Yesterday marked the 36th anniversary of the Berlin Wall collapsing under its own weight. It’s a day I somehow remember, despite my young age at the time, mostly because our elementary school class included a German exchange student who took the news with a level of emotion I had never seen a fellow elementary school student display towards current global events.
I was too young to understand what the hell was happening, but we watched the news live on television during the school hours. I’m sure our teacher must have had some semblance of understanding what was happening, and the event’s significance, but there’s no way any of us knew. While we were long past the days of nuclear war classroom exercises (and well before the days of shooter classroom exercises—all we knew was fire drills). We were growing up amid the Cold War, but weren’t fully cognizant of what that meant or what it even was.
But look at, and conversing with, our German classroom, we knew it meant something important. A period of decades of separation, an era of darkness, and a totalitarian regime was perhaps coming to a close. Maybe my memory has been invaded by decades of human experience, but you would look at the Germans atop the wall, birthing a new future, and only see hope on that television screen.
I was only a child then, but in hindsight, it was an event necessarily preceded by the collapse of the Soviet system in Poland, but of more importance. Amazingly, the predictions were correct: Germany would be quickly reunited, and within two years, the Soviet Union would fall as well.
What was the Berlin Wall? For those of the previous century, it likely requires no introduction. It stood at the symbol of the conflict between the major Western powers and the Soviet bloc. To overly simplify: Following World War II, the four major Allied powers split Germany into four spheres, each to be governed by an Allied Power. So, there was the British quadrant, the French, the American, and, finally, the Soviet. They did the same with the capital of Germany, Berlin. The British, French and Americans eventually merged their quadrants into one country (and one section of the city). The rest was the Soviets’. West and East Germany, as we Americans called it, and West and East Berlin, and we Americans called it. The GDR and DDR, respectively, to be more accurate in both labeling and linguistics.
Things lasted like this for over a decade. But, for the East (DDR), a lot of people were fleeing the Soviet East towards the democratic West (especially the young, wealthier, and well educated). This led to travel tightening by the DDR (and mostly the Soviets), and eventually the only way to defect was by traveling from East Berlin to West Berlin. The stymied the Soviet leadership for a good long time, until they saw what they perceived as a weakness: the election of the young and unexperienced John F. Kennedy. Seeing their opportunity, the Soviets and local DDR officials declared a wall should go up around West Berlin, to cut off the last remaining way of defecting.
And for decades, that Berlin Wall stood, surrounding the entirety of West Berlin, not to keep the Westerners in, but to keep the Easterners out. And it was a brutal wall: anybody who attempted to defect would be shot on sight. It’s unclear how many were killed, but it’s probably as many as 100 and could very well could be many more.
American presidents from JFK to Ronald Reagan pleaded with the East Germans and Soviets to take down the way, but it wouldn’t be American power that would change the world this time. Instead, it was a series of unrelated events, and some laughable errors, that would leader to its fall nearly four decades later. Poland held elections in which the Communists were ousted from power. Hungary and Austria opened the border between them. These two: The hope instilled by the Polish elections, and a new travel route open to West Germany (East Germans flooded Hungary to get to Austria, then to West Germany) led again to mass defections. The East German government tried to staunch the bleeding, but it was of no use. Eventually, the East German government decided to ease travel regulations between East and West Berlin, but due to communication errors in the calcified Soviet-style government, the announcement wasn’t the new rules, but a total freedom of movement, effective that very day. That night, the Berlin Wall was torn down by citizens of both East and West Berlin, effectively unifying the city.
The Berlin Wall served, as mentioned, as a symbol of the conflict of the West versus the Soviet, and a totem of totalitarian overreach. Its collapse served as a symbol of the end of both. And, for a short number of years, it rightfully did.
Some say you can’t have a country that isn’t protected by a wall. No. Walls are built for control, not protection. Walls are things built by regimes, while countries are generally comfortable with lines on a map and maybe some friction at borders. And the very idea that somebody should be shot and killed for merely existing in the wrong patch of territory is anathema to liberty and the very idea of liberal democracy.
Fuck Maggie Thatcher, but a good line is a good line: “Every stone bears witness to the moral bankruptcy of the society it encloses.”
Walls are no match for the indomitable human spirit—displayed for a worldwide audience that night of November 9, 1989. Walls do not last forever, at least for their intended purpose. Sure, Hadrian’s Wall and the Great Wall of China still stand in some form, but Hadrian’s Wall is not keeping the Scots away from England any more than the Great Wall is keeping the Mongolians out of China. They still stand to illustrate that people will not be controlled for long by mere infrastructure.
Recent Comments