Merkel grounded this declaration in the most dramatic experience of her life: growing up in East Germany behind the Berlin Wall. She described her daily routine as a young physicist at the Academy of Sciences in East Berlin — walking toward the Wall every day on her way home, getting close enough to see West Berlin and freedom on the other side, and then having to turn away 'at the last minute' to head toward her apartment. 'Every day, I had to turn away from freedom at the last minute. I don't know how often I thought that I just couldn't take it anymore.' Then 1989 came. Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets across Eastern Europe, and 'something which many people, including myself, would not have believed possible became reality.' The Wall fell. For Merkel, this wasn't abstract political theory — it was the lived transformation that launched her from physicist to politician to Chancellor.