My earliest political memory is of watching the Berlin Wall fall live on television. I can still picture my 7-year-old self in a spacious open-plan living room, my face up close against the screen, following in awe as hundreds of thousands sang and danced and hugged.

I was too young to understand the full import of what was happening, of course. But growing up in West Germany as a child of parents who had been raised behind the Iron Curtain, I had, even then, some childish sense of the immensity of these events: People who had been told what to do and where to go for a very long time, I grasped, would now be free.