And The Wall Came Tumbling Down

Every so often, I start to wonder what if I'd been born at a different point in history. I sometimes wish I'd been alive in the 1960s: so many defining moments of the 20th century fell within that great decade, not least the first Moon landing, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Prague Spring; though if I were pressed to pick just one thing from that decade I'd probably choose to be present at John F. Kennedy's inaugural address, the "Ask not what your country can do for you" speech.

I've always felt my generation has been starved of moments that truly define history: with the exception of 9/11 and the ensuing chaos in the Middle East (not that there wasn't chaos there before), the political makeup of the world hasn't changed dramatically since I was very young. So today, I wish I were just a few years older, that I might remember the most momentous event of the last forty years: the fall of the Berlin Wall.

While tensions had been building for quite some time, and the feeling was that it was a question of when East Germany would collapse rather than if, the sudden nature of the downfall took almost everyone by surprise, including the East Germans.

In fact, it was all something of an accident. For a fascinating, and funny, insight of a western reporter into life in East Berlin when the wall fell, this article from the Sunday Times, an extract from a book by Peter Millar, is well worth a read.

On November 9th, 1989, the East German Politburo agreed to ease travel restrictions on East German citizens, letting them leave and re-enter the country at will, once they had a visa, which would be issued starting the following morning.

However, their spokesman wasn't quite speaking from the same script. Gunter Schabowski was handed the new rules just before a press conference, and announced them to the world. He wasn't clear on the details: he made no mention of the need to obtain a visa, for example, and when asked by a reporter when the laws came into effect, he replied: "Sofort. Unverzüglich."

Literally translated: "Immediately. Without delay."

The press conference was broadcast live on German television that evening. Within minutes tens of thousands of East Berliners flooded towards the checkpoints along the length of the wall, demanding to be let through. The border guards had not yet been informed of the new law, and had no idea what was happening. Eventually they were told, and tried to inform the crowd that they would have to queue up the following morning and get a visa stamped into their passport.

But the crowd were having none of it: somehow they knew the crowd had reached a critical mass, and that there was no turning back. They massively outnumbered the petrified border guards, who made frantic telephone calls to their superiors. Eventually, a guard at Bornholmerstraße checkpoint, acting on his own authority, decided that enough was enough: it was simply unsafe to hold the crowd back, and if he didn't do something there were going to be fatalities.

So he opened the gates, and people flooded towards the wall.

The word soon got out to the other checkpoints, and they released the floodgates. Thousands of East Berliners rushed to find thousands of West Berliners waiting at the wall to welcome them to freedom. And within just hours, the iconic pictures of people hacking away at the wall with whatever tools came to hand were beamed around the world, for all to see: the Berlin Wall had fallen, peacefully. Within a year, Germany had been reunited, and the deep scars of separation could begin to heal.

And that, for me, is one of the amazing things about the collapse of communism: that it all happened peacefully. Almost every other revolution in history, from the Greek victory over the Persians at Salamis in 480 BC, to the communist takeover of China in 1949, have been bloody, and long. 1989 was the great bloodless revolution.

So take a moment to remember that, twenty years ago today, East Germans got back something they had not had for a generation, something we too often take for granted: freedom.