When the Berlin Wall did its mighty fall 25 years ago, East Germans were jubilant. On the evening of Nov. 9, 1989, they flooded into West Berlin at border crossing points such as the famous Checkpoint Charlie. They were greeted by equally euphoric West Berliners, some of whom greeted them with flowers and bottles of champagne.

As a German immigrant in the U.S., I could witness this historic event only via television from suburban Boston. However, on my next trip to Germany, I happened upon a used paperback the title of which can best be translated We Didn’t Think [for Ourselves] until Gorbachev [Came to Power] published by Georg Bitter Verlag.

The book is a compilation of interviews with randomly selected East German teenagers. The interviews were conducted by Vera-Maria Baehr within months after the fall of the Wall. Baehr had been rising in the East German youth organization, but soon found herself at odds with the powers that be. She was expelled from East Germany when she announced her intention to marry a man from West Germany.

Her book gives a sense of the upheaval among East Germans after the opening of the Wall. Speaking of changes in daily life, 16-year-old Linda comments: “We now have a completely new perspective. Everything used to be boxed in, regimented. Now all of a sudden a lot of things are uncertain . . . We have to start all over again now. When you think about it, it’s bad, of course, that everything you’ve learned in history class may be wrong, at least starting with the 19th century.”

“All of a sudden the pressure was gone,” explains Philipp, age 16. “You were able to say what you thought.” Because of learning difficulties he quit school early and was assigned a job he didn’t care for — assembling clutches for the Trabi, the much-maligned car that had a delivery time of 10 years.

He now finds it cool to be able to drive into West Berlin with his buddies, and that visitors from there no longer have to return before midnight. “You can get together under normal circumstances now. And I can visit my dad.” His father had fled East Berlin under threat of being shot by border guards and was not allowed back to see his family. Philipp is eager to get to know his dad at last.

It was Gorbachev, of course, who set in motion the changes that led to the downfall of East Germany’s communist regime. When he visited East Berlin, school children got the day off and were supposed to line the streets to greet him, waving Russian and East German flags. Linda had prepared placards reading “Perestroika,” Gorbachev’s program of restructuring the Soviet bureaucracy, and “ Glasnost,” shorthand for transparency in matters of policy. Linda wanted to show her support for Gorbachev’s reformist ideas, which East Germany’s leaders considered dangerous.

Some party members asked Linda and her friends not to show their placards. When they did anyway, the party members unfurled large flags to hide Linda’s placards. She then ran along with the motorcade holding up her signs, hoping Gorbachev and the East German bigwigs around him would catch sight of them.

As Linda tells it: “It was terrible and ridiculous at the same time . . . When I brought this up in school during history class, a subject taught by the principal, for the first time we had a real discussion, with the students speaking freely. We asked for an explanation [of the incident]. We really yelled at her. She was challenged and could no longer hide. And we were no longer afraid. Our principal walked dejectedly out of the classroom. All she could reply was, ‘I will pass it along, I will follow up on this.’ She didn’t have an opinion of her own.”

Not all students welcomed the changes the opening of the Wall had wrought. Some were skeptical because of the supposed Ellbogengesellschaft, the dog-eat-dog society in West Germany. “I’m afraid of capitalism,” Jenny, age 15, confesses, “of this power struggle where everybody wants to be the greatest . . . I don’t want to miss out on the social services we have here . . . We have to worry about new things now. Coal is becoming more expensive. And rents are going up.”

Some of these fears may have been justified, others were based on misinformation about West Germany. Capitalism was categorically dismissed as a system exploiting the workers. Students were told that in West Germany starving children were lying in the streets, while depictions of life in Russia included only pictures of happy children. After the Wende, the collapse of the communist regime, traveling in West Germany was an eye-opener for East Germans and corrected many misconceptions.

Students had suspected that their civics textbooks gave slanted views of political philosophy. Franziska, age 14, tells that she and her classmates turned in their civics textbooks. They placed them on the teacher’s table along with a note about what they wanted to talk about. “But the teacher didn’t notice it. Probably on purpose . . . Later we skipped civics . . . The old textbooks lay scattered around everywhere in school. Many took home a copy as a keepsake and because it was so crazy––­­the stuff that got our goat.”

Students had become used to hewing to the party line in class, but voicing their true views only at home or in the circle of their friends. “This way in school, and at home the other way,” as Sebastian, 17, put it. “I had grown accustomed never to say what I really thought. I did not participate in discussions. I hated my civics teacher. When, in ninth or tenth grade, I opened up a bit and advanced arguments she could not respond to, she would look into her textbook and say: ‘We’re getting away from our topic.’”

The hypocrisy of this system couldn’t last. The gap between socialist theory and conditions in real life, the inefficiencies of the state-controlled economy, and Gorbachev’s liberalizing reforms at home and in foreign policy finally brought down East Germany’s regime. After the announcement that East Germans were allowed to cross into West Berlin effective “immediately, without delay,” masses of them streamed into West Berlin, and within a year Germany was united again.

Peter Dreyer is a year-round resident of Edgartown.