The fall of the Berlin Wall: what it meant to be there

[Geee]

We throw chocolates up to the putty-faced East German frontier troops, as they stand guard – against whom? defending what? – atop a Wall that since yesterday has become useless. They push the chocs away with their boots. One of the West Berliners standing next to me tries again: “Wouldn’t you like a West-cigarette?” Sheepish refusal. Then I ask: “Why are you there?” This time, I get an answer: “Interview requests must be registered in advance, on this side as on yours.”

 

Lines scribbled in my notebook. Surreal moments from the greatest turning point of our time. In German, all nouns take an initial capital letter, so even a bungalow wall is a Mauer with a capital M. In English, there are many walls, but only one Wall. It’s the one that “fell” on the night of Thursday 9 November 1989, giving us history’s new rhyme: the fall of the Wall.

 

There are things in my notebook which I later published and therefore always remember: the breathless, denim-jacketed couple from the provinces asking: “Excuse me, is this the way out?”; the man walking up Friedrichstrasse who exclaimed “28 years and 91 days!” (that’s how long he had been stuck behind the Wall); the improvised poster proclaiming “Only today is the war really over”.

 

But there are other passages that I had quite forgotten, and some of them don’t fit so comfortably into hindsight’s fairytale of liberation. For example, during an onstage discussion at a well-known East Berlin theatre, three days after the Wall’s fall, Markus “Mischa” Wolf, the longtime East German spy chief who had become a Gorbachevite reformer after his retirement a few years earlier, still defended the Stasi.

 

“Most of Stasi not torturers, beasts,” recorded my indignant pencil, but “decent, clean people – anständige, saubere Menschen”. Wolf insisted he had no responsibility for the persecution of dissidents (sound of Pontius Pilate washing hands) and anyway, there “must be an apparatus for the security of the state and individual citizens as in any developed country”. Then, expressing its holder’s evident amazement, my pencil added “Loud applause!!”

 

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/nov/06/-sp-fall-berlin-wall-what-it-meant-to-be-there

[Valin]

What an exciting time that was! The world we grew up in...gone in the blink of an eye.

[Valin]

The Berlin Wall @25, Take 1

Steven Hayward

November 9, 2014

 

Today everyone is marking the 25^th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall—the signal event of the end of the Cold War. I find that students today, all born after the demise of the Soviet Union, have a hard time grasping the depth and vividness of the conflict. The Cold War might as well be the Boer War, and the Berlin Wall is as hazy as Hadrian’s Wall.

 

It is amusing to watch the liberal establishment observe this glorious anniversary with a binge of subtle revisionism that adds up to: Reagan had nothing to do with it. Pay no attention to that 1987 speech at the Berlin Wall (the one these self-same fashionable people all ridiculed at the time). It was . . . anything but that!

 

(Snip)

 

Is there really anyone out there saying “free enterprise brought down the Soviet Union”? (Though one is tempted to ask of Leffler’s beloved “social market economy” in Germany: how’s that working out for the former East Germany? Ask a former West German, and get ready for an earful of complaints.)

 

Keep spinning liberals. It’s fun watching you guys get dizzy and fall over.

[Valin]

The Berlin Wall @25, Take 2

Steven Hayward

November 9, 2014

 

FWIW, here are some excerpts of my account of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the larger currents around it from the Epilogue of The Age of Reagan, picking up right in the middle. One part of this at the end—that revolutionary politics are over—is clearly incorrect, though the “crisis on the Left” bit remains more true than ever:

 

The material and structural factors [of the end of the Cold War] are not to be dismissed, but “structuralist” explanations of the collapse of Communism are similar to “structuralist” literary criticism—both choke the life out of the story and ignore the essential, soul-moving dimensions of the matter. That the collapse of Communism in each of the Captive Nations played out in a distinct manner demonstrates this. . .

 

Throughout the fall protests in East German cities were growing, reaching a climax on November 4, when a million people took to the streets of East Berlin. East Germany’s aging tyrant, Erich Honecker, stepped down in October after Gorbachev came through down and showed him the back of his hand, but it was too late for the regime to save itself. In the face of the mounting exodus of its citizens and unprecedented public protests in East German cities (50,000 turned out in Leipzig on October 9, and half million flooded the streets of East Berlin on November 4), on November 9 the Politburo quietly decided to lift all travel restrictions. At the end of a routine daily press briefing at 7 pm, a Politburo spokesman made a low-key announcement that “private trips abroad can be applied for, and permits will be granted promptly. . . Permanent emigration is henceforth allowed across all border crossing points between East Germany and West Germany and West Berlin.” What’s this?!

 

(Snip)