The Berlin Wall PDF

T h e
Berlin Wall
20 years later
The new home of Germany's Reichstag, or parliament, completed in
1999. Its glass dome represents the openness and transparency of
democratic politics. Inset: the predecessor Reichstag building. It was
damaged by fire shortly after the Nazis came to power in 1933. The
Hitler regime nullified many civil liberties in the aftermath of the fire.
Contents
Introduction . .......................................................................................................... 2
Michael Jay Friedman
Paths To 1989 ........................................................................................................ 5

Fritz Stern
A Contested Future ............................................................................................. 13

Robert J. Lieber
I Will Remember That Day All My Life ................................................ 21

Adam Michnik
Those Were The Days, My Friend ............................................................ 27

Anna Husarska
Berlin Divided And Reunited, 19611989 (A Chronology). .......... 32
Roundtable:
What Was The Significance Of November 9, 1989? .................................... 44
Theresa Bond .................................................................................................. 46
Janusz Bugajski .............................................................................................. 48
Edwina S. Campbell . ................................................................................... 50
Roy Ginsburg ................................................................................................. 52
Ronald H. Linden ......................................................................................... 54
Andreas Rude . ............................................................................................... 56
Simon Serfaty . ............................................................................................... 58
Manfred Stinnes . .......................................................................................... 60
Jeremi Suri . ..................................................................................................... 63
2 THE BERLIN WALL: 20 YEARS LATER
Introduction
Michael Jay Friedman
T
he Berlin Wall symbol of a divided city greatly, the powers whose armed forces liberated a
within a divided nation within a divided nation from the Nazis ultimately shaped that nations
continent was grounded in decades-old subsequent political character and geopolitical
historical divisions. Most proximately, Nazi alignment. Western Europe thus emerged free,
Germany could only be subdued by the com- democratic, and generally aligned with the United
bined power of many nations, led by the democratic capi- States. Eastern European nations were ruled by
talist Anglo-Americans and the communist Soviets. Their communist regimes acceptable to Moscow, their foreign
joint liberation of Axis-occupied Europe naturally raised and military policies also subject to Soviet diktat.
the question: whose system would prevail, and where? Germany was a special case, Berlin even more
The victors inability to agree on an answer also so. The British, Soviets, and Americans each would
reflected real historical divisions. The Soviet Union defeat the Wehrmacht in parts of Germany. At the
conceived of itself as the vanguard of a global proletarian Yalta Conference of February 4-11, 1945, the Big
uprising, waiting, in Lenins words, for the other Three agreed that Germany would be divided into four
detachments of the world socialist revolution to come temporary occupation zones, France being the fourth
to our relief. Western governments in turn understood occupying power. Berlin, Germanys capital and leading
communist movements in their nations to be subservient city, lies 110 miles inside the Soviet occupation zone. At
to Moscow, and that far from waiting, Soviet leaders the Potsdam Conference (July 17August 2, 1945) the
worked steadily and stealthily to hasten revolution. Allies agreed to a similar four-power division of Berlin.
And the British and Americans remembered, (along Even then, it was understood that control of
with Poles, Finns, Latvians, and many others) that German manpower and industrial resources would tip
the Second World War began with a bargain among substantially the postwar balance of power. Germany
dictators Hitler and Stalin partitioning Poland had invaded Russia twice in forty years; the Soviets
between Germany and Soviet Russia. Only with were determined that postwar Germany be either
the launch of Operation Barbarossa, the German Communist dominated or else permanently weak,
invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, and Hitlers neutral, and disarmed. The western allies soon concluded
declaration of war on the United States after the that unless Germany and the other nations of Europe
Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, did the democracies were both democratic and prosperous, Soviet power
and the leading communist power join forces. might expand throughout the rest of the continent.
The Second World War did not end with a Over $13 billion in Marshall Plan aid from the U.S.
definitive peace treaty. Instead, and this simplifies helped to secure this prosperity. The Soviet Union
THE BERLIN WALL: 20 YEARS LATER 3
and the east European nations under its sway rejected Brandt, then the mayor of West Berlin, feared the wall
Marshall aid. Meanwhile, in the Soviet occupation zone, would turn his city into a concentration camp. He
the Red Army began dismantling and transporting warned U.S. President John F. Kennedy that West
to Russia German factories and other industrial Berliners morale might collapse. Kennedy was sympa-
structures, as reparations for the tremendous damage thetic, but insisted that a wall is a hell of a lot better
the Wehrmacht had inflicted on the Soviet Union. than a war. But Kennedy also flew to West Berlin, deliv-
Later, in 1962, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev ering there in June 1963 a moving address, and insisting
likened West Berlin to the testicles of the West. Every to at least a quarter million Berliners (one-fifth of the
time I want to make the West scream, I squeeze on citys population) gathered that day Ich bin ein Berliner.
Berlin. His predecessors might not have phrased it At one level, the Berlin Wall afforded Europe
quite the same way, but they also viewed West Berlin, stability. The periodic international crises over the city
a dangerously exposed western enclave within the eased. As the French man of letters Francois Mauriac
emerging Soviet bloc, as a place they could exert pressure. quipped, I love Germany so much Im glad there are
In June 1948, as the western Allies and the Soviets failed two of them.
to agree on whether Germany should be rehabilitated But the communist bloc was not as stable as it
economically, the Red Army blockaded West Berlin. In appeared. East Berliners continued to seek freedom in
response, the British- and American-led Berlin Airlift the west. As the historian David Reynolds observes:
ferried by air some 13,000 tons of food daily, until the fugitives kept on coming jumping from
Stalin lifted the blockade in May 1949. A few days later, windows, cutting the wire, tunneling beneath the wall,
the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) even ballooning above it. Nearly 200 died trying to
was proclaimed in the western occupation zones. The cross. And within the Soviet bloc, communism was
German Democratic Republic (East Germany) was failing. East European nations fell further behind their
founded in the Soviet occupation zone that October. western peers and knew it. New technologies proved
For the next twelve years, Berliners possessed an more compatible with the western models of personal
opportunity afforded few Cold War Europeans: the autonomy and economic entrepreneurialism. By 1989,
chance to vote with their feet. Between September 1949 the contradictions within the Soviet bloc, as an earlier
and August 1961, some 2.7 million East Germans, generation of communists might have put it, had been
the young and educated overrepresented among them, heightened higher even than the Berlin Wall itself.
crossed into West Berlin and thence by plane to the This book recounts how and why that wall
Federal Republic. In an ideological contest spanning crumbled. Among the voices gathered here are those of
claims of which system best could meet its citizens leading scholars, a dissident from a time when dissent
material needs and other aspirations, this mass required real bravery, and a journalist who was there
emigration (the GDR actually lost population during when the walls came down all through Eastern Europe.
this period) represented a powerful indictment of the We offer this book proudly, in hopes that those who
communist system, as did the suppression of the 1953 today enjoy freedom will treasure it always, and that
East German workers rebellion, the 1956 Hungarian those who do not yet may take inspiration from
uprising, the 1968 Czech revolution, and Polish protests events now only twenty years in the past.
in 1956, 1970, and 1981.
In August 1961, the GDR began to construct the
Berlin Wall. At first it was barbed wire, but soon it ex- Michael Jay Friedman is Print Publications Division Chief
panded into a 5-meter-high, 165-kilometer-long network at the Bureau of International Information Programs.
of concrete walls topped with barbed wire, and guarded He holds a PhD in political and diplomatic history.
with gun emplacements, watchtowers, and mines. Willy
Paths to 1989
Fritz Stern
T
he breaching of the Berlin Wall zone of occupation surrounded the former
on November 9 was the most capital of Germany, and thus Berlin, itself
dramatic symbol of freedom divided into four sectors, became an island in
regained in that miraculous year a red sea. Allied unity, already endangered by
1989, when in the political life Soviet moves in Eastern Europe in 1944-1945,
of Central Europe the unimaginable became gradually ended in a Cold War, an outcome
almost routine. Millions of people in East- neither side desired, yet with each contributing
Central Europe staged peaceful protests against to its development. By 1948 after the
the existing regimes, and communism seemed to communist seizure of power in what had held
be withering away. Much of the world rejoiced, out as a democratic Czechoslovakia the
but for Americans the end of that monstrous Western Allies gave up hope that they could
division in Berlin had a special significance. For
half a century, the United States, consonant
with its policy of containment, had in one way
or another protected the freedom of West
Berliners, as indeed that of West Germans;
gradually and reciprocally, former foes had
Opposite Page: become cherished friends.
West Germans We must take a quick look at where that
attempt to tear wall had come from. In their common victory
down a portion in 1945, the United States, the Soviet Union,
of the Berlin Wall and Great Britain had divided Germany
on November 11,
into three (later, with France, four) zones of
1989, while East
German guards occupation, with Berlin as the seat of an Allied
try to disperse Control Council that was to be responsible
them with hoses. for major policies in all zones. The Soviet
Above: East successfully cooperate with the USSR in

Germans riot in Germany and made what, in retrospect, should
Berlin in 1953, as
be considered prudent preparations for the
the authorities
try to hose them creation of a West German democratic polity.
down and Soviet When in June 1948 the Allies also supported
troops arrive. the introduction (even to West Berlin) of a new
Martial law was German currency, the deutsche mark, Soviet
declared and leader Joseph Stalin responded with a total in their military deployment: By 1948, most
many were killed.
blockade of West Berlin, designed presumably American forces in Europe had been brought
Right: West
Berliners unload to stop Western plans for a West German state home, while the vast Red Army remained
food that was or, at the very least, to impose Soviet rule on stationed all over Central Europe.
flown in by the entire city. The United States and Britain, Berlin remained symbol and supreme
Americans during eschewing a military confrontation, resolved danger spot during the Cold War; it was used as
the Berlin Air Lift on an audacious alternative: to supply West an escape hatch by East Germans who wanted
in 1953.
Berlins roughly 2 million people by air. The to trade life in their ever more economically
Berlin Airlift was a brilliant demonstration of depressed dictatorship for a life of freedom and
Anglo-American power, peacefully employed mobility in West Germany, which was then
for democratic ends. In this costly process, enjoying an economic miracle with a socially
Americans could count on the fortitude of West responsible market economy. (The Western
Berliners, led by their social democratic leader, Allies help promoted West German recovery,
Mayor Ernst Reuter, the first postwar German while the Soviet demand for reparations
politician to impress the American public. from East Germany further enfeebled that
In May 1949, the Soviets agreed to end the already depressed state-controlled economy.)
blockade for a token reward. This was a triumph President John F. Kennedy (1961-1963), for
for the Western Allies at a time of weakness one, understood that this singular open exit,
Above: A GDR from communist East Berlin to West Berlin, Willy Brandt, the young mayor of West
policeman patrols represented a genuine danger to the East Berlin, and West Berliners generally. The two
the Berlin Wall
German regime, and he also understood, as he Berlins now became rival showplaces for the
as workers make
it higher.
said at the time of the Bay of Pigs disaster (a two rival systems. And West Berlin prospered,
Right: Soviet failed, U.S.-backed invasion of Cuba by exiles continuously helped by American public and
tanks arrive to from the Castro regime) and the fear of Soviet private aid and protected by a token Allied
violently quell retaliation, that if there were to be a Third military presence. In time, East Berlin emerged
the crowds World War it would begin in Berlin. Stalins from Stalinist drabness, but as to its material
during the
successor, the volatile Nikita Khrushchev, also well-being to say nothing of the repression
Prague Spring in
Czechoslovakia
realized that East Germanys demographic losses it endured in the Stasi-dominated society it
in 1968. were intolerable for the East German regime, was a poor if evolving entity.
which was constantly badgering the USSR to The Berlin Wall continued to remind
take tough measures to close the opening. Western leaders and many West Germans of
In 1960-1961, the flow of East German the unnatural division of Germany, but they
refugees grew alarmingly, and it was clear that tacitly accepted it and concentrated on the
the drain had to be staunched. On August 13, construction of a European Community. The
1961, the East Germans, finally with Soviet Western powers were content to negotiate for
blessing, erected the elaborate, ugly wall that measures to alleviate the many deprivations
cut the city in half, leaving West Berliners that the Wall imposed. Dtente with the Soviet
free but hemmed in and often separated Union had become the Wests hope, and this
from friends and family, and East Berliners policy took different forms. In 1975, the United
permanently unfree behind what in typical States, its European allies, and the USSR and
double speak was officially called the its allies concluded the Helsinki Accords. The
Antifascist wall. The immediate American first two accords confirmed the inviolability
response was relatively mild, disappointing of existing borders, thus giving legitimacy
to the de facto boundary changes made in Leninists even during the dominance of its
postwar Central Europe, while the third part, ugliest form, i.e., of Stalinism, broke with some
commonly called the third basket, provided of the partys basic principles promising to
that all signatories would respect the basic cooperate with democratic political parties,
human and civic rights of their citizens. With for example, thus surrendering the previously
the consequent establishment of the OSCE enshrined dictum that the Communist Party
(Organization for Security and Cooperation would always represent the sole supreme
in Europe), the Soviet Union gained important authority in any communist country. Euro-
reassurances. As to the third basket, while at communists had already openly criticized the
first few political leaders on either side realized Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.
its inflammatory potential, it is imperative Perhaps, as many conservatives thought, Euro-
to recall especially to understand 1989 communism was a sham, a mere ruse. At the
that it offered dissident movements in very least, it was a straw in the wind.
Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union moral Poland, the largest Soviet satellite, had
encouragement and shreds of legal protection. its own history of unique suffering, first
Soviet tanks had repeatedly crushed violent under German occupation and then under
protests against the regimes in its satellites its Soviet liberation. Its earlier history of
in East Germany in 1953, in both Poland and being partitioned by neighboring European
Hungary in 1956, in Czechoslovakia in 1968. powers had bred its own defiant form of
But after Helsinki, groups of quiet, heroic, and nationalist resistance. Postwar economic misery
nonviolent dissidents as already manifest in had sparked open protest against its Polish
Vclav Havels Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia communist rulers and their despised masters
became a much greater force within the Soviet in Russia, the uprisings of 1956 being the most
dictatorships. Here were the beginnings of civil open manifestations of this resistance, as well as
societies formed from below, imbued perhaps by strikes and demonstrations in 1970. And still, as
the sense of what Havel later called the power in the entire Soviet bloc, repression, backed by
of the powerless. Admirable and important as Soviet tanks, worked.
these groups were, they alone could not have Then a dramatic change occurred: In 1978,
altered the repressive conditions, however. Cardinal Karol Wojtya of Cracow was selected
For that, one needed changes at the top, and as pope. A Polish pope! Unprecedented in
that came with the astounding and perhaps the history of the Catholic Church and yet
historically unprecedented simultaneous another sign perhaps that history had reached
appearance of spiritual and political leaders a sudden stage of openness. Pope John Paul II,
who understood the deadening effects of life bare of any military power, almost instantly
lived in stagnation unfree, uncreative, and mobilized new hopes among his countrymen.
impoverished. Have courage, he admonished the many
Even communists themselves recoiled from millions who, in his first papal visit to Poland
the rigid hand of Moscow: In 1975, leaders in 1979, saw and prayed with him. He became
of Italys and Spains large communist parties the ultimate moral authority in his country:
concentrated their criticism of Moscow in a charismatic figure, intensely human and yet
something they called Euro-communism. In fortified by the aura and pomp of the Church.
this new mode, the West European communists, (I visited Poland for the first time in 1979, a
who had previously been subservient Marxist- month after this trip. His effect was palpable.)
Karol Jzef
Wojtya Pope
John Paul II
greets a huge
crowd in his
hometown of
Wadowice,
Poland, in June,
1979.
He wanted to liberate Eastern Europe from the not by reckless, romantic passion but by
soul-deadening rule of atheistic communism; political prudence and the absolute rejection of
that he had strong misgivings about Western violence. Solidarnosc, workers and intellectuals
liberal society became clearer at a later time. cooperating, exemplified old social democratic
All Soviet satellite states, indeed the USSR hopes, and for some years those hopes briefly
itself, were suffering from economic privation and anonymously held sway. Solidarnosc
and backwardness, and economic discontent was civil society in nuce, claiming millions
was often the igniting cause of protest on the of members and posing a threat to the very
part of peoples groping toward the construction existence of the Soviet system. On December
of a civil society. Strikes occurred, but none as 13, 1981, the Polish head of state, General
portentous as the strike in the Lenin shipyards Wojciech Jaruzelski, imposed martial law and
in Gdansk that began on August 14, 1980. imprisoned the Solidarnosc leaders, hoping to
The strike leader, trade-unionist Lech Walesa, expunge the danger. But continued economic
summoned from Warsaw, among others misery and the unbroken will of multitudes
who supported the strike, two intellectuals, finally forced the party into concessions,
Bronislaw Geremek and Tadeusz Mazowiecki. negotiated at a round table beginning in
From the Inter-Factory Strike Committee that February 1989; the very shape of the table
guided the strike to its conclusion in September, became a symbol of the peaceful negotiations by
there emerged what amounted to a national which, beginning in Poland, communist parties
political movement, Solidarity (Solidarnosc), yielded power. Polands first semi-free elections
challenging the now insecure regime. From resulted in Mazowieckis becoming the first non-
then on, Solidarnosc enveloped the country communist prime minister in what had been a
the first free union in a communist country, communist country. (No doubt, the Polish pope
governed for the first time in Polish history was invisibly present in these historic changes.)
And yet the decisive presence had yet to gesture that was an electrifying recognition of
emerge. In 1985 after years of senescent his commitment to human rights. And two
Soviet leaders Mikhail Gorbachev, younger years later, he withdrew Soviet troops from
than the other communist leaders and radically Afghanistan, reducing the military element
different from them, was elected secretary in Soviet policy. From the very beginning
general of the Communist Party. Having grown tacitly and ultimately explicitly, he abandoned
up in the Soviet system and risen through it, he the Brezhnev doctrine, which had prescribed
had intimate knowledge of its crippling defects. Soviet intervention in satellite countries in
He came to power with radically new thoughts, which the position of the Communist Party
understanding the Soviet Unions desperate was threatened. What opened the road to 1989
need for reforms in the economic realm was Gorbachevs hope that the satellites would
Below left: (perestroika) and the civic realm (glasnost). He find their own way to a reformed communism,
Mikhail envisioned a reformed communist Russia taking free of either promise or threat of Soviet tanks.
Gorbachev
its place in what he called the Common House In the end, Gorbachev failed as a reformer
(left) applauds
after he and
of Europe. That this broke with communist in his own country, but he made possible the
Ronald Reagan dogma about the inevitable conflict between liberation of the satellite nations.
(right) signed socialist and capitalist systems was clear. The unrest in the Soviet bloc that had
the landmark Gorbachev understood the power of the United become manifest in Solidarnosc made its
intermediate- States; he knew that President Ronald Reagan appearance elsewhere as well, even in the
range missile
(1981-1989) had denounced the evil empire German Democratic Republic, whose orthodox
(INF) treaty of
1987.
and started his ill-fated Strategic Defense leadership continued to be fearfully suspicious
Below right: Initiative; and he had heard Reagans defiant of any liberalizing tendency (to the point of
One thousand tear down this wall demand. It is a tribute to censoring Gorbachevs speeches). Peace vigils
East German both men that, fearful of a nuclear holocaust, beginning in the fall of 1989 in East German
pro-democracy they reached important agreements concerning churches were quickly extended to peaceful
supporters build
disarmament in 1986 and 1987. Also in 1986, protest marches in a number of big cities. On
a human chain
through East
Gorbachev brought the great astrophysicist and October 9, some 70,000 citizens in Leipzig
Berlin in October, civil-rights champion Andrei Sakharov back marched peacefully under placards proclaiming
1989. to Moscow from his internal exile in Gorky, a We are the people and demanding democratic
reforms and they did so knowing that had thought possible that Soviet rule could
the regime had mobilized troops and given actually be overthrown peacefully had
additional blood supplies to local hospitals, occurred. Historians will long debate what
and knowing, as protesters everywhere knew, all contributed to this liberation and how, but
that communist regimes still had the means to that it was a concatenation of unforeseeable
liquidate protest; this had been evident in the processes seems clear: I find it tempting to think
massacre of Tiananmen Square in Beijing only a of it as a silent conspiracy of decency. The events
few months earlier. in Berlin were symbol and reality of the triumph
But the peoples wish for freedom was of Western and, therefore also, American ideals.
contagious and no longer to be repressed. In I have only hinted at the subterranean
June, the Hungarian-Austrian border was connections, which remain to be explored.
virtually opened, and this meant that East Two hundred years after the great French
Germans, who could easily travel to fraternal Revolution, a very different revolution tried
communist Hungary, now could reach West to create a new Europe, and for once, by
Germany, via Austria, without surmounting the benevolent cunning of history, the right
the Wall in Berlin. Other East Germans fled leaders and brave, prudent citizens appeared
to the West German embassies in Prague and simultaneously. Perhaps never before or after
Budapest, determined to remain on embassy was there so much hope in the air, and perhaps
Near a rebuilt grounds until the means to get to West it was too good to last. For many reasons, such
section of the
Germany were provided. At obvious risk, East as the return of violent nationalism, reality in
Berlin Wall
and a museum
Germans were on the march, either abroad or, some places very quickly turned ugly and bloody
at the former even more impressively, on the streets at home. again. But a precedent was set, a successful
Checkpoint On November 9, the opening of the Berlin precedent that affirmed the power of the
Charlie, a man Wall signified the triumph of the first peaceful powerless. I doubt that the sparks of those
walks through a and ultimately successful German revolution, days are extinguished forever: Might one see
field of wooden
a triumph perhaps not sufficiently honored by that under radically different conditions and for
crosses that
commemorate
their West German brethren. radically different purposes, millions of Iranians
those who were By the end of 1989, the satellites of the on the streets of Tehran, demanding a different,
killed at the wall. Soviet Union had been freed. What very few better life, are following that precedent?
Fritz Stern, University Professor Emeritus at

Columbia University, is an historian of modern
Europe, particularly Germany. Recipient
of international honors and prizes, he has
published widely in the U.S. and abroad; his
most recent work is Five Germanys I Have
Known (2006). He served as senior adviser to
the U.S. Embassy in Bonn, 1993-1994, while
Richard Holbrooke was U.S. Ambassador there.
A Contested Future
Robert J. Lieber
M
omentous events take on the proposition that given the opportunity to
a life of their own. The choose, people will demand political freedom.
American Revolution Almost anyone who lived through the
in 1776, the French Cold War, and not just in Germany, will still
Revolution of 1789, the remember key moments: the Berlin Airlift
outbreak of World War I in 1914, the Russian of 1948-1949; the Korean War (1950-1953);
Revolutions of 1917, and the end of World War Khrushchevs 1956 secret speech denouncing
II in 1945 all continue to stand as watersheds, the crimes of Stalin; the Soviets launching of
marking the boundaries of old and new eras, Sputnik the first space satellite in 1957;
and as the subjects of continuing debate as erection of the Berlin Wall in August 1961;
to their political, cultural, and historical the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962;
significance. The opening of the Berlin Wall the Vietnam War; the Soviet-led invasions of
Right: Berliners rightfully merits inclusion in this list, and Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968);
watch in two decades later the event still reverberates and the transformation of the Soviet Union
anticipation as in terms of its meaning and consequences. under Mikhail Gorbachev beginning in 1985.
American planes The joyous throng of East Berliners pouring
fly in supplies
into West Berlin on the night of November 9,
during the Berlin
Air Lift, which 1989, represents not only an indelible memory
lasted from June for people of that city, but it symbolizes a
1948-May 1949. more profound transformation: the peaceful
Opposite Page: reunification of Germany; a Europe whole and
East Berliners free; the end of a worldwide Cold War that had
atop the Berlin
threatened to plunge the United States, the
Wall, near the
Brandenburg Soviet Union, and their respective allies into
Gate, December a catastrophic conflict; and arguably most
22, 1989. important of all compelling evidence for
Above: American As a young graduate student, I vividly recall friends would be arrested and imprisoned after
and Soviet tanks a trip on foot through Checkpoint Charlie on a they sought to protest East German troops
face off during
cold, dreary late December day just a few years participation in crushing the Prague Spring,
an especially
tense Cold War
after the Wall had been built. The barriers, and I would not see him or his family again
confrontation. warning signs (Achtung, Sie verlassen den until more than two decades later after the Wall
Right: Decades Amerikanischen Sektor), and taciturn and wary had miraculously opened.
later, Berliners East German border guards and volkspolitzei The Wall came down for reasons large
walk freely below created an atmosphere worthy of a John and small, though none of these diminish the
a sign demarking
LeCarre novel. (Indeed, LeCarres The Spy Who surprise, even shock that this could happen so
a border that no
longer exists.
Came in From the Cold captures the temper of suddenly and peacefully. At one level, people
those times.) I recall, too, meeting East German had voted with their feet. Ever since the
students while visiting the eastern half of the creation of the communist German Democratic
city, including an ambitious, talented young Republic (GDR) in the eastern sector of
physics student who believed in the ideals of his Germany occupied by the Soviet Union at the
system but yearned for socialism with a human end of the Second World War, large numbers
face. Less than two years later, he and his of people seized the opportunity to move from
Clockwise from top: Women and children

refugees arrive in West Berlin; (Left to right
at front) Soviet Communist Party Chief Nikita
Khrushchev, Premier Nikolai Bulganin, and
Deputy Premier Anastase I. Mikoyan welcome
delegates to the 20th Communist Party Congress
in Moscow; West German Chancellor Konrad
Adenauer (second from left) joins the other
NATO representatives in 1956.
The Prague
Spring, 1968.
Czech protestors
surround a Soviet
tank. Their
protest would
be violently
suppressed but
disillusionment
with Communism
would deepen.
East to West (as another friend of mine and conflict that had begun in Europe; the collapse
his family did by riding the S-Bahn in a not-yet of Soviet communism and almost all of its
divided Berlin). After August 1961, those who imitators; and the dissolution of the USSR into
fled did so under dangerous and sometimes its 15 constituent republics. These extraordinary
deadly conditions. They left homes and friends transformations stimulated enormous
in search of a better life, the material attractions enthusiasm and optimism.
of the West, and personal freedom on the An End of History?
other side of the Wall. In the final months, as The post-Berlin Wall events marked the
Czechoslovakia and Hungary liberalized, East start of dramatic changes in Eastern Europe,
Germans fled by the tens of thousands through the Caucasus, and Central Asia, as well as Latin
those neighboring countries, in a flood the America and Africa. Transitions to democracy
GDR authorities were incapable of stopping and away from state-controlled economies took
without bloodshed and that the 400,000 troops place in the former Warsaw Pact countries,
of the Red Army stationed in East Germany most notably Poland, the Czech Republic, and
would not stop, not in 1989, and not to save a Hungary, but also throughout the region. The
tottering regime. Russian Federation and many of its 14 former
In reality, the opening of the Wall republics also adopted democratic forms of
represented just one of four historic governance and economic transformation,
transformations compressed into a remarkably though many with disappointing results.
short time: the end of a divided Germany and Elsewhere in the world, a flood tide of political
a divided Europe; the end of the Cold War, a opening and economic reform seemed to portend
a bright future. This optimism is captured in a In Russia itself, the initial forms of
widely cited essay and book, The End of History, democracy under Presidents Gorbachev (1985-
by the political theorist Francis Fukuyama. He 1991) and Boris Yeltsin (1991-1999) were
argued that in view of these epic changes, it had burdened by a chaotic transition and economic
become evident that liberal democracy and a collapse. From 1999 onward, the countrys
market-oriented economic order were the only institutions became more stabilized but
viable options for modern societies. increasingly took on a semi-authoritarian form
Unfortunately, the predominance of these in which, despite the appearance of democracy,
political and economic models proved more President Vladimir Putin (1999-2008; prime
contingent than seemed to be the case in the minister, 2008-present) and his colleagues
initial heady days and months of the post- presided over what The Economist magazine
Berlin Wall era. For some, the creation and termed one of the most criminalized, corrupt,
stabilization of these new systems became far and bureaucratized countries in the world.
more problematic than expected. Many of the Currently, the Russian people possess much
countries of Eastern Europe as well as the Baltic more autonomy in their daily lives than they
states successfully implemented wrenching had under Soviet communism, but they do so
political and economic transitions, though the within a system that stifles independent political
process itself was at times long and arduous. But parties and the rule of law, lacks an independent
in the Balkans, as well as parts of the Caucasus, judiciary, gives its cronies control of leading
Central Asia, and also Africa, the process was companies, and dominates television and the
fraught with difficulty. Ethnic conflicts erupted, major media.
driven by appeals to extreme nationalism, and Even where liberal democracy and the
elections sometimes brought the veneer of market economy have taken root, initial
democracy without the substance. enthusiasms and boundless optimism have
Czechoslovakias
1989 Velvet
Revolution
liberated
that nation
from Soviet
domination.
Here, 200,000
crowd the streets
of Prague. The
white banner
reads Free
Elections.
waned. In some places, for example Bulgaria defended the former GDR, with even those
and Romania, the problems have been those acknowledging its bad sides now claiming
of corruption and of inadequate state capacity that life was good there. Certainly there is
to carry out successfully the functions for misplaced nostalgia, driven by the predictable
which it is responsible. The ardent desire of frustrations of daily life, especially at a time of
Eastern European countries to gain entry recession and high unemployment. Attitudes
to NATO and the European Union helped and history matter too. Explaining this kind of
significantly in the early post-Cold War years apology for dictatorship requires an empathetic
to keep democratic and economic transitions understanding of attitudes and historical
on track. Requirements for rule of law, civilian experience. The population of East Germany
control of the military, minority rights, political had been unaccustomed to the challenges,
freedoms, and accountability proved to be real the risks, and the opportunities of life in a
assets during these transition periods and when free society. They had lived for 56 years under
applicant states found themselves buffeted by dictatorships: from 1933 to 1945 under the
competing priorities and claimants at home Nazis and then until 1989 under a Soviet-
and abroad. imposed communist regime. Adapting to life in
Here it is important to understand the a liberal democracy and market economy may
differences between liberal and illiberal thus require generational change as well.
democracy. Liberal democracy requires not just We like to think that all good things go
elections and some of the formal institutions of together: liberty, popular sovereignty, equal
democracy (parliament, president, courts), but opportunity, equality of condition. But as
a free press, rule of law, independent judiciary, Professor Michael Mandelbaum has noted in
minority rights, freedoms of speech and Democracys Good Name, the idea of democracy
assembly, the ability of parties and individuals itself has historically combined two related
to seek office peacefully through competitive but sometimes competing notions: liberty,
elections, and the functioning of civil society i.e., freedom of the individual, and popular
institutions in which peoples livelihoods and sovereignty. These notions can and do come
way of life do not depend exclusively on the into conflict, for example if majorities favor
government. Illiberal democracy (a term coined policies that restrict individual freedom or even
by the prominent journalist, editor, and scholar repress or limit the rights of some members
Fareed Zakaria) denotes a system in which of society. Stable liberal democracies resolve
elections take place, but in which civil liberties, this contradiction through constitutionally
civil rights, and the multiple dimensions of mandated rights protected from majoritarian
a genuinely democratic society are severely restriction and through maintaining an
limited or altogether absent. Societies emerging independent judiciary to which individuals
from dictatorship and affected by deep ethnic can appeal.
and sectarian divisions have been especially More broadly, the combination of liberal
vulnerable to these internal conflicts. democracy and a market economy also embodies
Even where corruption and government a certain inbuilt tension. A market economy
performance have not been major factors, helps to preserve individual liberty, but it also
lingering doubts can remain. A recent opinion can give rise to substantial economic disparities.
poll in the former East Germany revealed This inequality, in turn, can conflict with
that a shocking 57 percent of respondents notions of popular equality and social solidarity.
Bosnians
celebrate in
the streets of
Sarajevo in 1995,
days before the
Dayton Peace
Accords officially
ended the war
in Bosnia.
Challenges come from external sources and how best to respond to threats from
as well. As the political scientist Azar Gat has proliferation, failed states, ethnic conflict, and
described in a provocative and widely cited human rights abuses. Despite calls for a League
Foreign Affairs essay, the rise of authoritarian of Democracies to offset the weaknesses of the
capitalist powers poses a renewed threat to United Nations, the European Union, and
the predominance of liberal democracy. They other international institutions in confronting
represent an alternate path to modernity, common world problems, the criteria for where
and just as the defeat of their 20th-century to draw the line between liberal and illiberal
precursors, Imperial Germany, Nazi Germany, democracies remain problematic, and few
and Imperial Japan, depended on the United countries are willing to prioritize such a new
States coming to the aid of the European grouping above their existing commitments
democracies, so too the future requires active to regional bodies, other institutions, or more
and sustained American engagement on behalf narrowly defined national interests.
of liberal democracies and societies. In short, two decades after the opening
In this competition, differences of outlook of the Berlin Wall, rather than the end of
among the democracies remain an ongoing history and a foreordained triumph of liberal
problem. They often disagree among themselves democracy and the market economy, the
on important policy choices, such as democracy future remains contested. Despite this, there
promotion, international economic policies, are reasons for optimism. To some extent, the
the past but also the future, not only the fall
of the Wall itself, but the collapse of Soviet
communism, the end of the Cold War, the
success of velvet revolutions in Ukraine and
Georgia, the halting but nonetheless real
progress of democratization in many parts
of the world, and massive demonstrations for
freedom by the Iranian people suggest there
is something deep-seated, profound, and
fundamental in the desire for political freedom.
Its success is not inevitable, but as presidents
from Franklin Roosevelt to Harry Truman,
John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton,
George W. Bush, and Barack Obama have
proclaimed, the aspiration for liberty and
democracy is an intrinsic human longing.
The challenge for the worlds democracies
Above: After today is foreshadowed in a remark by one
a fraudulent
of Americas Founding Fathers, Benjamin
2003 election,
Georgians
Franklin, after the historic Constitutional
launched the Convention of 1787. When asked by a passerby
Rose Revolution. if the new United States would be a republic
Right: Hungarian or a monarchy, he replied, A republic if you
women cast can keep it. Much the same might be said
ballots in 2009.
about the global future for free societies and
Below: A rural
Romanian
market economies. Their prevalence may not be
family expresses foreordained, but with effort and commitment,
its political the likelihood of sustaining and extending them
allegiance. remains promising.
Robert J. Lieber is Professor of Government

and International Affairs at Georgetown
University and the author or editor of fifteen
books on international relations and U.S.
foreign policy. He publishes and lectures
widely and has appeared on U.S. and foreign
television and radio networks.
information revolution and the development of
modern knowledge-based societies appear to
create a propensity, i.e., a receptive environment,
for liberalization and democracy. Looking to
I Will Remember That Day

All My Life
BY Adam Michnik
I
n 1989 nobody anticipated the fall of activists Ed.] and penned a few sentences
the communist regime no one in the of commentary to be published on the first
world. When U.S. President Ronald page. I wrote it was a great holiday: In the
Reagan (1981-1989) called in West Berlin, perennial struggle between man and barbed
Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall! wire, today man triumphed and the barbed
people took it as an echo of Cold War rhetoric wire was defeated.
and not as a realistic political project. I was under the impression that all of
And yet, the Wall was torn down. Poland was rooting for the Germans, who were
I will remember that day for the rest of my walking towards freedom. We kept repeating:
life. It was during an official visit of the leaders "Ich bin Berliner Ich bin Berliner.
of the Federal Republic of [West] Germany In all appearance, East Germany (the
to Poland, which was already governed by the German Democratic Republic, or GDR) was
cabinet of Tadeusz Mazowiecki, the first non- a communist state, and yet it was somehow
communist prime minister in the Soviet bloc. unique. It had a typically incompetent
It was in the afternoon. I had been invited for a government run by a party nomenclature,
talk with the West German Foreign Minister corruption, ubiquitous police surveillance,
Hans Dietrich Genscher. We were discussing and a deepening economic crisis. What was
the prospects for the next few months. During atypical, however, was the existence of the other
our conversation an aide entered the room and democratic and rich German state and
handed the minister a piece of paper. Genscher the presence of Soviet garrisons on the GDRs
read it, looked at me, and said: The border territory. It used to be said about Prussia that
crossing in the Berlin Wall has been opened. it was not a country that had an army, but an
That was the conclusion of our interesting army that had a country. The GDR was not a
conversation. I ran to the office of Gazeta country with Soviet garrisons; it was a country
Wyborcza [the democratic newspaper founded for Soviet garrisons. That was the reason for and
by Michnik and other journalists and political the guarantee of the GDRs very being.
In 1989 the Soviet garrisons, which in 1953 chanted, We are the nation! Later, the slogan
had saved the GDR regime by suppressing a changed into We are one nation!
workers uprising, received new instructions. The Berlin Wall thus fell in the German
The new rulers in the Kremlin had launched the peoples minds even before the actual event,
policy of perestroika, in fact a retreat in internal which followed soon thereafter. On October
and foreign policy from the logic of the Cold 22, 1989, Erich Honecker was deposed and on
War. GDR leader Erich Honecker refused to November 9 Gunter Schabowski, the chief of
accept this new policy. His cronies used to say: propaganda and member of the Politburo of the
Should we have to change the wallpaper in our SED, the East German ruling communist party,
home only because our neighbor changes his? said in a press conference: Today we reached a
But East Germans also did not like the old decision to issue an ordinance that allows every
wallpaper. When on June 20, 1989, Hungarian citizen of the GDR to leave the country through
foreign Minister Gyula Horn, together with his any border crossing. After a moment, he added
Austrian counterpart, cut the barbed wire on that the ordinance is effective immediately.
the border between their two countries, East If Schabowski misspoke, it was the most
Below: The Germans began pouring through Hungary important and most beautiful slip of the tongue
last Soviet into Austria. A little later, those who did not in the history of Germany. Right after the
leader, Mikhail
want to emigrate started to demonstrate in the announcement, Berliners armed with mallets
Gorbachev,
shakes hands in streets of East Germany the new policies of and chisels set about to dismantle the Wall.
Bonn in June, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev emboldened What was unimaginable became real. The
1989. people, and Lutheran churches in the GDR German circle was squared.
Opposite Page: served as meeting places for the protesters. West The fall of the Berlin Wall contributed
East Berliners German President Richard von Weizsaecker greatly to the downfall of the communist system
atop the Berlin
accurately defined the two sources of the demise in the whole bloc, but it was not the first decisive
Wall, near the
Brandenburg of Honeckers regime: Gorbachev and churches. event. The process as seen from Warsaw
Gate, December During Gorbachevs visit to Berlin in had started in a big way in August 1980,
22, 1989. October 1989, people shouted Gorby! and when a large strike in the Gdansk shipyard
delegitimized the dictatorship of the communist
party, which claimed to be the dictatorship
of the proletariat. It was an exceptional event
the proletariat issued a stern warning to
the dictatorship of the proletariat. It was the
utmost moral defeat of communism. The real
dismantling of the Berlin Wall began right
there, right then. The Polish Round Table
compromise and the subsequent semi-free
elections in June 1989 were themselves heavy
hammer blows against the Wall.
Other events contributed. The policy of
U.S. President Jimmy Carter (1977-1981),
who put human rights on his banner and
sought dtente with a human face, started
a confrontation the Soviet Union could not
Right: Lech
Walesa speaks
to striking
workers at the
Gdansk Shipyard
in 1980. The
milestone Gdansk
Agreement
led to the first
independent
labor union in
the Eastern Bloc,
Solidarity.
Below: Adam
Michnik (center)
casts his vote
during the first
partially-free
elections within
the Soviet bloc.
Solidarity won a
sweeping victory
over the Polish
Communists.
win. Neither could it prevail against the policy whole sequence of events as well as the
of President Reagan, who challenged the evil Soviet failure to keep up technologically with
empire, engaging the Soviets in an arms race the United States and the misadventure in
they could not win. The pontificate of John Afghanistan led to Gorbachevs new policy,
Paul II also played an immense role, with the one in which Soviet troops no longer would
pontiff setting the Christian message of human prop up the communist GDR regime. Probably
freedom and dignity against a communist no one did so much for the world as the last
doctrine based on violence and lies. The general secretary of the Soviet Communist
Party, although abolishing communism was their homes and their cities after the aggression
certainly not part of his plan. on Poland in 1939 and the expulsion of
The fall of the Berlin Wall marked the end Germans decreed by the Allies after Germany
of post-Yalta Europe; it marked the end of faith lost the war both worries and saddens. The
in the communist utopia and in the perpetuity embarrassing opportunism and conformism
of the Soviet regime; it marked the end of the of some German elites that accompanies this
punishment imposed on the Germans for mental shift saddens, too.
unleashing Nazism and starting the war; it also I notice similar phenomena in other
marked the end of humiliation for democratic European countries, including my own. But
Europe, which tolerated the image of a great nowhere are they as dangerous as in Germany.
city tortured day after day with barbed wire and To put it differently, although Europe
border towers. changed a lot and for the better after
But the tearing down of the Berlin Wall the destruction of the Berlin Wall, it did not
and the end of communism had more than become an Arcadia of flourishing tolerance,
one facet. Just as the massacre in the Square of respect for the dignity of others, and unfettered
Heavenly Peace in Beijing counterpoised the love of ones neighbor. Our continent is still full
Polish elections of June 1989, which brought the of minefields, booby traps, and threats with
defeat of the communists, the velvet revolutions which we must reckon.
in Central Europe had their darker parallel And yet after those 20 years
in the bloody events in Romania and the long I remain an optimist. Why? Because I have no
war in the former Yugoslavia. The velvet was other option.
stained with blood. The smell of this blood still
lingers in Europe. I felt it in many places for
example, in the refugee houses set aflame in
several German cities. Those houses burned Adam Michnik is the editor-in-chief of Gazeta
after the fall of the Wall. A whole library Wyborcza, the largest Polish daily. In 1968-
was written about the paradoxes of German 1989 he was one of the leading organizers of
unification and I can add little to the subject. the democratic opposition in Poland. Historian,
But I remember an anecdote I once heard from essayist and political publicist, he was the
one of my German friends. Shortly after the editor of several underground samizdat
unification, an Ossie and a Weissie meet in periodicals and was arrested and imprisoned
Berlin. The Ossie says, Welcome! We are one several times for his pro-democratic activities.
nation. The Weissie replies laughing, We too! In 1980-1989, he was an adviser to the
Although I am a Pole free of independent trade union Solidarity and its
Germanophobia, this laughter still rings in my leader, Lech Walesa. In 1989 he participated
ears, especially when I observe how numerous in the Round Table Talks that brought about
German politicians and intellectuals abandon the end of the communist system in Poland.
critical reflection on German history and choose Michnik is the author of several books,
preoccupation with harm done to Germans, including Letters from Freedom, The Church
usually accompanied by a morally relativistic and the Left, and Letters from Prison and
view of the harm done by Germans to Poles. Other Essays.
The ease with which some see a symmetry
between the expulsion of Poles and Jews from
Those Were the Days,

My Friend
by Anna Husarska

Y
our point of view depends on behind the concrete structure topped with
your viewpoint goes an old barbed and razor wire was the seven-meter-wide
Polish saying, and the way we, post way of raked gravel and so we were told
in Eastern Europe, saw the a minefield.
coming down of the Berlin Wall And while the Wall was an enclosure
is a perfect illustration of this proverb. Here around West Berlin (the French, British, and
is my view one shaped by a sympathetic American sectors), metaphorically it encircled
understanding of the Polish historical and enslaved half the continent.
experience. For us in Eastern Europe, perhaps the most
First: What was the Berlin Wall? oppressive and difficult indignity was the wall
Among other things, it was a metaphor. of denials:
Right: The Big
The difference between what one saw from The wall of communist laws forbidding
Three (front either side of the physical structure tells us free travel to the democratic part of the world
row, left to much about a Europe divided into Soviet and
right) of Winston non-Soviet zones, a fate sealed at the Yalta
Churchill, Franklin Conference in 1945.
Roosevelt, and
From the West you could come up to the
Joseph Stalin
shaped postwar
wall, you could touch it, scrawl graffiti on it,
Europe at the watch the East from an elevated platform.
Feb. 1945 Yalta The Berlin Wall was a stage for American
Conference. presidents: John F. Kennedy proclaiming his
Opposite Page: solidarity with the encircled city, Ich bin ein
The Berlin Wall
Berliner; Ronald Reagan pounding at the Soviet
blocks access to
the citys famed
leader, Mister Gorbachev, tear down this wall!
Brandenburg From the East, the Wall was gray and
Gate. depressing. We knew (but could not see) that
Right: East
Germans queue
up at a state-run
store.
Far right: Lech
Walesa, leader
of Polands
Solidarity union,
casts his ballot in
a 1989 election
as his son Bogdan
looks on. Walesa
later would serve
as President of
Poland.
collectively (still today!) called the West lest shipyard in Gdansk and it won the right to
we see through the regimes lies. strike. Also one might conclude that only with
The wall of communist censorship making the 2004 admission of eight East European
it nearly impossible to read anything other than countries into the European Union was the
propaganda lest we be infected by bourgeois, Europe created at Yalta truly undone, although
capitalist ideology. (Uncensored books, not just yet if one lives in Belarus.
magazines, and newspapers had to be smuggled Even within the annus mirabilis 1989, many
in, but we devoured them when we could.) East European events competed for attention
The wall of communist jamming of and significance: the first talks between a
foreign radio stations, such as BBC, Radio Free communist regime and its political opposition
Europe, and Voice of America, with a persistent (April, in Poland); the first semi-free elections
buzzing noise lest we hear the truth about (June 4, in Poland, eclipsed by the tanks
events in the world and in our own country. crushing the dreams in Tiananmen Square
But even worse was the wall inside each of that same day), the historical rehabilitation of
us, the one that made us live a schizophrenic Imre Nagy and his companions from the 1956
existence in two worlds homes and company Budapest uprising (June 16, in Hungary); the
of family or friends where one could be oneself Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, itself
and a second world, false but increasingly grounded in the Charter 77 movement 12 years
familiar, in which we would wear a mask of earlier, began in earnest that November. A
obedience. The apprenticeship into this double month later, the former dissident writer Vclav
life started early, around kindergarten, where we Havel was president. Finally, Romania until
learned political slogans while reading Winnie then seemingly the most solid communist
the Pooh and made hammer-and-sickle paper regime proved the bloodiest in its sudden
cuts while playing with teddy bears. fall, also in 1989.
Second, the date or dates the Wall Meanwhile, that years German history
fell also contributes to our understanding. can be framed within characteristically orderly
November 9, 1989, is the date most brackets: a January 19 pronouncement by East
potently associated with the end of the unjust German leader Erich Honecker that The Wall
oppression of half of Europe. But the Wall will be standing in 50 and even in 100 years,
began to crack back in 1980 when the Polish if the reasons for it are not yet removed, and
trade union Solidarity was created at the Lenin an improvised speech by West German head
Clockwise
from top left:
November
1989, happy
East Germans
on their way
to new homes
in the West.
The displayed
license plate has
been defaced
to indicate
Germany
rather than
the GDR; at a
Dresden rally in
December, 1989,
East Germans
display a banner
calling for One
Germany; with
the Wall down,
East Germans
pass through
Checkpoint
Charlie into
West Berlin.
Helmut Kohl to the citizens of the eastern most conspicuous part of the physical and
German Democratic Republic (GDR) gathered metaphorical Iron Curtain dividing free and
in Dresden on December 19 as the crowd unfree Europe.
shouted, Germany, Germany and We are When exactly did this Curtain come down?
one people. Cracks appeared when Hungarian officers
Third, the actual, physical crumbling. removed the barbed wire on their border with
The Wall was not merely 106 kilometers Austria. This was in May 1989. That summer
of concrete elements and 68 kilometers of thousands of East Germans drove their tell-
metal lattice fence with 302 watchtowers tale Trabants (a notoriously unreliable, locally
bisecting a German city. It was instead the manufactured East German car made, some
November 3, 40,000 East German refugees

had left for West Germany via Czechoslovakia.
Now the dam really was leaking. The Wall
looked far less sturdy.
Given the precise procedural formalism
and stiffness of the GDR, the ultimate irony
of November 9, 1989, was how the Wall at last
opened that day: It was a bureaucratic screw-up.
Not having been properly briefed, Communist
Party leader Gnter Schabowski famously
announced in a live, televised press conference
that all rules for traveling abroad were lifted.
When pressed by journalists, he stated that it
was immediately, not for the next day as it was
planned. As for the rest, well, we all saw it.
No, I was not in Berlin the night the Wall
fell. On November 9, 1989, I was in the editorial
offices of The New York Times. The editor,
Max Frankel, had granted me a short-term
internship. I would acquire some experience
about independent newspapers and apply it in
the newly democratized Eastern Europe, where
I had a journalist job waiting for me. That such
a position was even possible in Poland tells us
much about the rush of events.
A few days before the Wall came down
a Polish actress declared on the TV news,
referring to our semi-free elections: Ladies and
gentlemen, on June 4, 1989, communism ended
Bucharest, alleged, of cardboard) to Warsaw and Prague in Poland. It did. And the Gazeta Wyborcza
December, 1989:
and from there to Budapest, hoping to make it (Electoral Gazette) daily newspaper, created as
Civil Defense
members
to the West. And so when on September 11, part of the decision to hold those elections, was,
deliver food to 1989, the Hungarians opened their border for as the saying went, the first free newspaper
revolutionaries. citizens of the GDR to exit freely, some 15,000 between Berlin and Vladivostok.
Germans voted with their feet. That was one I came back to Poland in the spring of
dent in the dam-like Berlin Wall, and a big 1989, after 15 years of living abroad, to join the
one. Three weeks later, citing humanitarian editorial staff of that daily. I found the newly
reasons, the GDR authorities allowed a secured freedoms almost unbelievable, but my
special train to leave Warsaw with almost a colleagues not only knew it was for real, they
thousand East German refugees, transit the also expected a domino effect soon would bring
GDR, and continue on to the Federal Republic the crumbling of the entire Soviet bloc. Surely,
of Germany. More such trains left soon from they argued, the Poles could take the credit for
Poland, carrying a total of 7,600 refugees. By that? The patriot in me agreed.
It took a little bit longer than 10 days, but

still it was a time when everything seemed
possible, when we Eastern Europeans thought,
as the song went, Wed live the life we choose,
wed fight and never lose.
Moving almost directly from reporting
on the velvet revolution in Czechoslovakia to
Romanias bloody revolution, took me from
the seventh cloud of heaven to hell on earth.
In my notebooks from that time I find
these entries:
Dec 12, 1989, Prague:
People on Vclavsk nmst square
dance and sing For Christmas we want Havel
president and they stick flowers in the barrels of
the rifles of the puzzled policemen.
Dec 25, 1989, Bucharest:
Palace Square smells of wet ashes from
the burnt out building of Communist Party
and people repeat Today is Christmas, the
madman is gone as they watch the replay of the
A Hungarian The reporter in me wanted to see it all. In execution of Nicolae Ceauescu.
border police 1989, the Gazeta Wyborcza foreign desk was Dec 28, 1989, Bucharest:
officer checks
as privileged a seat as they come to observe the State Romanian television broadcasts a film
travel documents
at the Hungarian- demise of communism. with Charlie Chaplin, that was forbidden until
Austrian border For the rest of 1989 and well into 1990, now The Great Dictator.
in 1996. What I reported for Gazeta as the domino pieces Oh, yes, those were the days
was once the fell: from Czechoslovakia, Romania, and
first open border Nicaragua, then writing for a newly created
between Soviet
weekly from Albania and from the Baltic
Bloc countries
and the West States. Having participated in the Solidarity Anna Husarska worked as an editor and
is now among movement, I had very high expectations for the translator in the office of Solidarity abroad
the many open other movements across Eastern Europe. (Paris) and was a journalist at the Polish daily
borders in a Reporting from Czechoslovakia was Gazeta Wyborcza. In the U.S. she was staff
united Europe. probably the most exciting. It was the cleanest, writer at The New Republic and The New
smoothest, and most elegant of the revolutions. Yorker magazines reporting from conflict
It was also a swift one. Graffiti in Prague that and post-conflict situations, Senior Political
winter featured this simple list: Analyst at the International Crisis Group
Poland, 10 years. and is currently Senior Policy Adviser at the
Hungary, 10 months. International Rescue Committee. The opinions
East Germany, 10 weeks. expressed here are her own.
Czechoslovakia, 10 days.
Berlin Divided...and reunited, 1961-1989

(A Chronology)
1961 the Eastern sector of Berlin from the three Western

sectors, preventing any further migration. Two days later,
MARCH 13 President John F. Kennedy meets with the GDR begins construction of a mammoth concrete
West Berlins Mayor Willy Brandt, reassuring him of wall. Refugees attempting to flee westward to freedom
continued U.S. support. are shot dead by border guards. The British Foreign
Office calls the move contrary to the four-power status
JUNE 3-4 At their Vienna conference, President of Berlin and therefore illegal. The New York Times
Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev find
themselves in stark disagreement over German self-
determination. Khrushchev threatens after six months
to negotiate a separate peace treaty with East Germany,
a measure that would unilaterally change the post-war
status quo, and threaten western access to divided
Berlin. In response, Kennedy promises a cold winter,
announces plans for a substantial buildup of U.S.
conventional military forces, and declares he will defend
Allied access to West Berlin.
JULY/AUGUST In response to the large number

of refugees fleeing East Berlin and the GDR (as many
as 2,000 each day from August 1-12), the East German
government gravely warns of measures to safeguard the
security of the German Democratic Republic. Above: Before the Wall: a 1952 Berlin border crossing.
Opposite Page: in August, 1961, two young girls speak
AUGUST 13 Before dawn on a Sunday morning, East with their grandparents in East Germanyover a
German police officers and soldiers begins barricading barbed wire fence. So close yet so far.
Clockwise from top: After

learning that the GDR was
sealing off Berlin with barbed
road blocks and walls, these
East German citizens flee
while they can with only a few
belongings; West Berliners
watch as Eastern workers divide
their city in August, 1961; A
West Berlin guard stands watch
as East German workers add
blocks to the wall.
Left: GDR border

guards check cars
at the Helmstedt
Checkpoint in Berlin
in December, 1961.
Below: President
John F. Kennedy
greets Soviet
Premier Nikita
Khrushchev as they
meet for the first
time in Vienna on
June 3, 1961, two
months before the
erection of the
Berlin Wall.
editorializes that those who fled to the West did so

because they could not endure the shame and misery of
living under the so-called German Democratic Republic.
AUGUST 26 All crossing points are closed to

West Berliners. The East German government restricts
passage to only West Berliners with a special permit,
then effectively shuts down access entirely by refusing to
issue these permits.
1962
JANUARY 24 Twenty-eight men, women, and

children escape to West Berlin by tunneling their way
under the fortified Wall. Among them were a 71-year-
old paralyzed woman and an 8-year-old girl.
JUNE 8 Fourteen East Berliners, including a woman Wall as West Berliners screamed at the murderers on
with a baby in her arms, seize control of a passenger the other side.
ferry on the River Spree and brave gunfire from GDR
border guards to reach the West Berlin bank unharmed. 1963
Today is my dream come true, said the ships steward.
This is the happiest day of my life. JUNE 26 President Kennedy invigorates Germany
and shook the world with a powerful speech from
AUGUST 17 Eighteen-year-old Peter Fechter West Berlin. He concludes with the words: All free
becomes the Walls 50th casualty when he is shot by men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and
border guards during an escape attempt. His bullet- therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words: Ich
riddled body is left unattended on the eastern side of the bin ein Berliner.
Left: An East German police officer crawls through a

tunnel built in West Berlin the GDR claimed it was
built for Western spies, while the West claimed it was
built to help refugees. Above: Two men open an oil
drum that had been used to smuggle their girlfriends
over to West Berlin in 1965.
Left: West German construction workers stop

for a chat directly next to the Berlin Wall
in September, 1967. Above: British soldiers
watch the border in November, 1968. On the
other side, East Germans are extending the
Berlin Wall.
Clockwise from top left: West

Berliners queue up for pass
certificates to visit relatives in the
East. East Berliners did not have
this option; Families return to the
West after visiting relatives in East
Berlin. The sign reads See you
again in the capital of the GDR!;
An aerial view of the Berlin Wall
from the East; An East German
border guard watches the fortified
border. East German guards were
ordered to shoot on sight anyone
who attempted to escape.
DECEMBER 17 Just in time for the Christmas establishes a separate East German citizenship,
holiday, an agreement between the West German and encompassing residents of East Berlin. This implies that
East German governments enables West Berliners the division of Germany will be permanent.
to obtain short-term permits to visit relatives in the
Eastern part of the city for the first time since the FEBRUARY 3 East Germany releases four
border was closed. Americans imprisoned since 1965 on charges of helping
East Berliners escape to the West.
1964
1970
OCTOBER 5 Fifty-seven East Berliners successfully
reaches West Berlin through a 145-yard tunnel dug MARCH 19 Former West Berlin mayor and now
under the basement of an abandoned pastry shop. It West German Chancellor Willy Brandt meets with
took over six months to build the tunnel and was the the chairman of the GDR Council of Ministers, Willi
largest escape to date. Stoph, in Erfurt, East Germany.
1965 MARCH 26 The U.S., Great Britain, France, and the

Soviet Union begin negotiations on a Berlin Agreement.
DECEMBER 26 About 800,000 West
Germans take advantage of a special two- 1971
week holiday relaxation of restrictions to
visit friends and relatives in East Berlin. JANUARY 31 Berliners can make telephone calls
East Berliners were not permitted to travel across the Wall for the first time in two decades.
to the west. One was killed and another
wounded attempting to do so.
President Ronald Reagan waves to the crowd after a
1967 famous June, 1987 speech in which he declared Mr.
Gorbachev, tear down this wall! He is applauded on
the right by FRG Chancellor Helmut Kohl and on the
FEBRUARY 2 East
left by FRG President Philipp Jenninger.
German parliament
MAY 3 Erich Honecker, the mastermind of the 1980

Berlin Wall, takes over from Walter Ulbricht as East
German leader. OCTOBER 9 Attempting to re-impose travel
restrictions, the GDR raises the fee for visitors from
SEPTEMBER 3 Representatives of the U.S., West Berlin to twenty-five deutsche marks per day.
France, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union signs
the Four Powers Agreement, reaffirming that all four 1982
powers retain rights and responsibilities with regard to
Germany and, by implication, to Berlin. JUNE 11 During his first visit to West Berlin as
president, Ronald Reagan calls on the Soviet Union
1972 to work proactively toward long-term peace. During a
speech to American soldiers, he asks Why is this wall
DECEMBER 21 West German minister Egon Bahr here? Why are they so afraid of freedom on this side of
and GDR State Secretary Michael Kohl take a major the wall?
step toward reconciliation, signing the Basic Agreement
on Relationships between the Federal Republic and the 1984
German Democratic Republic. It provides for enhanced
commercial, diplomatic, cultural, and tourist ties. JANUARY 20 The U.S. Embassy in East Berlin
arranges for six GDR citizens to cross into West Berlin
1975 as political refugees.
OCTOBER 29 Despite lingering tensions, the FRG JANUARY 24 A dozen more East Germans seek
and the GDR agree that either side can rescue drowning refuge at the Permanent Representation of the Federal
victims in bordering rivers and canals. This issue arose Republic in East Berlin. Much to the consternation of
after West German firefighters were forced to watch a the GDR, they too were granted asylum in West Berlin.
boy drown in the Spree riverwhich separated East
from Westwhen GDR border guards refused to let MARCH 14 Frustrated by its inability to stem the
them try to save him. flow of East Germans to the West, the GDR erects
a second wall between the Brandenburg Gate and
Potsdamer Platz. West Germany initially attempts
to take advantage of this development and adjust the
borders of Berlin. The New York Times opined that
neither the United States or the Soviet Union is
exercising much control in Berlin. In its 23 years of
existence, the Wall had already claimed at least 70 lives.
1985
MARCH 11 Mikhail Gorbachev, youngest member

of the Soviet Politburo, is elected secretary general of
the communist party. The New York Times calls him
As tourists look on, East Germans are held at rifle point A Leader With Styleand Impatience.
after a failed attempt to escape to the West.
Clockwise from top: 120,000

East Germans demonstrate
in Leipzig in October, 1989;
A lone East German soldier
shakes his fist at a mass of
West German protesters
who had thrown bottles at
guards and a newly-erected
barrier at Checkpoint
Charlie on October 7, 1989;
Hundreds of East German
citizens race through the
woods into Hungary on
their way to the open
border with Austria and the
West in August, 1989.
1986 insisted upon was trust but verify. The increased trust
between the Cold War adversaries makes diplomatic
Gorbachev ends economic aid to the Soviet satellite solutions over Germany increasingly plausible.
states in Eastern Europe. This eventually produces new
policies on military aid and political interventions in DECEMBER 10 East German state police thwart a
the region, and ultimately to Soviet acquiescence when planned protest by the Initiative for Peace and Human
revolutions spread throughout Eastern Europe. Rights.
1987 1989
JUNE 7-8 A large open-air rock concert by the JANUARY 18 Honecker defiantly asserts that the
British band Genesis is held in West Berlin, and draws Wall would stay for fifty, even a hundred years, as long
East Berlin youth to the Wall to listen. As GDR state as capitalist forces opposed his regime.
police try to disperse the crowds, 3,000-4,000 young
Berliners chant The wall must go! Countless East FEBRUARY 6 A final East German citizen is shot
Berliners are injured as they were beaten by police and dead attempting to flee West. He was the last of 79
thrown into vans. recorded victims. The wall would ultimately come
down later that year.
JUNE 12 President Reagan speaks in front of
the Brandenburg Gate, exclaiming Mr. Gorbachev, FEBRUARY 27 East German Communist theorist
tear down this wall! Some Reagan advisers deemed Otto Reinhold gives a speech denouncing the reforms
the phrase too provocative. Reagan decided to say it of Gorbachev. Soviet analysts summarized his views
anyway. Berliners roared approval. by saying there was no need to repair ones walls just
because a neighbor was doing so.
DECEMBER 8 Ronald Reagan and Mikhail
Gorbachev sign the landmark Intermediate-Range MARCH 8 A young East German citizen attempts
Nuclear Forces Treaty. The linchpin phrase that Reagan to fly a homemade hot air balloon out of Berlin. He died
when the balloon crashed in Zehlendorf, West Berlin.
MARCH 12 A dispute over fishing rights near

Szczecin, in Western Poland, reveals a rift in the East
Bloc dating to World War II. This would later become
a diplomatic hurdle during the German reunification
process.
JUNE 7 Demonstrators protest in East Berlin

after a series of allegedly fraudulent local East German
elections. One hundred twenty were temporarily jailed.
AUGUST 8 Outside of the Permanent

Representation of the Federal Republic in East Berlin,
Berliners sing and dance atop the Berlin Wall on the GDR citizens gather to seek asylum. So many came
morning of November 10, 1989 the day after the and refused to leave that the building had to be closed
wall fell.
when it could no longer accommodate people under Left: November 9, 1989, the night the wall came down.
dignified, humane conditions. Berliners crowded atop the Berlin Wall and demanded
its destruction. Above: A traffic jam along 17th Street on
AUGUST 19 Approximately 900 East German November 11, 1989, leading through the Brandenburg
Gate and into the West. Thousands of GDR citizens fled
citizens escapes into West Germany via Hungary to
west after the wall came down.
Austria. They were attending a picnic event entitled
Tear It Down and Take It With You, where attendees
were encouraged to clip off pieces of the barbed wire recognize the groundswell of discontent in East Europe.
running along the border. About 100 Germans shows Gorbachev prophetically adds that Life punishes those
their way through a closed gate while Hungarian police who come too late.
looked away. Three thousand refugees escaped by this
means during the month of August. In the coming OCTOBER 9 Mass demonstrations of 70,000 in
weeks, these numbers would increase mightily. Leipzig, home to much grassroots opposition to the GDR.
SEPTEMBER 11 The New Forum is founded in OCTOBER 18 Erich Honecker is forced from office
East Berlin by critics of the GDR; Hungary opened its after 18 years as state and party chief. He attributes
border with Austria with a ceremonial cut of barbed his resignation to the effects of gall bladder surgery.
wire. Ten thousand East Germans crossed into West Honecker later is brought to trial in Germany. His
Germany via Austria that month. successor is Egon Krenz, a conservative whom The
New York Times calls no Gorbachev. Krenz promises
OCTOBER 7 Official celebrations of the 40th reforms, but they proved too little, too late.
anniversary of the GDR commence. Thousands
demonstrates in Berlin, demanding democracy and OCTOBER 21-30 In Berlin and other major
freedom. Mikhail Gorbachev lectures the regime of German cities, hundreds of thousands of protestors
Erich Honecker, urging it to embrace reforms and to mass in demonstrations against the government.
Left: East and West Berliners stand together in the

NOVEMBER 7 The entire East German rain on December 22, 1989, to see the opening of the
Brandenburg Gate Park after 28 years. Above: East
government resigns, followed closely by the entire
German border guards greet the West German police
Politburo. Demonstrations continue, refugees increase. as the GDR removes pieces of the wall to create a
public throughway.
NOVEMBER 9 After a vague announcement lifting
travel restrictions, the GDR government unexpectedly minister by the Peoples Parliament of the German
opens its borders in the evening. While some border Democratic Republic. Meanwhile, in Leipzig, 200,000
guards insisted that one had to read between the lines, demonstrate for reform, as others do so in other
and that citizens would need special permission to pass, major German cities. The Monday Demonstrations
the guards were overwhelmed by the number of citizens continue for weeks. The Soviets do not intervene.
who appeared. Orders were not issued to stop them.
Tens of thousands flood into West Berlin. DECEMBER 3 The entire Socialist Unity party
leadership, led by Egon Krenz, resigns. Along with
NOVEMBER 10 Border guards began dismantling many other top party functionaries, former state and
the Wall to create more transfer points. Berliners party chief Erich Honecker is expelled from the party
both East and West enthusiastically participates in disgrace. What power remained in East German
in the destruction. government was in the hands of Hans Modrow, a
reformist politician from Dresden.
NOVEMBER 11-12 Three million East German
citizens visits West Germany to look, shop, or visit DECEMBER 22 The Brandenburg Gate reopens for
with family and friends; some sought new lives in the the first time in 28 years. It had been a potent symbol
FRG. Tens of thousands fill the Kurfilrstendamm, of the division of Germany. Helmut Kohl, Chancellor
overwhelming the streets. West German newspapers of West Germany, called it one of the happiest hours of
run a special supplemental listing of more than 4,000 my life.
jobs many with rooms included to provide a
reason for East Germans to stay. DECEMBER 31 On New Years Eve, around
500,000 people from around the world gathers at the
NOVEMBER 13 Hans Modrow is elected prime Brandenburg Gate to celebrate a new era.
ROUNDTABLE
We asked a number of thinkers to share their responses to a single question:
What was the significance of November 9, 1989?
Theresa Bond
Theresa Bond is a pseudonym for a respected political analyst specializing in closed societies.
N
ovember 9, 1989. The iconic photo These two are extreme cases of totalitarian
captures the crowded crest of the communist dictatorships. Remnants of the Wall linger
Berlin Wall as people celebrate its on in several parts of the former Soviet Union
crumbling. It is a globally recognized Belarus, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan among the
symbol of the end of a world divided by most prominent examples but few people in Minsk,
oppressive communist regimes. Ashgabat, or Tashkent ignore the wrong that victimizes
Or is it? them. They have dissident opinions they just cannot
Twenty years after the event, not one single voice them.
photograph of this event was legally viewed by any When asked about dissident opinions, people
of the 23 million citizens of North Korea. This is in Havana may not know what the word dissident
ironic because the closest thing to the Berlin Walls means. But in Pyongyang they will know neither the
Checkpoint Charlie is the Panmunjom border post word dissident nor opinion.
between North and South Korea. There, soldiers of the
last nation divided by communism look menacingly into
each others eyes. Hardly anyone, including the North
Korean regime, favors a wall between the two Koreas,
but the Norths dynastic and paranoid dictators are
particularly difficult to handle.
Cubas regime is another that clings to communism
and oppresses its people in the name of that ideology.
The Wall in Cuba is personified by a wall of Malecn,
the seaside boulevard in Havana where Cubans come
to look at the sea and the world beyond their island, a
free world to which they cannot freely travel. Not one
picture of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, has
ever been legally published in Cuba. Cold War tensions linger on the Korean peninsula.
Here, South Korean soldiers closely watch North Korean
soldiers in the border village of Tention.
Clockwise from top: Cuban dissidents

demand freedom and democracy, 2003;
Female members of Turkmenistans Peoples
Council; An Uzbek woman examines foreign
newspapers and magazines.
Janusz Bugajski
Janusz Bugajski holds the Lavrentis Lavrentiadis Chair in South East European Studies and
is the director of New European Democracies at CSIS.
T
he Iron Curtain disintegrated long
before the Berlin Wall was dismantled
in November 1989. The communist
system in Eastern Europe had been in
terminal decay for several years. The
single-party regimes stifled human rights and political
freedoms and were unable to deliver on the core
justification for communism: economic performance.
The disparities between East and West grew starker
during the 1980s, especially as market integration
boosted West European prosperity and the Soviet-
dominated Warsaw Pact proved not to be a credible
alternative to an integrated Europe.
Protest movements against communism
periodically rumbled across the region, but in the
summer of 1980 an earthquake shook Europe with
the formation of Polands free trade union Solidarity.
Although Solidarity was temporarily stifled and
driven underground, its mass membership and far-
sighted leadership demonstrated that the days of
Soviet-imposed communism were numbered. The only
unknown was whether the system would disappear with
a bang or a whimper.
Above: On the eve of the October 1989 GDR elections, Soviet overlordship. While communism is but a fading
East Germans sit in front of the Palace of the Republic in a
nightmare in these nations, their struggle to maintain
peaceful demand for democratic reforms.
Opposite page: Pro-Solidarity banners, September 1988.
state independence from an increasingly assertive
Russian government continues to this day.
Indeed, officials in Moscow seek to revise the
Fortunately, communism no longer had the significance of 1989 by asserting that the Soviet Union
strength to resist its own expiration. Ideologically did not occupy half of Europe after World War II
bankrupt, economically incompetent, and politically and by underplaying how Soviet arms imposed there a
primitive, Marxism-Leninism proved another repressive totalitarian system that stifled political and
experimental dead end. Moreover, the Soviet regime economic progress for almost half a century. Some of
that had propped up proxy governments throughout Russias spokesmen claim that the Kremlin benevolently
Eastern Europe no longer had the conviction or dismantled the Soviet bloc and that the Cold War
resources forcibly to suppress the fraternal peoples ended in a draw, rather than admitting that the Soviet
yearnings for pluralism and national independence. system proved an abject failure and that it disintegrated
By the time the Berlin Wall was formally breached, from within.
Poland already had achieved a democratically elected Unfortunately, this notion of a benign or even
government, while Hungary and Czechoslovakia were progressive Soviet system is offered to justify current
steadily moving toward political pluralism as leaders and future assertiveness. For this reason, both
there realized that systemic change was unavoidable. Europeans and Americans must vigilantly defend the
Looking back on November 1989, it is often real historical legacy of November 1989.
overlooked that while these historic events signaled the
collapse of communism, they also heralded the national
liberation of Central and East European states from
Edwina S. Campbell
Edwina Campbell has served on the United States Air Force Air University faculty since 2003,
and before that in a number of academic and analyst positions. She has served as a U.S.
diplomat, specializing in political-military affairs, and her publications include Consultation and
Consensus in NATO and Germanys Past and Europes Future. The views expressed in Campbells
essay are hers alone and not those of Air University, the United States Air Force, or the
U.S. Department of Defense.
O
n November 9, 1989, I was on a Ive been grateful ever since that I never did get to
speaking tour in West Germany for Berlin on that trip; the atmosphere there was unique.
the United States Information Agency. Throughout West Germany in the coming days,
I spent the day in Saarbruecken, took I had the same experience that Id had in Frankfurt.
a train to Frankfurt, read for a while, I encountered a huge divide between academics,
went to sleep early, and woke up the next morning politicians, and diplomats, on the one hand, and most
without having heard about events in Berlin. No one West Germans, on the other, in the interest they
mentioned them over breakfast. When I finally turned showed in the opening of the Wall. When I did engage
on the television mid-morning, on every channel, people in conversation, some were nervous or even
reporters stood in front of the Wall while people fearful about unfolding events, but many professed to
behind them chipped away at it. I sat down on the bed, be simply indifferent.
dumbfounded, and stared at the TV. My experience that long-ago November says
What do you do on a bright, cold day on which something important about the rocky course of
the worlds strategic tectonic plates are shifting? I German-American relations since the mid-1990s.
visited Frankfurts Paulskirche, which in 1848 had Perhaps the greatest difference between the two
witnessed the failed attempt to create a unified, countries, culturally and politically, is their attitude
democratic Germany. A lot of schoolchildren were toward change. The opening of the Wall ushered in a
touring the church, but no guide explaining the events period of global political change unprecedented, at least,
of 1848 deviated from the script to mention the path since 1918, and perhaps simply unprecedented. The
to unification being carved in the Berlin Wall at that transatlantic paradigms of the 20th century became
moment. I heard no conversation about the opening inadequate, but an understandable desire to cling to
of the Wall until that evening, at the political science them persisted in Germany.
conference I was attending at the university. West German foreign policy was built on two
virtues: stability and predictability. In 1989 these were
the pillars, of Bonns Ostpolitik, pursued since the 1970s
A new era. Above: German Chancellor Angela Merkel

and U.S. President Barack Obama, April 2009.
Left: Once rivals, now allies. German and Polish
soldiers serve together in the NATO alliance.
make us overly optimistic about our ability to deal with

change, and the transatlantic crises of the last few years
reflect that, as well. The American belief that a problem
can be solved inevitably clashes with the German
conviction that situations must be managed.
Both are right. On November 9, 1989, the four-
decades old Cold War was solved because the Allies had
and of its even more long-standing ties to the NATO collectively managed their often tense relationship with
alliance. On November 9, 1989, that era of stability the Soviet Union. The answer to the German question
and predictability ended, and the West Germans I similarly emerged from a decades-long transatlantic
encountered that month instinctively seemed to know it strategic dialogue. Both countries need to remember
and to shy away from the reality of what was happening that answers to todays global political questions
in Berlin. can only emerge from a willingness to continue that
Americans have a different history. We tend to view dialogue in the century ahead.
moments of political unpredictability and instability as
opportunities to seize, not crises to be feared. This can
Roy Ginsberg
Roy H. Ginsberg is Professor of Government at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs,
New York, and author of Demystifying the European Union: The Enduring Logic of
Regional Integration.
T
wenty years after its fall, the Berlin Wall The Wall represented an artificially divided
still evokes a variety of painful images. Germany and a dangerously bifurcated world. It was in
Berliners and the world remember those that world that I visited East Berlin as a student in 1974.
killed trying to escape and families and What I most remember as a citizen of a free country
friends kept apart after 1961 when the was the sense of foreboding I felt when entering and the
communists erected the Wall to preserve their failing sense of freedom I felt when leaving and the sadness
system. After all, no one ever tried to escape from of knowing that others left behind could not follow.
freedom in West Berlin to tyranny in East Berlin. Fifteen years later, I rushed into my classroom to
The Wall was another manifestation of the wartime share my joy at the news that the Wall was being torn
Allies failure to agree on what to do with a defeated down. My students were intrigued but not exhilarated.
Germany. Twice brutalized by German armed forces Their experience differed from that of my generation.
in the 20th century, the Soviets wanted a neutral, Children and grandchildren of those who fought
weakened, and dependent neighbor. Conversely, the to defeat fascism, my generation was more directly
Americans and their allies wanted a democratic and connected to these wartime heroes and to the postwar
free Germany as a bulwark against the spread of leadership of the United States and its allies. From the
communism and to prevent the return of fascism. Marshall Plan, Truman Doctrine, and Berlin Airlift
Since the wartime Allies retained occupation of the late 1940s to the containment of communism
rights in Berlin after 1949, both the western Federal in the 1950s and 1960s, the West stood down
Republic of Germany (FRG) and the Soviet satellite communism. Diplomat and Russia scholar George F.
German Democratic Republic remained independent Kennan predicted communism would atrophy from
but not fully sovereign. Not until 1989-1990 when the within, which it did, while containment limited Soviet
Wall came down, the wartime Allies relinquished their expansionism to Eastern Europe.
residual occupation rights, and the two German states Postwar West Germans must be congratulated
were united, was World War II finally concluded. for constructing a democratic polity and a beacon of
hope for the East. West Germany had two advantages
over the Weimar Republic, its doomed democratic
Above: German paratroopers

prepare for a 2001
peacekeeping mission in
Macedonia.
Left: A German Court clears
the way for ratification of
a European Union reform
treaty.
predecessor. It had the economic security to prosper stability in a world far more dangerous to many
and democratize as part of what became the European civilian populations than the world of 1989. If Germany
Union (EU). It had physical security through the can assume leadership through the EU, NATO, and
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO); thus the United Nations to further enhance stability and
the FRG would no longer threaten or be threatened by security in a world in need of both, it can give back to
other European powers. those who helped it to be secure and free.
Todays united Germany, a recipient of security
from the EU and NATO, promotes democracy and
Ronald H. Linden
RONALD H. LINDEN is Professor of Political Science at the University of Pittsburgh. A Princeton
PhD (1976), he was Director of the Center for Russian and East European Studies at Pitt from
1984-89 and 1991-98. From 1989 to 1991 Dr. Linden served as Director of Research for Radio
Free Europe in Munich, Germany. He is the author of numerous works on Central and Southeast
Europe and is the Associate Editor of Problems of Post-Communism.
N
ineteen eighty-nine began with Europe the deficiencies of communist regimes, their nearly
divided, as it had been since the end simultaneous fall in Eastern Europe was unexpected.
of World War II. More than one Previous challenges usually had been confined to a
hundred million people lived in states single country. This time the demonstrations and
dominated by the Soviet Union and societal demands were infectious and the results
national communist parties of Eastern Europe. Vclav sped from the replacement of the communist prime
Havel, a renowned playwright and proponent of human
rights, languished in jail in Czechoslovakia; Nicolae
Ceauescu and Todor Zhivkov were in their third
and fourth decades of tyrannical rule in Romania and
Bulgaria, respectively. And in Germany, a 12-foot-high
wall cutting through and around the city of Berlin
symbolized most poignantly the real and symbolic
division of the continent.
By the end of the year, Vclav Havel was president
of Czechoslovakia, dictatorships from the Balkans
to the Baltic Sea were overturned, and the people of
Eastern Europe, having regained their sovereignty,
began the task of building democracies and free
economies. The opening of the Berlin Wall on the night
of November 9, 1989, was emblematic of the end of the
separation of Europe.
Apart from the breathtaking speed and scope of
these events, several features make them remarkable. Mikhail Gobachev discusses agricultural management
First, while analysts and political actors had noted reforms with Soviet farm equipment workers.
minister in Poland at the end of August to the execution

of Nicolae Ceauescu in Romania on Christmas Day.
In addition, with the exception of Romania, the
revolutionary changes were nonviolent. The regimes
were challenged not by foreign armies but by their own
peoples, convinced that the governing doctrines of the
past 40 years had brought not liberation but repression.
But the upheaval went beyond mere dissatisfaction
with failed policies. These events also demonstrated
the importance of governing legitimacy, the idea that
governments have the right not just the power
to rule. From the beginning, East Europeans viewed Clockwise from top left: Former dissident Vclav Havel
local communist rulers not as theirs but rather as greets crowd on December 29, 1989, his first day as
the product of Soviet domination. When Mikhail President of Czechoslovakia; Over 100,000 answered the
Gorbachev, the Soviet leader who had been pushing call when the dissident group Civic Forum called for a
demonstration against Czechoslovakias communist
reform in his own country, removed the threat of
rulers; A Bulgarian man reads about
intervention, the derivative regimes of Eastern Europe election returns, June 2001.
were swept away.
Two other factors made possible the end of
communism and the fall of the Berlin Wall. One was None of this would have mattered had the people
the spread of information, both about the West and of the region not shown the courage and vision to seize
about the real situation in Eastern Europe. Knowledge the moment, to recognize that their time had come to
about how West Europeans and Americans were undertake the tasks of both tearing down as they did
governed, and how they lived, enhanced the appeal of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and building up as they
alternative models. While notions of democracy and do now every day in newly democratic societies.
freedom in Eastern Europe may not have been fully
specified, the knowledge that these concepts worked
elsewhere proved a powerful motive.
Andreas Rude
Andreas Rude is a Public Affairs Specialist at the U.S. Embassy in Copenhagen with special
focus on security policy. He is also a freelance writer and columnist whose work has appeared
in most major Danish newspapers.
Lets go find a pocket calculator! concern for the environment, and authoritarian regimes
I
collapsing under the weight of their own lies and
n the summer of 1989, a few months before the worthless slogans. History was being put right.
Berlin Wall came down, I worked at a small Perhaps the greatest consequence of the fall of that
think tank in Copenhagen devoted to security strange monument was the birth of a different mindset.
policy. Every day the staff would convene for an No longer suspended by the logic of superpower
informal luncheon discussion of current affairs, confrontation, the main currents of European culture
and in August of that year something astonishing was and politics were set free, and Europeans began to think
happening. The East German government was allowing about themselves in ways they had not for half a century.
its citizens to cross the border from the German The dark side of that feat was the violent breakup of
Democratic Republic into Czechoslovakia and Hungary Yugoslavia and the specter of ethnic cleansing. The
en route to Austria, and we all watched as the crowds reunification of Germany, on the other hand, was a
leaving grew bigger every day. The situation was fluid logical follow-up to the fall of the Wall, and Berlin has
to say the least, and one particularly excited colleague since regained its former standing as a celebrated center
wanted to estimate the point at which a much-feared for politics, media, and the arts. Significantly, it has
neighbor would be completely empty of its 16 million also preserved and added to its richness its American
inhabitants. Hence the urgent request for a calculator. post-World War II legacy. For Berlin was an American
The flippancy showed the mood. It was unbelievable success story before it became a European one.
a fairy tale in the cynical world of international The Cold War ended when the Wall was knocked
politics. When the Wall fell in November, the over and long lines of modest Trabant cars made
excitement swept everywhere, and as one peaceful their way from East to West. Tremendous energies
revolution after another caught on in Eastern and soaked up by that conflict were released, with Europe
Central Europe, somber predictions of anarchy and becoming more prosperous and bolder, as the European
violent reprisals gave way to real optimism. The catalysts Union expanded across the continent and NATO
seemed all of a distinct moral nature: human rights, welcomed former adversaries as new members. Think
tanks too have grown, as challenges nobody thought
Clockwise from top left: NATO alliance

soldiers display their nations colors; an East
European crowd masses to rally for freedom;
former adversaries a former U.S. army
lieutenant at left and a former East German
state security officer at right read about
the once-divided city.
of a few decades ago now bear down on us. In all this, Nobody should be surprised about that.
the conversation about Europe reopened in 1989 The rules of the game changed as if by magic in 1989.
is a true asset, critical on both sides of the Atlantic Twenty years later we are still catching up, making
and producing impressive results. But even as this history as we go along.
conversation deepens, it is nowhere near any conclusion.
Simon Serfaty
Simon Serfaty holds the Zbigniew Brzezinski Chair in Global Security and Geopolitics at the
Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C. His most recent book is
Architects of Delusion (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009).
W
hat happened in Berlin 20 years
ago, on November 9, 1989 and
what followed in Moscow the
following year was magical.
The moment is not so far away
that it cannot be celebrated now with the same emotion
as it was lived then. So many had lived for so long
with the long, twilight struggle we call the Cold War
that they viewed its ending as a miracle rather than
the fulfillment of a man-made vision that had dared
anticipate the rollback of an evil empire, the collapse of a
fatally flawed ideology, and the peaceful resurrection of
Europe from two suicidal wars.
A vision, however, is mostly what is remembered
after everything has worked. Lost sometimes in the
glow of success are the components of that vision: the
patience in the midst of occasional setbacks, prudence
in the face of dangerous provocations, and fortitude to
overcome the tragic burdens of history that produced
the events of fall 1989. The many expressions of that
vision, lived over time, deserve to be remembered, not
only because they worked but also for their relevance
to the new insecurity unleashed most dramatically on
September 11, 2001.
Above: Political activists demanding greater

transparency in government release balloons unsustainable way of life. As a result, the events of
outside the Reichstag, 2004. Right: a NATO summit November 1989 were not merely the triumph of the
welcomes new members Albania and Croatia and U.S.-led transatlantic West over the Soviet Union but
celebrates the alliances 60th anniversary. Europes triumph over history: As the states of Europe
Opposite page: a tourist reviews one of the last
bid farewell to arms when they surprisingly agreed to a
remaining pieces of the Berlin Wall.
gradual pooling of their national sovereignty, they recast
themselves into an ever-closer community, now a union,
Central to the vision that shaped the Cold War and that gave them more democracy, affluence, stability, and
its final outcome was a broad U.S. understanding that peace than ever before.
despite the nations unquestioned might, the over there There were those, 20 years ago, who thought
of yesteryear had come over here to endanger American that the end of the Cold War and the reunification
interests and values and could again. Admittedly, of Germany would threaten Europes unity, as well
calls to disengage from various Cold War flashpoints, as its solidarity with the United States. That the
to come home, were heard throughout the Cold War, reverse instead proved true testifies to the depth of
often linked to warnings of irreversible decline and the vision that brought America and Europe to that
impending disasters. But those calls could be ignored, magical moment 20 years ago and has motivated the
and the heavy burdens of entangling commitments enlargement and deepening of the Euro-Atlantic
could be borne because Americans had arrived at a institutions that continue to define their relations.
broad understanding that no nation alone, however Admittedly, during the Cold War this vision was
peerless, could remain isolated for long without allies confined to half the world only, as Secretary of State
that shared its values, interests, and goals and could thus Dean Acheson subsequently wrote. Today those limits
contribute their capabilities, experience, and diversity to remind us of the need to extend that vision, to afford
common, complementary, or compatible policies. others the opportunity to achieve peace, prosperity,
The ultimate goal of U.S. leadership, however, and freedom.
was not merely to win a war but to defeat war itself
on a European continent that had made of war an
Manfred Stinnes
Manfred Stinnes, Ph.D. (University of Minnesota, 1978), has been a Lecturer in International
Relations at Humboldt University in Berlin since 2003.
W
e may all agree on the geostrategic country and it has remained so even after the events
consequences that followed the of 1989-1990.
fall of the Berlin Wall: The Soviet Germanys new, secure Western orientation offers
empire began to disappear and special reassurance to its European neighbors. It is
with it the satellite countries grounded firmly in the special German-American
East Germany among them emerged from Soviet relationship, a bond probably best explained by the
domination. The opening of the borders between East anecdote in which of the German Foreign Office
and West Berlin marked an initially hesitant beginning telephone operator, before connecting Foreign Minister
to a process that culminated in the October 3, 1990 act
of German unification or, in correct historical and
constitutional terms, the German Democratic Republic
(GDR) dissolved itself and joined the Federal Republic
of Germany. This was achieved without violence and
should be interpreted as a diplomatic triumph of the
Western alliance statecraft, not least for securing
Moscows final approval for this fundamental reordering
of the post-World War II political status quo.
The consequences for the continent were profound.
Throughout the 19th and early-20th centuries,
Germany faced real strategic rivals and adopted its
famous Schaukelpolitik policy of fatally adjusting its
orientation between East and West. With the peaceful
reunification of the two postwar German states,
this dilemma has been put to rest. For the first time, East German refugees stand outside the head
Germany is surrounded by friendly countries. Since office of provisional accommodation after escaping
through Hungary and Austria into West Germany on
1949, the Federal Republic of Germany was a Western
August 8, 1989.
Even a month before the Wall fell, political

repression remained in place in East Germany.
Top: East German police repel pro-democracy
demonstrators. Left: young East Germans light
candles as a protest against political arrests.
country, and in May 1989 the Hungarian reform-

communist government opened the border to Austria
months before the Berlin Wall was breached.
But the East Germans also acted bravely. Segments
of East German Protestant churches functioned as a
haven for protesters and opposition-minded citizens
H.D. Genscher with Secretary of State James Baker in who saw no future in the GDR. The southern parts of
February 1990, told Baker: God bless America. The East Germany proved an opposition stronghold, with
German-American relationship was never as intimate Leipzig its informal capital.
as in 1989-1990. That was a time of great optimism. As the tension between the GDR government and
Experts and laymen talked about a peace dividend and the opposition movement grew, the famous Monday
expected democratic progress on a global scale. night demonstrations in Leipzig became the focal point.
While events in Berlin were of huge symbolic Following the October 4, 1989 GDR 40th anniversary
and practical importance, the Polish and Hungarian celebrations, the East Berlin government prepared
opposition movements had paved the way for the for a final crackdown and, as many feared, was even
German events. On June 4, 1989, the Polish opposition ready for a Chinese solution to suppress the next
achieved the first (almost-free) elections in a communist Monday demonstration on October 9. Army brigades
After German reunification, graffiti artists

and large special police forces were mobilized and they appropriated the remains of the Wall.
surrounded the historic inner city. Hospital floors were
emptied and prepared for emergency treatment of large
numbers of wounded. Demonstrators prepared their (Wende). A domestic East-West uneasiness has set
wills and many expected not to survive the Monday in, mostly due to economic difficulties. While Berlin
night demonstrations. A heroic atmosphere pervaded celebrates the November 9 anniversary of the fall of
the city. However, when 70,000 demonstrators gathered the Wall, the Leipzig region instead commemorates
peacefully to march down the streets, military and the nonviolent revolution and the momentous night
police officials did not dare to order the troops to shoot. of October 9. After 20 years, these divided memories
It was the beginning of the end of the communist call for honest appraisals and common understandings.
government in East Germany. For the first time in While this comparatively modest divide is real, it pales
German history, a successful, nonviolent revolution in comparison with the enormous political achievements
occurred. By comparison, the fall of the Wall merely of the German people and their neighbors, events
punctuated the victory of the democratic revolution. perhaps best symbolized by the passing of the Berlin
Twenty years later, many former East Germans Wall and the uniting of a free German people.
have lost their pride in the achievements of 1989-
1990. Some even have dropped the term nonviolent
revolution in favor of the bureaucratic word turn
Jeremi Suri
Jeremi Suri is the E. Gordon Fox Professor of History, the Director of the European Union Center
of Excellence, and the Director of the Grand Strategy Program at the University of Wisconsin-
Madison. He is the author of three major books, most recently, Henry Kissinger and the
American Century. Professor Suri frequently writes for scholarly journals, newspapers, magazines,
and various web blogs, including his own: http://jeremisuri.net.
T
he fall of the Berlin Wall marked the The fall of the Berlin Wall testified to the shift
end of an era a 50-year period of in political momentum from communist rulers to
continuous superpower confrontation, educated, articulate, and newly empowered citizens.
rigid global alliances, threatening nuclear Vclav Havel, Lech Walesa, and Boris Yeltsin emerged
arms races, and the brutal repression
of dissenting ideologies. The Cold War was a time
when the dominant international states grew more
powerful and exerted leverage over distant societies on
an unprecedented scale. The break-up of traditional
colonial empires in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East
only increased the influence of the U.S., Soviet, and
Chinese governments in those regions. The strongest
states dominated the global landscape from the last
dying days of the Second World War through the heady
hours of November 9, 1989, when the world opened to a
new kind of popular politics.
Communist power crumbled in Eastern Europe
and the Soviet Union because citizens no longer
believed in their leaders professed ideals. Citizens
also ceased to fear the consequences of repression by
government forces that were visibly uncertain about
what they believed and what kinds of violence they
could legitimately deploy. Communists ruled until 1989 A woman laborer repairs a wall as portraits of
in Eastern Europe and 1991 in the Soviet Union, but Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev and East German
political figures look on.
they lost real political authority years earlier.
Above: supporters of Boris Yeltsin, Russias first post-

communist leader. Right: Angela Merkel becomes the
first Chancellor from the former East Germany, the first
woman, and the youngest person to hold that office.
as public heroes. These figures attracted support from

people who craved authentic leaders, climbing to power In this context, the fall of the Berlin Wall
through independence, rather than careerism. They also unleashed a proliferation of dreams for better living
commanded a broad international following through the conditions, but these remained small dreams. They
global circulation of their words and images. The Cold promised freedom from lies and repression. They did
War began in an era of intimidating radio speeches not, however, offer a clear path to a new world. Talk of
from aging men; it ended with the youthful energy of an end to history masked an inability to think about
attractive figures on television. what might come next. The liberation that accompanied
The new politics of television, and soon the the end of the Cold War often produced a dangerous
GPS Printed by Global Publishing Solutions (A/GIS/GPS) (09-20568-E-1.0)

Internet, were fragmented and impatient. Groups of intoxication. Forward thinking grew more difficult
people organized across societies former political with each passing day.
prisoners, religious dissidents, and labor unionists, November 9, 1989 opened new opportunities
among others to challenge the grand narratives of for personal freedom and organization. It also created
authoritarian communist and liberal capitalist societies. new challenges for managing international relations.
They demanded that the state serve their specific Making the freedoms that followed the fall of the
interests. Groups of consumers, investors, and students, Berlin Wall serve the needs of a more complex world
in particular, also rejected collective sacrifices and that is the political calling of the first global post-Cold
opted for instant gratification. They demanded political War generation.
presentism rather than calls for a future utopia. The
political was now the personal.
U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE
Bureau of International Information Programs
2009
http://www.america.gov/publications/books/berlin_wall.html
Photo credits:
All pictures are credited AP Images with the

following exceptions:
Inside front cover: lower right, Library of
Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
Page 5: Microsoft Corporation. All Rights
Reserved. 6: left to right, Bettmann/CORBIS;
Carl Mydans/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images.
7: left, dpa/Landov. 15: bottom left, Bettmann/
CORBIS. 24: top to bottom, Erazm Ciolek/Reuters;
Chris Niedenthal/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images.
28: left, dpa/Landov. 32: Gnter Bratke/dpa/
Landov. 33: Keystone/Getty Images.
34: top, dpa/Landov. 35: top, Volkmar K.
Executive Editor: George Clack
Wentzel/National Geographic/Getty Images.
36: top right, Express Newspapers/Getty Images; Managing Editor: Michael Jay Friedman
bottom left, Terry Fincher/Express Newspapers/ Design Director: Min-Chih Yao
Getty Images. 37: top left, dpa/Landov. Contributing Editors: Jody Rose Platt,
63: Popperfoto/Getty Images. 64: right, John Anthony Crews
MacDougall/AFP/Getty Images. Photo Research: Maggie Johnson Sliker
It was a great holiday: In the perennial struggle between
man and barbed wire, today man triumphed and the
barbed wire was defeated.
Adam Michnik
Bureau of International Information Programs

U.S. Department of State
http://www.america.gov/publications/books/berlin_wall.html

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How did the Berlin Wall come to be constructed?

How did the Berlin Wall come to be constructed?

What events led up to the fall of the Berlin Wall?

What events led up to the fall of the Berlin Wall?

T h e

Paths To 1989 ........................................................................................................ 5

A Contested Future ............................................................................................. 13

I Will Remember That Day All My Life ................................................ 21

Those Were The Days, My Friend ............................................................ 27

Berlin Divided And Reunited, 19611989 (A Chronology). .......... 32

Above: East successfully cooperate with the USSR in

Fritz Stern, University Professor Emeritus at

Clockwise from top: Women and children

Robert J. Lieber is Professor of Government

I Will Remember That Day

Those Were the Days,

November 3, 40,000 East German refugees

It took a little bit longer than 10 days, but

Berlin Divided...and reunited, 1961-1989

1961 the Eastern sector of Berlin from the three Western

JULY/AUGUST In response to the large number

Clockwise from top: After

Left: GDR border

editorializes that those who fled to the West did so

AUGUST 26 All crossing points are closed to

JANUARY 24 Twenty-eight men, women, and

Left: An East German police officer crawls through a

Left: West German construction workers stop

Clockwise from top left: West

1965 MARCH 26 The U.S., Great Britain, France, and the

MAY 3 Erich Honecker, the mastermind of the 1980

MARCH 11 Mikhail Gorbachev, youngest member

Clockwise from top: 120,000

MARCH 12 A dispute over fishing rights near

JUNE 7 Demonstrators protest in East Berlin

AUGUST 8 Outside of the Permanent

Left: East and West Berliners stand together in the

Clockwise from top: Cuban dissidents

A new era. Above: German Chancellor Angela Merkel

make us overly optimistic about our ability to deal with

Above: German paratroopers

minister in Poland at the end of August to the execution

Clockwise from top left: NATO alliance

Above: Political activists demanding greater

Even a month before the Wall fell, political

country, and in May 1989 the Hungarian reform-

After German reunification, graffiti artists

Above: supporters of Boris Yeltsin, Russias first post-

as public heroes. These figures attracted support from

GPS Printed by Global Publishing Solutions (A/GIS/GPS) (09-20568-E-1.0)

All pictures are credited AP Images with the

Bureau of International Information Programs

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I Will Remember That Day

Those Were the Days,