The Cold War, the Berlin Wall, Checkpoint Charlie - the Allied crossing point between East and West Berlin - are a few of many Cold War experiences that, even only I saw through  fictional films and books during my high school and college years in the 1980s, have stayed with me.
I still remember watching in a Greek movie theater in 1983 the scene in ‘Octopussy’, where Agent 009 dies bringing a fake Faberge egg across the Berlin Wall, alerting the Secret Service to a possible funding source for Russian agents in Britain.
I read back then and reread recently the book by John Le Carré ‘The Spy Who Came in from the Cold’ published in 1963 way before I was born, in which Alec Leamas, the head of the British Intelligence operation in West Berlin, waits anxiously at Checkpoint Charlie a British agent who had been operating in the Eastern sector. But, after being compromised, he is trying desperately to escape back to West Berlin. The man arrives on a bicycle, passes through the gate, but is then shot dead in the transition zone, as Leamas looks on helplessly. At the powerful last chapter, Leamas tries to escape across the wall with an innocent young woman named Liz Gold, who is the secretary of her local cell in the Communist Party of Britain, and Leamas’ lover. He climbs to the top of the Berlin Wall and reaches down to pull Liz the rest of the way up, East German spotlights suddenly shine on them, and shots ring out. Liz’s fingers slip from Leamas’ grasp, and she falls. Leamas hears Smiley’s voice (on the Western side) saying, “Jump, Alec! Jump, man!” He sees her dead body with hair drawn across her cheek as if to protect her from the rain. He climbs back down the wall on the East German side to be next to her. Leamas is then killed by more shots from the guards.
I watched in the movie theater in 1982 ‘Firefox’ in which Mitchell Gant, perfectly played by Clint Eastwood, is called back into service to steal a top secret Russian fighter that travels at 6-times the speed of sound, thought control guidance and invisible to radar.
As a political science major, I was always fascinated by the Cold War, so naturally the fall of the Berlin Wall is one of these events for which I remember where I was - the Sales Hills cafeteria at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, watching on television as on the night of November 9, 1989 hundreds of people converged at the crossing point of East and West Germany - The Berlin Wall.
In 1961, the Berliner Mauer and other fortifications were built and closely guarded to keep East Germans from crossing the infamous border shared with West Germany. Prior to the Berlin Wall’s erection, 3.5 million East Germans had avoided Eastern Bloc emigration restrictions to escape into West Germany, many over the border between East and West Berlin. During its existence from 1961 to 1989, the Wall stopped almost all such emigration. The Wall included guard towers lining large concrete walls circumscribing a wide area - later known as the “death strip” - containing anti-vehicle trenches, “fakir beds” and other deadly defenses. After its erection, around 5,000 people attempted to escape, with estimates of the resulting death toll varying between 98 and 200.
On November 9, 1989, at midnight, East Germany’s rulers gave permission for gates to be opened. East Berliners rushed across to meet jubilant crowds of West Berliners. People began to topple parts of the Wall. The rest is history!