he partly illustrated himself. Schnurre grew up in Frankfurt before his father, a librarian, moved to Berlin in 1928. Here Schnurre attended a socialist elementary school and grammar school.
- Dave Desroches
Dave "Rave" Desroches is a Canadian rock musician from Hamilton, Ontario. He grew up in Hamilton with the members of the punk rock band Teenage Head, appearing with them on their "Frantic City" LP, and opening for them in his own band, "The Shakers". Eventually he replaced original 'Head' vocalist Frankie Venom in 1984 after Frankie had left to form The Blue Angels. Desroches left Teenage Head in 1989. He then formed a group called The Dave Rave Conspiracy, …