November 9, 1989 , the day the Berlin Wall fell and the world changed forever . Not even the most astute saw it coming . As Hungary's foreign minister in the late summer of 1989 , Gyula Horn gave the order to let visiting East Germans use his country to do a 400-mile end run around the Berlin Wall , a move now seen as the beginning of the end for hard-line communism in Europe .
The Berlin Wall was torn down in 1989.