Photographs taken the week following the fall of the Berlin Wall
on November 9,1989.

When the first reports began to come out that people were crossing the wall from the East to the West, I was in California covering the third week of the devastating Loma Prieta earthquake with the rest of the staff of the San Jose Mercury News. I caught the first flight out from San Francisco--the last seat available anywhere in California, it seemed--and arrived in Berlin on November 10. Some of these photographs here are from Sunday, November 11, when a section of the wall was taken out and East Germans were allowed to cross over from their side of the historic Potsdamer Platz.