WORLD HISTORY

. . . I mention all these details, which I remember so clearly, in order [to] give a sense of the shock that we suffered when The Wall came upon us one night. There we were in Berlin, at the crossroads between East and West, at the juncture of two fundamentally different cultures, and suddenly we were locked up like canaries in a cage. Literally from one day to the next, from being a vibrant and cultured city, Berlin subsided into the drowsy torpor [dullness] of a midsummer afternoon in the provinces. We were imprisoned in a dull, flat country ____ Jens Reich, “Reflections on becoming an East German dissident, on losing the Wall and a country, “ in Gwyn Prins, ed., Spring in Winter:The 1989 RevolutionsWhich historical event is directly reflected in this passage?