HERMITAGE — Philip C. Myers was in West Berlin working on a play when he joked on the telephone with a friend who lived in East Germany.

“I told Bootza, ‘We’re going to tear down this wall tonight. You’ll be able to come over tomorrow.’”

It was Nov. 9, 1989.

“That night, it fell,” Myers, of Hermitage, said of the wall between East and West Germany. “We didn’t know.”

Myers had been invited to be production designer on a play called “Horse” that Jonathan Failla was staging in West Berlin, and hoped to take to East Berlin. The men met while doing art and set work on “Tiger Warsaw,” the Amin Q. Chaudhri film shot in Sharon and the surrounding area in 1987.

He landed in West Berlin on about Nov. 6, his video camera at the ready. There were “glimmers” of what was going to happen, but Myers said he did not expect things to unfold as they did.

Myers shot 24 hours of video, and condensed it to about a two-hour film.

The film shows the Nov. 6 protests that led up to the wall’s tumble.

“I’m not sure what they were protesting,” Myers said. “It felt like there was (danger) but then there wasn’t.”

Myers and Failla got permission from a West German guard to go up to the wall to film on the west side of the Brandenburg Gate. The wall wall’s surface was littered with graffiti.

At one point, a voice from the East German side came over a public address system saying the gate would not be opened. The West Germans started chanting — in German, of course — “tear down this wall.”

Three days later, Myers was at Checkpoint Charlie. In the early evening, very few people were about. He filmed a Frenchman doing some sort of performance piece with skulls on his hands as he danced on the curb that marked the east-west border.

“That’s an act of defiance,” Myers said.

Nearby, someone had scrawled on the wall, “Walls are not everlasting.”

About 90 minutes later, the streets swelled with people. Shortly after, East German cars started driving into West Berlin.

“It’s open,” a friend of Myers’ said. “We’re in the middle of (expletive) world history.”

People lined the streets holding West German flags as the East Germans drove in. Myers and Failla talked their way into one of the cars and filmed a man named Olaf as he drove in the west for the first time.

Myers and Failla met up with Bootza and some other East Germans for a celebration.

“That’s the problem with these East Germans — they don’t know their place,” Failla quipped.

On the 10th, Myers filmed Bootza walking around an open market in West Berlin, marveling at the selection.

“A lot of stuff,” Bootza said.

East Germans lined up at banks to collect 100 marks each, which they were given by the West German government to spend in West Germany.

Later, Bootza took Myers and Failla to East Berlin. The video shows lots of cranes towering over construction sites.

“They’d build things to make it look like progress,” Myers said. “You’d get in farther and see how ratty it is.”

While some of the churches and squares remained beautiful, Myers noted that structures felled by Allied bombs during World War II remained in ruins, and many buildings still had bullet holes in them, more unrepaired war damage.

One of the oddest sites was the Monument Against Fascism and Militarism.

“You have a monument against militarism, but you had guards with guns standing in front of it,” Myers said.

The guards goose-stepped to and from their posts, a symbol of Nazi Fascism.

While Myers has no footage of the wall coming down, he spent some time at it with a hammer.

“That wall was hard,” said Myers, who brought a chunk back with him. “They were using bulldozers to bring that wall down. No sledgehammer was going to break a piece of that.”

Myers said he can’t believe it has been 20 years since his visit.

“I look at this (video) every once in a while and it feels like yesterday.”

In the same vein, Myers said it’s hard to comprehend that he witnessed history.

“It was exciting but, at the same time, it was a normal day,” he said. “You don’t realize you’re in the middle of history until you see it written down somewhere.”

A Vietnam vet who was one of the first American troops deployed, Myers said he had the same feeling in San Francisco in the late ’60s when he got pulled into one of the electric Kool-Aid acid tests with the Merry Pranksters about and the Grateful Dead performing.

“I didn’t think of it as history until I read Tom Wolfe’s book — ‘The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test’,” he said. “This all happened to me.”

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Copies of Myers’ Germany video are available at 29 Logan, the art gallery at 29 Logan Ave., Sharon.[/i]